New Article: Meiri, Sexual Violence as Represented in Israeli Holocaust-Related Cinema

Meiri, Sandra. “Visual Responses: Women’s Experience of Sexual Violence as Represented in Israeli Holocaust-Related Cinema.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22.4 (2015): 443-56.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350506815606439

 

Abstract

This article explores the function of Israeli narrative films’ persistent, albeit marginal, portrayal of women as victims of sexual violence during the Holocaust. While the marginalization of such characters may be attributed to the difficulty of representing sexually-related trauma/post-trauma, their portrayal attests both to the ubiquity of sexually-related crimes in the Holocaust and to its aftermath: namely, the persistence of women’s trauma. The first of the two waves of ‘retro films’ examined here evinces the importance of the visual, cinematic representation of women’s trauma. Its main function is to legitimize its disclosure through cinematic aesthetic/artistic mediation, for sexual violence was a crime committed against helpless victims. The second wave includes films made from the point of view of ‘the second generation’, and explores the topic further by dealing with the transmission of post-traumatic symptoms of women’s trauma to the second generation.

 

 

New Article: Zakai, Literature, Ideology and Sexual Violence in the Writing of Rivka Alper

Zakai, Orian. “A Uniform of a Writer: Literature, Ideology and Sexual Violence in the Writing of Rivka Alper.” Prooftexts 34.2 (2015): 232-70.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/prooftexts/v034/34.2.zakai.html

 

Abstract

This essay explores the politics of women’s writing in the Zionist yishuv by examining the literary career of Rivka Alper, whose work features a difficult clash between a “feminine” narrative of sexual trauma and Zionist ideology. I discuss Alper’s literary trajectory from her first novel, Pirpurey mahapekha, a coming-of-age story of a young woman, which foregrounds themes of sexual trauma and gendered violence, to her second project, Ha-mitnaḥalim ba-har, a biography of a Zionist role model, one of the women founders of the colony of Motza. Alper’s transition from “personal” fiction to ideological literature is part of a process of an arduous self-fashioning toward carving a place for herself, albeit marginal, in the Zionist republic of letters. Her process demonstrates the predicament of writing as a woman in a Zionist cultural space that marks writing as an emasculating practice, but exclusively assigns male writers the role of national subjects. In such a space, I argue, transitioning to marginal genres in order to write for the collective emerges as a privileged alternative for an aspiring woman writer. And yet, as contents from Alper’s fictional writing infiltrate her biographic writing, the literariness of her “less literary” text exposes the exclusions that lie at the heart of the Zionist ideological project, and, in turn, reinscribes “the feminine” as a composite marker of these exclusions back into the Zionist text.

 

 

Dissertation: Wooten, Gender Integration into the Military

Wooten, Jeff. Gender Integration into the Military: A Meta-Analysis of Norway, Canada, Israel, and the United States, EdD Dissertation, University of New England, 2015.
 
URL: http://dune.une.edu/theses/33/
 
Abstract

Over the past 15 years, the Global War on Terrorism has necessitated an examination of the military’s practices and the way that they meet the complexities of new and different types of war and tactics. Vital to this examination are policies related to the inclusion and deployment of women in combat. Burba stated war is not a setting for social testing, but the American Military must embrace the social subtleties of gender differences in an effort to meet the Armed Services requirement for an ever-changing asymmetrical battlefield. This study compares and contrasts the American current policy divergent to three other countries’ policies that have successfully integrated women into combat: Norway, Canada, and Israel. Through this examination, an opportunity to recognize gaps in training and procedural information that are most important to the successful implementation in the United States is revealed. The scientific data, although supporting the fact that physiological differences exist between men and women, were not supported in the argument that all women should be excluded from combat units. In all case studies, it was found that women who volunteered for combat assignments performed equally as well as their male counterparts without degradation of operational readiness or a lower unity of cohesion. However, I was not surprised that the leaders of the three counties observed that the successful integration of women into combat units is not about changing a culture. It is simply a leadership issue.

 

 

New Article: Dagan, Looking Beyond Risk in Paroling Denying Prisoners

Dagan, Netanel. “Looking Beyond Risk in Paroling Denying Prisoners. A Response to Assy and Menashe’s ‘The Catch-22 in Israel’s Parole Law’.” Criminal Justice and Behavior (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093854815589324

 

Abstract

This paper offers an additional theoretical perspective to the “Catch-22” problem as discussed in Assy and Menashe’s article, which appeared in the December 2014 issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior. It offers to look beyond risk in the discussion about parole of denying prisoners. By focusing on the retributive meaning of the problem, the paper offers an additional framework to discuss the magnitude of the problem (via proportionality analysis), and the overt and covert forces that influence a parole board’s discretion in action (via character retributivism analysis).

New Article: Mansbach-Kleinfeld et al, Child Sexual Abuse as Reported by Israeli Adolescents

Mansbach-Kleinfeld, Ivonne, Anneke Ifrah, Alan Apter, and Ilana Farbstein. “Child Sexual Abuse as Reported by Israeli Adolescents: Social and Health Related Correlates.” Child Abuse & Neglect 40 (2015): 68-80.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.11.014

 

Abstract

The objectives of the study were to assess the prevalence of child sexual abuse (CSA) in a nation-wide representative sample of 14–17 year old Israeli adolescents, and to examine the associations between CSA, socio-demographic correlates and various measures of physical and mental health. The study population consisted of 906 mother–adolescent dyads, belonging to a community based, representative sample of Israeli 14–17 year olds, interviewed in 2004–5. Response rate was 68%. Subjects provided demographic data, and information about CSA, physical symptoms, body image, well-being and use of mental health services. DAWBA was used to obtain information regarding mental disorders and suicidality. SDQ was used to obtain data on bullying. Statistical analyses were conducted using an SPSS-17 complex sample analysis module and multivariate analyses were conducted to assess the associations between CSA and risk factors and social and health related correlates. Findings show that CSA was reported by 3.3% of adolescents. Higher risk of exposure to CSA was found among girls, among adolescents living in a one-parent household and among adolescents with a chronic disability. In multivariate models adjusting for gender, learning disabilities and depression, CSA was associated with suicidal attempts, stomach ache, dizziness, sleep problems, well being at home and bullying behaviors. No association was found with suicidal ideation or other physical symptoms. Our findings confirm that the associations between CSA and different outcomes vary depending on the socio-psychological context, and underline the importance of addressing the complexity of variables associated with CSA.

New Article: Peled, Female Sexual Subjectivity in Victoria by Sami Michael

Peled, Shimrit. “Construction of Female Sexual Subjectivity in Victoria by Sami Michael in Comparison to other Hebrew and Israeli Writers.” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 27 (2014): 233ff (in Hebrew).

 

Abstract

Sexual violence towards women in the Jewish community in Baghdad is central in Sami Michael’s novel, Victoria. Can these violent erotic scenes be interpreted as destabilizing patriarchal mechanisms in Israeli culture? The article discusses this question taking into consideration the debates about pornography in feminist theory and exploring other representations of violence against women in Hebrew and Israeli Literature. Feminists’ views of pornography are divided. From a radical feminist point of view, the production of the subordinate feminine subject in pornography is effective and ultimate. Other feminists claim that pornography can theoretically subvert the mechanism of oppression and its efficacy in exploitation of the female subject because it is by nature repetitious.

Trying to evaluate the impact of the violent erotic scenes in Victoria, this article examines preceding representations of violence against women in Hebrew and Israeli Literature. Portrayal of physical and emotional pain after rape or female desire that does not end in disaster seldom appeared in Hebrew and Israeli literature before Victoria. Although the novel is compliant with the Zionist narrative, Michael fashions a rich and particular female existence in Victoria, centered on feminine sexual subjectivity. I suggest that Michael’s representations of violence against women, and female desire that is nevertheless left intact were accepted by Israeli readers because of the displacement identity in time, space and ethnicity to Jewish Baghdad.

This displacement, which leaves current Israeli culture untouched and therefore does not threaten the reader, allows sexual female consciousness, and sane female sexual subjectivity to enter. However, it is also possible that the feminine confession is forced, that it constructs a femininity, which, though experiencing pain, humiliation, suppuration and abuse, collaborates with the patriarchal mechanism in confessing pleasures that repeat and extend pornographic discourse, making possible the continuation of mechanisms of suppression.

 

 

פלד, שמרית. “הבניית סובייקטיביות מינית נשים ב’ויקטוריה’ לסמי מיכאל בראי פרוזה עברית וישראלית”. מחקרי ירושלים בספרות עברית כז (2014): 233 ואילך.

New Article: Sela-Shayovitz, The Role of Israeli Media in the Social Construction of Gang Rape

Sela-Shayovitz, Revital. “‘They Are All Good Boys’: The Role of the Israeli Media in the Social Construction of Gang Rape.” Feminist Media Studies (early view, online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2014.993675

 

Abstract

This paper analyzes the construction of incidents of gang rape in Israeli newspapers between the years 2000 and 2010. The study examines the differences between the news media framing of gang rape and individual rape. Results indicate that the coverage of gang rape significantly differs from that of individual rape. Newspaper coverage over-emphasizes instances of gang rape in relation to individual occurrences of rape by means of sensational headlines and “yellow” journalism. Moreover, the construction of gang rape reflects a convergence of gender, race, and class oppression through the blaming and marginalizing of victims, criminalizing rapists from socially marginal groups, and absolving offenders most closely associated with the upper middle class. These findings suggest that the Israeli media play a key role in perpetuating patriarchal hegemony and social inequality.