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Cambridge Forum for Jewish Studies

 

Prof. Smadar Lavie (University of California, Berkley) will be discussing:

 

Mizrahi Mothers, Wrapped in the Flag: Ultra-Nationalism, Apartheid, and the Divinity of Bureaucracy in Israel


Smadar Lavie is a scholar in residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group, U. C. Berkeley’s critical feminist research center. She is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork. Lavie spent nine years as tenured Professor of Anthropology at U.C. Davis, before fleeing California for Israel with her son as a result of domestic abuse. Once inside Israel’s borders, Lavie became a target of the regime due to her lifelong, outspoken scholarship and activism for gender equity and social justice for both Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli authorities confiscated her passports and issued an eight-year-long stop-exit order that trapped her within the country’s borders. Barred from gainful employment due to her politics and skin color, she was forced to rely on state welfare to survive. Even so, she turned her efforts to help establish feminist, anti-racist social initiatives, including Israel’s first Feminist of Color social movement. Lavie is the author of The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and co-edited Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. She is the winner of the American Studies Association’s 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize and the recipient of the 2013 “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for service on behalf of Mizrahi communities in the State of Israel.


Free and open to all • Refreshments will be available


Date: 
Thursday, 16 October, 2014 - 17:15 to 18:45
Event location: 
Outer Parlour, Pembroke College