In the Cement Boxes

Based on four years of ethnographic research the book offers an intimate, textured and rich depiction of contemporary life in one marginalized development town in the Negev. Placing the stories of five women at the center, the author (herself a Mizrahi woman born in a development town) depicts the creative strategies used by each woman in dealing with the multiple exclusions - gendered, ethnic, class-based, geographic marginalization - that these women have to deal with. The five paths include daily struggles to make ends meet and escape social isolation by one single mother who raises two children without the help of her drug addict partner; the investment in an increasingly more religious-observant lifestyle by another woman. The life stories of two other women are dramatized using texts these women wrote about their own lives. Experimenting with a range of writing styles we get a closer understanding of patterns of feminist rebellion at the margins and of a way of life that resists, adopts and refashions centrist narratives of what it means to be Israeli woman today.

Readable, engaging and at the same time theoretically informed the book is a sustained reflection about the ways in which gender, class, ethnicity, and religiosity are mutually produced in contemporary Israel and about how the center can be understood from its margins.