Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Class in Religious Zionist Identity and Culture Elana Sztokman* Bar Ilan University, Israel

Home , Channel 1 (Israel), Mordechai Elon

International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 217–235

To be an Arab Jewish girl in a state religious school in Israel: Navigating gender, ethnicity and class in religious Zionist identity and culture Elana Sztokman* Bar Ilan University, Israel

TaylorCIJC_A_179668.sgm10.1080/13644360600797222International1364-436XOriginal2006112000000JulyElanaelana@lookstein.org MarylesSztokman and& Article Francis Francis (print)/1469-84552006 Journal Ltd of Children’s (online) Spirituality

This paper examines the ways in which gender, religion, ethnicity and class intertwine in a state religious girl’s junior high school in Israel. It is based on ethnographic data collected from 1999–2002, including interviews with staff and students and observations of classes and other school events. The claim is made that in this school, hierarchies overlap, such that ethnic hierarchies mesh with academic hierarchies, and Ashkenazi religious rhetoric becomes a tool with which to keep certain girls perpetually marginalized. The paper brings in a particularly poignant observation of Noa, a student of Moroccan descent, arguing with her Ashkenazi religious studies teacher about social justice and moral goodness as they find expression in Genesis and in the hallways of the school.

Keywords: Gender; Ethnicity; Religion; Mizrahi girls; Israel; State schooling; Identity formation; School ethnography

On 4 November 1995, when Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin was assassinated by Bar-Ilan University student Yigal Amir claiming religious imperative, the world of religious Zionism trembled. The media interrogated rabbis as religious institutions devoted days to the question: did religious Zionism do this? Some, like veteran religious Zionist head of Har Ezion Yeshiva Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein answered with a resounding ‘yes’. ‘At times we educated towards simplicity… not only simplistic messages but also a simplistic way of thinking’ (Silence in our Camp, Channel 1, 9 November 1995). Still others, like Rabbi Haim Drukman, leader of the century-old religious Zionist Bnei Akiva youth movement, expressed offense at the question. ‘Why should we say “we have sinned”? … The education that we give is for the values

*Dr Elana Sztokman, Yizchak Rabin 57/1, Modiin, Israel 71700. Email [email protected]

ISSN 1364-436X (print)/ISSN 1469-8455 (online)/06/020217–19 © 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13644360600797222 218 E. Sztokman of truth. We cannot give up on even one letter of the Torah. We cannot give up on even one Jew, we cannot give up on one piece of the Land of Israel. It’s wholeness, perfection’ (Mabat News, Channel 1, 8 November 1995). The split in responses reflects some of the frictions and tensions that have existed within the religious Zionist identity perhaps from its inception but exacerbated by the act in which Yigal Amir threw religious Zionism into turmoil. Religious Zionism, a nineteenth century construct, initiated by European Jewish religious leaders and adopted by Rabbi Yizchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935) in early twentieth century Palestine, envisions a modern Jewish state resting on ancient Jewish religious principles. This movement is something of an ‘awakening’, with modern Israel becoming part of a dynasty from the time when ancient Temple stood in Jerusalem. The movement rests on ‘the belief that the State of Israel is the beginning of the sprout- ing of our redemption … and the ingathering of all the Diasporas therein … It is defi- nitely the beginning of the assured redemption of Israel’ (Tirosh, 1974, p. 72). However, the philosophy was founded initially in the absence of the political reality of a state, and thus many pragmatic questions of application were glossed over, ignored or deferred. A fundamentally problematic issue is the relationship between religious Zionism and surrounding secular cultures.1 Leaders have taken different approaches to this issue. Rabbi Kook argued that secular Israelis should be treated like ‘babies that were kidnapped’, uneducated about Judaism but not responsible for their ignorance. This two-sided position, that ‘rather than deprecate the positive secular Zionist effort, let the religious harmoniously enhance the hallowed’ (Yaron, 1991, p. 219), constructed a discernible moral hierarchy in which religious Zionists saw themselves both as superior to secular Jews, and compassionate towards them. For others, the issues were political rather than moral. ‘The fact that today prime ministers are secular and don’t follow our beliefs,’ argued Rabbi Zvika Landau, then Director of Religious Education in Jerusalem and the south, in an expression of candor, ‘hurts us a lot. But we bless the government every Sabbath … that they should succeed’ (quoted in Sztokman, 1996). For Landau, the moral hierarchy was offset by a reverse political hierarchy, in which religious groups were seen as occupy- ing the bottom rung. Another view is that the role of religious Zionism is to promote a grass-roots transformation of the hierarchy, by ‘connect[ing] with sinners who constituted the majority in the [secular] Zionist camp, [and] simultaneously penetrat[ing] society … in order to make Torah dominant in the public sector’ (Tirosh, 1996, p. 22). Thus, because religious Zionism espouses absolute faith in a linear, God-driven historical progression, one that stands at odds with contemporary realities, the construction of religious Zionist identity contains inherent conflicts to attend to, notably, here, the secularism in modern-day Israeli culture. The movement, then, continues to struggle with its own hierarchical social constructs, and with tensions between perceived divine imperative and political realities. The construction of religious Zionist culture as resting within a rigid dichotomy vis- à-vis secular culture intensified in the 1970s, particularly with the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement (Sheleg, 2000). Bnei Akiva had been a sympa- thetic image of religious Zionism, in which young religious Israeli boys looked almost Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 219 identical to secular Israeli boys, with muscular bodies and a proud but easygoing demeanor—the only difference being the small skullcap or the ‘small head covering for women’ (Sheleg, 2000, p. 25). But the 1980s symbol of Gush Emunim, with the men’s huge skullcaps long, unkempt beards, and visible guns, turned religious Zionism into a fanatical fringe, removed from ‘normal’ in Israeli society (Aran, 1986). Moreover, the more fanatical imagery as well as certain absolutist values gradually dominated the entire movement (Ravitzky, 1993; Sheleg, 2000). ‘We are guilty of educating an entire generation with primitive thinking, slogans, and clichés,’ argued Rabbi Mordechai Elon. ‘Our youth is incapable of looking at a complex reality’ (Silence in our Camp, Israel Channel 1, 9 November 1995). Religious Zionism became a movement of singular rather than complex cultural indoctrination. Some indications, however, are that post-Rabin youth are not as single-minded vis- à-vis secular culture as the adults. According to Shechter (1999), post-Rabin religious Zionist youth is also perhaps more ‘postmodern’ than their predecessors—that is, they are less interested in the land of Israel than in its people. Similarly, Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun (2000) argues that national–religious youth is in a crisis of ideology and identity, and that young people are stuck between ultra-religiousness and secularism, in a fading middle ground that lacks focus and direction. In other words, young adults may be struggling because they do not necessarily accept the linear, polar constructs of religion versus secular life. Moreover, while the cultural symbolism became almost exclusively male-owned (skullcaps, ritual fringes, and guns), religious women were constructing more complex identities. Anthropologist Tamar El-Or (1998), in examining the contrast between religious Zionist indoctrination and young women’s identities, found that the women who struggled with these issues typically reported, ‘I am not representative’ of the movement. El-Or concludes that this complexity is in fact exactly representative. But further research into the identities of religious Zionist young women is sorely lacking. Just as religious Zionist identity is male, it is similarly an Ashkenazi, or western European construct. According to Sami Shalom Chetrit (1999), an Israeli writer of Arab descent (also known as Oriental, Sephardi, or Mizrahi Jews), the view of religious Zionism as an identity in polarity with secularism is an Ashkenazi, or European Jewish construct, a smokescreen masking underlying ethnic and socio-economic trends. Zionism, he argues, is a post-colonial construct, in which European Jews, who wanted to assimilate and ‘become’ secular Europeans but were prevented from doing so by anti-Semitism, looked instead to Israel to become a secular Western state, one that colonializes Middle Eastern Jewry and Western religion in one fell swoop. Mizrahi feminist Henriette Dahan-Kalev explains that ‘what distinguished Oriental Jews from Israelis of European origin was that they lived at peace with their traditional religious practice, while the European Zionists discarded it’ (2003, p. 96). This is why, for example, the Zionist elites, according to Chetrit, detest the religious, political Mizrahi movement of Shas. The Shas movement, which is described within secular-Ashkenazi elite circles as ‘one of the most enigmatic phenomena in Israeli society and politics’ (Yadgar, 2003, p. 1), represents a meshing of both Middle Eastern culture and religious culture, the two most despised cultures in the elite Israeli class. Thus, the 220 E. Sztokman

Zionist narrative, from this perspective, sees both religious culture and Mizrahi culture as ‘enigmatic’, or strange, or in Foucault’s (1977) terms, as deviant from the norm. For its entire history, then, religious Zionism has been defined as Ashkenazi, taking for granted an Ashkenazi cultural definition which Mizrahi is ‘other’ (Stahl, 1992). One Ashkenazi educational researcher, one of the few to acknowledge ethnic discrimination in State Religious education, describes the religiousness of Mizrahim as ‘different’; while ‘we’ might consider riding on the bus to a soccer match on the Sabbath ‘wrong’, ‘they’ will consider it ‘normal’, even if they ‘strangely enough’ refrain from smoking (p. 8). Similarly, while Ayalon and Yogev (1996) show that in religious Zionist schools, Ashkenazi boys have an academic advantage, they fail to examine ethnic constructs of the culture itself. Similarly, Sheleg writes, matter-of- factly, of State Religious schools: ‘Many families who chose to send their children to the torani [private religious] schools did so not necessarily because they wanted a torani education, but because they wanted a more elitist education than state religious (where there is a high level of integration …)’ (2000, p. 36). In all of these writings, there exists a distinct ‘us’ and ‘them’ along ethnic and socio-economic lines, an exclusion of Oriental Jews from the Israeli cultural and religious Zionist narrative (Motsafi-Haller, 1998) Religious Zionism, then, is at the same time a culture ‘under attack’ by a dominant secular state, and an elite movement that has adopted a classic colonial stance vis-à-vis Jews of Arab descent. Thus, Mizrahi religious identity remains largely invisible in Israeli society and culture. Significantly, many studies conducted on religious identity in Israel demonstrated—to the astonishment of researchers—that the large majority of Israelis define themselves as neither religious nor secular (Kedem, 1995). However, the questions asked in many quantitative studies rest on Ashkenazi assumptions about definitions of religious identity. For example, a person who turns on lights on the Sabbath (Shabbat) is defined as ‘not Orthodox,’ leaving the complexity of the religiosity in limbo, lacking definition within the classic Israeli religious-secular narrative (Kedem & Bar-Lev, 1983; Bar-Lev & Kedem, 1986). Sociologists Deshen and Shokeid (1999), in outlining the differences in religious identity between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, explain that adherence to a non- legalistic tradition is a common identity within Sephardi religiousness. Moreover, Sephardi religiousness is less exacting about legalistic obedience and favors belief in God and pure religious expressions, and it is transmitted through familial relationships rather than the written word. These differences, which are rooted in differential immigration histories, explain why many respondents of quantitative studies find themselves without identity within Ashkenazi definitions. According to this analysis, Sephardi Jews have a complex identity that remains foreign to the hegemonic Ashkenazi religious discourse in Israel. They can be selective in their specific obser- vances without hindering their overall sense of religious identification. For Oriental Jews, then, actions like the flicking of a light switch on Shabbat are insignificant, while for European Jews, that flick is monumental because of the written halacha that attribute volumes of intricate meanings to that tiny act. Mizrahi religiousness remains an invisible construct within religious Zionism and Israel generally. Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 221

This paper seeks to make the invisible visible by exploring the religious identities of young women at the state religious Levy Junior High School for Girls.2 Here, the eclectic mix of cultures is palpable: indeed, the majority of students are Sephardi, and approximately one-third of the students are Ashkenazi immigrants from English speaking countries. There are significant class issues at work here as well: approximately one-third of the students are on welfare, almost exclusively Mizrahi, but many of the other girls come from the highest economic strata in the city. The overlap between class and ethnicity is heightened by the fact that many if not most of the wealthier students are from English-speaking Ashkenazi—otherwise known as ‘Anglo’—back- grounds. Moreover, as it is a girls’ only school, gender is the palpable undercurrent within all these constructs. Thus, the construction of religious identity at the Levy School has complex religious, ideological, class, ethnic, and gender tensions, in which several hierarchies are being constructed simultaneously, feeding into one another in multiple ways. This paper looks at these constructs, from the perspectives of teachers and then students, with an eye towards the constructions of overlapping hierarchies around religion, ethnicity, class, and academic achievement. The construction of identity among religious Zionist young women begs unveiling.

Methodology This paper is an educational ethnography based on three years of qualitative research in one school. It entailed interviews with students, staff, the principal, and parents, and observations of classes and countless informal daily activities in and around the school. Formal interviews were conducted with 51 girls and 25 teachers, as well as 10 taped interviews with the principal Dr. Debbie Cohen, 6 with the assistant principal, and interviews with the school rabbi, school counselor, secretaries, and high school principal. Observations were made of dozens of classes, school outings, assemblies, meetings, plays, and parent–teacher nights and recruitments. In this work, the writings of Ruth Behar (1995), Spradley (1979 ), Sara Delamont (1992), Tamar El-Or (1998), Lincoln and Guba (1986), and Geertz (1973) were especially useful. Interviews were conducted according to Spradley’s (1979) definitions of semi-open interviews.

‘Religious plus–minus’: Girls navigating religious identity The Levy Junior High School is neither an elitist, religious, semi-private ‘torani’ school, nor a state school. The population is meant to be ‘religious’ but not ‘haredi’ [ultra-Orthodox]. The school occupies that place in Israeli society that is perhaps a shadow of other, more dominant communities. This shadow community is in a state of flux and movement. As if standing in the middle of a see-saw, trying to keep balance, girls waver between competing pulls around religious identity, and navigate the tensions in different ways. When I asked Rivka, for example, if she is religious, she said: ‘Not religious religious, I mean, yeah, religious. Mamlachti dati [State religious] … I mean not, we are not like traditional, but we’re not like haredi, we’re not really.’ She had trouble defining 222 E. Sztokman

‘mamlachti dati’, marked more by what it is not than by what it is. Hodaya said: ‘I’m religious, but not super religious.’ Lisa similarly said, ‘I’m not not religious. I’m just not religious.’ Her friend Tanya added: ‘What’s religious? Everyone’s religious in their own way. Everyone has their own way to be religious.’ Like El-Or’s interviewees, these girls see themselves more in terms of ‘are not’ than ‘are’, as sitting between worlds and as constructing individual and independent identities. As if to say, a ‘truly’ religious person is different than me, but so is a ‘not religious’ person. Nurit and Rona also have identities ‘in-between’ others, but use the term more common in Sephardi circles, masorti [traditional], to describe that ill-defined limbo. Nurit explained, ‘Some people think that to be religious means to be haredi and some people think that to be traditional is to be secular … I am traditional. I keep Shabbat, I keep whatever needs to be kept.’ Her friend Rona added, ‘And you believe!’ While Sephardi Nurit and Rona’s religious practice is defined in very similar ways to Americans Lisa, Hodaya and Rivka—that is, by keeping Shabbat—there is a constant tension between identities, caught between religious and secular: what one calls perhaps ‘mamlachti dati’ the other calls ‘masorti’. They all look for identities within rigid constructions of religious-secular, in which they do not find a neat position. But Nurit and Rona add the question of belief over behavior, a classic response according to Deshen and Shokeid’s (1999) analysis of ‘familial religion’, in which belief is everything. Similarly, Sepahrdi Orly, when asked how she described her religious identity, immediately said ‘I believe in God.’ Although she later expanded on some practices, being ‘religious’ is a function of belief more than it is a function of keeping all the details of Shabbat or kashruth [food purity]. Thus, Orly, too, constructs religious identity in Sephardi terms of belief over strict halachic adherence. Many girls struggle with the invisibility of their religious identities. Kurdish Noa, for example, who calls herself ‘religious plus–minus’, describes an eclectic family life with difficult definitions.

It’s mixed. My father is religious, he ‘returned’ [chazar betshuva3]. We were always traditional … My mother is not exactly religious religious, she’s traditional, she respects my father, she doesn’t put on any lights [on Shabbat] in front of him, she doesn’t smoke on Shabbat. … And my sister is religious, she also ‘returned.’ … My mother and sister are like normal, they don’t exaggerate … Me, I don’t know. I have moments. I began to stop when my uncle died, and them my friend Natalie left and she was always bothering me to keep more, so since the summer I’ve been keeping …

Noa’s religiousness dwells in that fuzzy, ill-defined space that is neither haredi nor secular, fluctuating between constructs, uncertain of her own religious identity where definitions are not her own. Moreover, the metaphors of religiousness, such as ‘returning,’ imply that being religious is moving towards an esoteric ‘home’ that she has never dwelt in, as if she is currently ‘lost’, or on a strayed path. In other words, the pressure here is to be something else, something ‘more’, not what she is. Lital’s family is also mixed, and she too has a struggling religious identity in flux.

I’m the strongest religiously at home. My parents keep only Shabbat and not holidays. I keep the holidays as well. Or I try. Even though it’s hard when the television is on in front Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 223

of you and you like have to see it! I explain to them that holidays are just like Shabbat, I show them verses from the Bible. But my mother has this thing, ‘be happy on your holiday’. Last Passover, we went to my grandmother who lives a few kilometers away. It was raining and I said, no I’m not going, let’s make [seder] at home. But in the end, everyone wanted to go to my grandmother, so I said I would go by foot. It rained, and my mother yelled at me and said, ‘Don’t go! It’s dark and raining!’ So I went by foot and came back by car. They pressured me and I went but I felt bad about it. Lital’s family has a Sephardic religious definition, but Lital brings in an Ashkenazi written culture that creates familial rifts. She is situated as both child and teacher, describing herself as ‘stronger’ than her family, a metaphor—like Noa’s ‘returning’—around higher, better, more, or effectively stricter (Rapoport & Garb, 1998). Thus Ashkenazi religious constructs intrude not only on Lital’s identity but on her family relationships. Danielle, an eighth-grade American girl, is similarly in a position of being more ‘adherent’ than her parents, with identities that are fluid and blurry. [My parents] turn on lights but they do Shabbat. … I don’t know if [my mother] believes in God, but she is not doing, she is not an orthodox Jew. She doesn’t pray. … [They] turn on lights on Shabbat [but I] don’t. Because I do what is required in school. I mean I can’t, if I start turning on lights, I know that it will go to, watching TV, and surfing the internet, and I don’t want to get to that. But my sister on the other hand stopped keeping kosher out of the house and is completely not religious. Danielle, referring to the Ashkenazi religious identity, defines religiousness around the light switch on Shabbat, an act—like Lital’s getting into a car and Noa’s mother’s smoking—that distinguishes between a halachic observance of Shabbat and familial observance. But in the language of religious schooling, it is an absolute difference between being religious or not. The term ‘l’hitchazek’, with its meanings around strengthening, fortifying, and overcoming (Rapoport & Garb, 1998), seeks ‘to “cure” the girls of the “ills” of Western secular adolescence and fortify their religiosity so as to ensure that they establish the ideal home’ (p. 8). Thus, while Danielle’s family is not religious according to standard Ashkenazi terms, her adoption of notions that refraining from flicking a switch is strength—like Lital’s avoiding television on Shabbat—reconstructs home life. The pressure from the school to be ‘more religious’, and more Ashkenazi in religious culture, is enormous. Tova, for example, has internalized a more Ashkenazi religiousness, and her friend Etti called her ‘haredi’ because ‘that’s what she aspires to be’. Tova explained: Not haredi. Just more religious. Right now, I’m traditional. I do what I can and strive for more. Every time I advance. Once, for example, I wouldn’t read Psalms, I wouldn’t say God’s name, about Shabbat I would be more disrespectful. Like, I wouldn’t break Shabbat but you have to know the root of everything, of the opinions. … It’s about keeping our connection with God. Tova’s metaphor for religiousness around ‘advancing’ (mitkademet), resembles those of going ‘home’ and of ‘fortification.’ For Tova, though, it includes not just keeping commandments but ‘understanding the roots’—that is, going to the text. She is perhaps combining the Sephardi belief with the Ashkenazi written word, within the context of school pressure to ‘be more religious.’ Similarly, even though Etti mockingly 224 E. Sztokman called Tova a ‘haredi’, she still reveres Tova’s religious identity. She sees it as a ‘higher level’, a metaphor loaded with the same hierarchical significance as ‘strength’, and as ‘advancing.’ ‘I prefer the religious framework [in this school] because I know that if I go to a secular school, I will decline religiously.’ Thus Etti, who is not herself religious— indeed, at the end of this year, she transferred to a state school—has nonetheless internalized the religious construct of religiousness as strictly linear and hierarchical. For some Mizrahi girls, the struggle to find a comfortable place within strict definitions proves challenging—even when they adapt to Ashkenazi standards. Persian Merav, who describes herself as ironically ‘more religious’ than her school friends, is struggling for lack of clear religious-ethnic belonging. ‘The spirituality of the school is not so high. Girls don’t care to go to pray. And nobody here care[s]. This school does not educate for such a high religiousness. It’s a shame’. Merav, who with language of ‘high’ has internalized the hegemonic constructs religious hierarchy, is actively seeking out a religious cultural group that is ethnically Persian but religiously Ahkenazi, and her identity is homeless at the school. There is also a powerful gender component within these processes of identity formation. This is a culture defined by a male symbol completely absent from the school—the knitted skullcap. As Tamar said, ‘We are religious like almost the whole school. Knitted skullcap’. This popular identification of religious Zionism as ‘the knitted skullcap’ (see for example, Fisherman, 1999), highlights the girls’ struggles to find visible definitions for their own identities. Thus, where both connection and disconnection in religious Zionist culture are built around male symbols, these girls are searching for a self that barely exists on its own. Perhaps, then, the ‘religious plus– minus’ that characterizes many girls’ identities has indeed formed a surrounding culture, a form of resistance to indoctrination on gender and ethnic axes. But some Mizrahi girls, perhaps in an attempt to raise their status in a religious society, would rather conform to the system’s strictest definitions in order to truly ‘advance’. Saving oneself is perhaps a simpler form of agency than deconstructing systemic hierarchies.

The ethnicity of boundaries: Becoming non-religious The centerpiece of religious identity as ‘not secular’ insists on constructing ‘other’ as wrong, bad, or superficial—or even, as Ditza once suggested, not Jewish: ‘I have a secular friend, and her life is basically just chasing after money. It’s to have more clothes, more parties … We’re not in touch any more because we are just not compat- ible. She doesn’t eat kosher, she eats pork, they are just like goyim [non-Jews], there is no difference between them and goyim other than that they are called Jews.’ This religious Zionist construct places secular [hiloni] and non-Jew together, in opposition to correct religious Jew. Ditza let go of her secular friendship because once the other girl began eating pork, they simply had ‘nothing’ in common anymore. Thus, religious practice around issues like kosher goes from being a dietary practice to being a mainstay of culture and identity, one that creates uncrossable boundaries. Within the Levy School, narratives around being non-religious formed a gray cloud, a clear but dark barrier enclosing this space, maintaining definitions and Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 225 identities. Along that barrier lay ethnic differences around religious and academic identity, notions of correct femininity, and a troubling ethnic divide around who is ‘in’ and ‘out’. Mizrahi Shula, Orna and Noa told me, for example, about their friends who left the school to go to non-religious schools. Sophie and Yonit, two of the girls who eventually left, said ‘it’s boring to be in a religious school … In a secular school there’s a different routine, and in a religious school you’re stuck with just girls. It’s not fun.’ Sophie actually defines herself as religious, like her mother, ‘but my father goes to soccer on Shabbat,’ and said she was nervous about switching schools. ‘But I’m mostly going because of the boys.’ In other words, regardless of beliefs and life- styles, the very presence of boys creates an unbridgeable symbol of religiously ‘out’. Girls who were religiously ‘out’ paint powerful portraits of religious identity. One girl, Sarit, was described by teachers as a ‘bad kid’. ‘Something is off’ with her, said one teacher, she ‘can’t be trusted,’ she knows how to get out of ‘situations’ and she wears a school bag that says ‘Joe’ on it in English. Aliza the sports teacher said that on one excursion, ‘some boys from the secular school saw us and asked us if Sarit was with us. I was stunned’. That is, the presence of boys in a girl’s life already places her on the margins, with a dangerous sexuality (Faludi, 1991). Indeed, Sarit was suspended for a few days after that, then was allowed back on the condition that she would see a therapist, and Sarit’s mother had regular talks with Debbie. ‘The problem,’ Debbie explained, ‘is that she has four siblings in non-religious schools. The parents say they don’t know why she’s “rebelling” so much, but I know that it’s because the family is forcing her to be religious, although they themselves are not religious.’ In other words, in this space, religious identity is clear, and one is either in or out. The presence of secular boys in Sarit’s life—regardless of other factors such as parents’ wishes— constitutes the penultimate symbol of female non-religiousness. Indeed, the placement of girls on the margins was a central process in defining school religious culture. Stories of the non-religious girls hanging onto the school by a thread were many and disturbing. Debbie related a story about a girl named Osnat who ‘is not religious, and on Thursday she gave someone the finger from the bathroom window—a young male teacher from the state school next door.’ The presence of a swearing gesture, a non-religious person, and a male, conflated in this story to desig- nate outness. The girl was brought to Debbie’s office, the father was called, and Osnat was promptly suspended. ‘She was already at risk of being kicked out for next year because she was not religious, but I had a long teary talk with the father and decided to give her another chance.’ Later on, the girl attempted to commit suicide, but Debbie was unimpressed. ‘She got advice from one of the other girls in the class that if she wants people to have sympathy on her, she should pretend suicide. Another girl in the class has attempted suicide several times by wrapping a scarf around her neck. There it’s more serious because she may actually do it. But this on Thursday was just a show.’ The girl stayed in the school until the end of the year, and then went to another school. According to Debbie, in the remedial class ‘they’re all messed up, and the teacher is having a really hard time. One girl walks around with a knife. Many of them aren’t religious. Most of them have serious family problems, major problems and a lot of violence, and we are not equipped to handle it on our own.’ Non-religious 226 E. Sztokman here is constructed with violent, mentally ill, sexually active, suicidal and/or deceit- fulness, and wrapped up in a myriad of symbols that place them unequivocally as ‘out’. Indeed, non-religious girls, readily identified by their track and perhaps by a distinct culture of discourse, are on the fringe of the school academically and religiously. They are the most gazed upon, the least trusted, the most reprimanded and the ones threatened with being kicked out. In this overlap between religious and academic marginality, the source of expulsion is often unclear. But most significantly, there is a striking ethnic component: all the fringe-dwellers are Mizrahi. Significantly, by contrast, several Ashkenazi-Anglo girls who define themselves as not religious are not in precarious positions in school. Zimrit, known as the ‘leader’ of the tenth grade, is overtly hostile towards religion. She hates religious studies, which she describes is one of the ‘dumbest things’ and ‘so boring’, and does not believe in religion at all. ‘I don’t really believe in a God. It is not something that I pray for … because basically I believe I am the one who is controlling my life and I am the one who is actually supposed to make the things work… Teachers scream at me often [laughs] and they tell me that I have to pray and stuff. I just take it easy, you know. And if it bugs teachers it is their problem not my problem.’ She also does not keep Shabbat and although she has never eaten pork, she says ‘if someone would give me bacon for breakfast I think I would eat it. I don’t see any problem with it.’ From both Ashkenazi and Sephardi perspectives of belief and the written word, Zimrit is completely non-religious. And yet, she holds clear privilege in the school, so much so that teachers’ reprimands are ‘their problem.’ She does not even bother conforming out of fear. She fears nobody. Similarly, British Michal Goldberg is academically and socio-economically privileged, and despite her complete rejection of religious beliefs and practice and poor academic performance, she is neither sanctioned nor threatened. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think I’m going to be religious when I get older.’ Her Hebrew teacher, Mizrahi Leah Davidi, was outraged by the fact that she hands in blank assignments and does not pray. What really gets me angry about Ashkenazim and Sephardim, there are two girls sitting here, one named Rosenblatt and one named Goldberg—Ashkenzi [girls]—and they don’t pray. And nobody does anything to them and they are both on the school’s athletics team and they go to competitions. And it really gets me angry. Now, this Goldberg, I have been a teacher for 30 years, and I have never had a student not write an essay. And this Miss Goldberg doesn’t … When Azoulai, they harassed her father for three years because his name is Azoulai [Mizrahi name]. It makes me angry beyond words. Like Zimrit, Michal neither believes nor practices, and irreverently ignores both religious and academic obligations, but none of this makes her a fringe-dweller. At the Levy School, then, the overlap between ethnic, academic, and religious identity, forges powerful hierarchies indeed.

Chanit and Hodaya: An Ashkenazi resistance Forms of resistance pierce school life in different corners, especially around the teaching of religious texts. For teachers, Bible classes formed a site of cultural construction, but for many students, they constituted an avenue of resistance. Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 227

One struggle I observed was between veteran Bible teacher, Chanit, and American Hodaya, in the high-track bible class. Chanit, a tall, imposing woman with a straw hat covering almost all of her brown hair, dark red lipstick, a dark blouse worn over her perfectly matching straight skirt that reached down to her ankles, stood at the head of the class, where 22 ninth-grade girls sat in three rows. ‘When people are talking, I don’t talk,’ she said as girls came to attention. When there was silence, she began, ‘Last lesson we were talking about the false prophets in Jerusalem and how they say there won’t be any destruction of the Temple.’ Bible in hand, she referred to the chapter in Ezekiel that they are studying. Chanit, with her austere posture and frown, waiting for silence, sent a clear message that she was master of this room and all that it contained. Chanit handed out three pages of questions and instructed the girls to read chapter 8, verse 11. ‘Where did the shechina [God’s spirit] go?’ She read. ‘To the tabernacle,’ said one student. ‘No, into exile,’ corrected Chanit. ‘After God left Jerusalem, He is now everywhere.’ Chanit continued to analyze the text, a prophetic warning by Ezekiel against false idol worship, desecration of the temple, and admonitions against Israelites who prayed to different gods. ‘I’ll give you an example,’ Chanit said, to illustrate the importance of monotheist practices. ‘It’s like a guy who gets cancer and then he gets chemotherapy. That’s what makes him better. Without it, you can make the person more comfortable but you can’t take care of that problem and make it go away.’ Hodaya, sitting near the door, leaning her head against the wall, raised her hand to argue. ‘Maybe each person had their own prayer.’ Chanit, not responding to Hodaya, turned her attention instead to Revital in the other corner and asked her to change places, and then instructed the girls to look at the text, leaving Hodaya’s question lurking behind a discourse of commanded instructions. Within this context of prophecy about idol worship in the first temple period, the Bible is taken not only as absolute historical fact, but as the indisputable source of all morality. Multiple perspectives, varied interpretations, and alternate viewpoints do not exist in this space, and are almost parenthetically equated with idol worship. Although Hodaya tries to inject an element of post-modernism by suggesting that each person has ‘a different prayer’, the comment gets lost. Hodaya later described her frustration. ‘I don’t get along with [Chanit]. We are always on two different sides. I am more open for options. She will say what [medieval French commentator] Rashi says and I can bring a different idea that Rashi doesn’t … She is not always open for other options.’ Chanit confirmed this relationship in a telling staff room exchange. ‘These Americans with their doctorates and their “floralism”4 [sic],’ she complained. ‘I had one parent with some kind of doctorate in bible or something, the girl comes to me and says, “My mother says you’re not teaching Bible right. She says Rashi isn’t always right.” What kind of floralism is this? To say only their way, by saying Rashi isn’t always right is the right way? I ask you, is that floralistic?’ Hodaya’s struggle for a multi-faceted religious identity is clearly at odds with Chanit’s goal of singular trans- mission. For Hodaya, the connection between the text and religious practice increases her frustration. ‘Chanit is very extreme and I am more traditional in religion … She is very 228 E. Sztokman

stubborn. She is a hard person to deal with … I like Bible but it depends how it is taught, I like more discussion. I like when we have a discussion about facts.’ Hodaya, who likes Bible, participates vociferously and is in the highest track in Bible, is turned off from both the text and from religion by her interactions with Chanit, whose loyalty to absolutist and authoritarian readings of the text and religion creates distance. This ‘schooling’ of Bible thus creates barriers between the students and the text, and the students and religion (Noddings, 1992, 1993). In other words, while Chanit views Hodaya’s perspective as irreligious, for Hodaya, the ability to openly explore actually brings her closer to the text and to the religion. Outside of formal schooling, Bible takes on other forms. Students from an after- school club called ‘Nachat’, an acronym for ‘Noar Chovevei Tanach’ [Youth who Love Bible], came at the end of class to promote their club, describing how they ‘love reading Bible’—a sharp contrast to Chanit’s space of performance and obedience. Hodaya considered taking the National Bible Test because of how much she loved Bible, but eventually decided that ‘there’s no point’ because ‘you are so busy and anxious from studying that you are not learning to get deep enough.’ Moreover, it went on the report card, and she was concerned about failing. The emphasis, then, on measured performance effectively distances students from the text, and muffles what might have been, at least for Hodaya, a more passionate connection to Bible. Tracking, as well, became a major barrier between some of the girls in Chanit’s class and connection to religious texts. She told the girls, ‘When we decided last year to divide Bible into tracks, our assumption was that there are girls who love to learn Bible … But this year there has been a change. Girls don’t want to learn Torah. Whoever doesn’t want to stay here can go down a group.’ Revital said, ‘I don’t mind going down.’ But Chanit said, ‘You can’t go down because then people will say that you don’t want to put in any effort.’ There was mumbling in the class and Chanit said, ‘Don’t argue. Not everyone is able to put in an effort in the same way.’ Then she quickly added, ‘Let’s move on.’ Despite a brief pronouncement to the contrary, tracking became another one of Chanit’s absolute facts, not to be disputed. Significantly, Revital seemed particularly unhappy in the class. I met her later in the year, when she walked in to Debbie’s office crying. Assistant Principal Dana, who accompanied her, explained that Revital was upset about Chanit’s Bible class, about ‘the teacher’s attitude, and … the fact that she was really trying hard to do well in tests but was not successful.’ Revital wanted to go down a track, and Debbie, sympathet- ically agreed to explore options. But Debbie did not want her to go down a track, because from her broader perspective of religious girls and education, with all its gender, ethnic, and class implications, she built a policy according to which students never move down in their track, but only up.

There’s the whole thing of families who encourage their boys more than their girls. This is a school where girls are always going to be pushed up and not pushed down. … As soon as a couple of girls got 70s on test, they came right away and said, ‘Move me down a track.’ Then we said ‘Why move down? Why don’t you study harder?’

For Debbie, this was a gender issue. In the local boys’ religious school, she said, Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 229

When somebody gets a 70, right away they say ‘I want to be tested and I want to do more and I want to do extra.’ And in the Levy School, they say right away ‘Go down.’ Those are boys and these are girls! The girls were taught to move down. Debbie sees this learned helplessness in which girls see themselves as unable (Grossman & Grossman, 1994) as not only about gender, but also about religion and ethnicity. ‘That is not only a cultural difference between the Mizrahim and the Ashkenazim. Even among the Ashkenazim this is the problem of orthodoxy that puts girls down. I am very glad that we caught that right away … we have said that and now they are saying that everywhere, up, everything here is up.’ In other words, although Revital was suffering in Chanit’s high-track bible class, moving ‘down’ was charged with gendered meaning. Thus, the policy of religious girls ‘moving up’ hit an impenetrable block. Chanit is on ‘top’, Revital is stuck at an impasse, and Hodaya’s relationship with the bible and religion is obstructed. Both Revital and Hodaya, Anglo-Ashkenazi girls from academic families, for whom religious identity is constructed in Chanit’s Bible class, actively resist the construction. Perhaps they are searching for ‘warmth’, a term implied by Noddings (1992, 1993), representing that which remains absent for these girls within the Ashkenazi, text-centered, hierarchical and effectively ‘cold’ transmis- sion of religious culture. Perhaps there is a conflict between Debbie’s academic goals as a religious feminist educator looking at policies and large symbols, and the girls’ individual goals of forging meaningful, personal religious identities.

Reading ethnicity in Toshba Significantly, like Revital and Hodaya, the overwhelming majority of girls in the highest track in Bible classes were Anglo. In Toshba [the Oral Law], the other central pillar of religious education, the ethnic make-up of the highest track is comparably Anglo-dominant. In order to deviate from strict tracking, Debbie introduced a program in Toshba for the ninth grade, called the Beit Midrash [small study hall] program. She brought in a group of young women studying at a local girls’ teaching seminary to teach Toshba in small groups in the Beit Midrash, two rooms full of tables across the hall from the library. I walked into the Beit Midrash, scanned the room, and noticed Noa engaged and impassioned in the back, sitting with two other girls and her teacher, Nediva, and joined the groups with everyone’s permission. Noa, a striking 15-year-old dark- skinned girl, with rectangular, thick-rimmed glasses, was vehemently arguing a point with Nediva, her petite, 20-year-old, light-skinned teacher. The discussion was about the Genesis story of Abraham begging God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. I entered the group as Noa was saying ‘But how could he do it? How could he kill all those tzaddikim [righteous men]?’ ‘God loves the tzaddikim but hates the reshaim [evildoers],’ Noa said, her long black hair pulled back as she leaned forward. ‘Let’s read Genesis 18; 23–25’ Nediva replied, adjusting the scarf that was covering all her hair, a signifier of religion and married status. She pointed to the worksheets, which contained an array of biblical and 230 E. Sztokman

midrashic textual cut-outs. ‘What does this verse say?’ Noa started to answer, ‘Rabbi Aha says’—but Nediva stopped her and said, ‘Forget about Rabbi Aha, we’re in the verses now.’ Another girl, Maayan, said, ‘Save the city.’ Noa began doodling as Nediva talked. ‘Why did Abraham change his mind,’ Nediva asked, ‘from saving only the righteous people to saving the whole city?’ Maayan said, ‘There’s no good reason.’ ‘Guilt,’ Noa said quietly. Nediva, ignored Noa, and began to speak, but Noa persisted. ‘He didn’t fight. He still saved himself. Like, he just wanted to save the tzaddikim because he’s a tzaddik, like he’s saving only himself. It’s worthless. There’s no attempt here to bring them back. It’s like, it’s too hard, so they throw you out of school! It’s a punishment that’s too strict! What happened to repentance? What happened to giving people a second chance? What about helping them change?’ For Noa this conversation was not just about the immediate text, but about her own life experiences of justice and injustice, social hierarchy, and questions of bad things happening to people she loves. Nediva may have been reading Genesis, but Noa was reading the school. She later explained that ‘This year, they are going to kick out some more of my friends,’ and it felt unfair. ‘I really think that this year the girls really tried to get better.’ She described an incident in which a girl was reprimanded and threatened with expulsion for arguing too loudly on the bus. ‘I don’t know what they were so upset about, but right away they jump on her, I don’t know.’ Indeed, as God watches the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, counting righteous and evil, the school watches girls everywhere they go, measuring their sins. Noa’s friends are the objects of this divinely inspired panoptical gaze (Foucault, 1977), even in a space that they consider to be personal—an argument between friends on the bus. Because her friends are not conforming to gender–ethnic–class expectations of ‘nice girl,’ they are less entitled to privacy, respect, and compassion—and Noa sees that as completely unjust. Her outrage was exacerbated here by a text seen as constructing this injustice as divine. She read Abraham as an elitist—he was looking after ‘tzaddikim’, which means he was looking out for himself. For Noa, ‘righteous and evil’ are class constructs with ethnic overtones that have a strong presence in the school. ‘I don’t see here that it suggests that if people would not change their ways that they wouldn’t be saved,’ Nediva responded. ‘After all, what is Abraham famous for?’ Silence. ‘When a person opens himself up, what is that called?’ Silence. Finally Noa said, ‘That he’s not an egoist.’ ‘Kindness!’ corrected Nediva. Noa was looking down, playing with her pencils. ‘Noa are you with us?’ Nediva asked. Noa looked up and stared. Nediva asked, ‘Have you ever done this, seen someone get a punishment that was too much and you protected them?’ ‘This is it!’ Noa said excitedly. ‘This is what we’re saying!’ But Nediva continued her own thought. ‘We see here a very great quality of Abraham’s. What does this tell us, that he does this?’ Silence again. Nediva continued, ‘That God discovered Abraham’s qualities, that he could teach the world some things. Does everyone get the point?’ Noa and Nediva were talking different languages. Nediva had her planned lesson, in which she had to say that Abraham was special because he had compassion. Noa Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 231

tried to say that she was living compassion by trying to deconstruct the unjust hierarchies imposed on her friends. Nediva did not hear her, reverting to her almost catechism-like teaching methods. Noa is already disconnected, looking down absently, knowing she hasn’t been heard here. Nediva, concerned with her own lesson plan around transmitting empty moral messages instructing us to be ‘good’, completely missed that Noa was actually living the message. There was also a hidden curriculum about religion and gender. For Nediva, the message was ‘be nice’, be a ‘tzaddik’, as a religious person, as a girl, and as a student. In practice, ‘nice’ for her meant memorizing a text if not actually understanding it, following your teacher’s instructions, paying attention without fiddling, and not getting too excited about your argument. For Noa, however, being nice means engag- ing, interfering, thinking about other people’s pain, maybe even screaming passion- ately and perhaps not accepting authority. Cultures of niceness and care clashed, though Nediva didn’t seem to understand. Nediva interpreted Noa’s resistance to her as a sign that she was not behaving properly as a student, that she wasn’t getting the message. Indeed, the consequences of this exchange were, ironically, to move Noa closer to the fringe. By speaking of an injustice that was foreign to the teacher, Noa was constructed as a bad student. ‘All I have to do is move my head,’ Noa later complained, ‘and already she’s on top of me saying “Noa, are you with us?”’ Nediva confirmed this. ‘Noa is a very smart girl but she is a little spacey, she’s always busy with other things. Her teacher also tells me that she’s a very, very smart girl. But you have to really hold her very tight.’ Noa’s teachers want her to be more compliant, less ‘spacey’, because they see spaciness as inappropriate behavior, bordering on ‘badness.’ But it seemed to me that Noa’s ‘spacey’ behavior—of looking down, getting lost in her own thoughts, playing with her pencils—was a reflection of her goodness, of her desire to help her friends, her need to believe in a just God and a just society, her need for a relationship with an authority figure who is seeing her and hearing her instead of just watching her. Thus Noa’s rebellion—to be nice in her own way by seeking social justice in a loud, disruptive, perhaps Mizrahi way, rather than to simply conform to the institutionalized, or Ashkenazi, upper-class version of ‘nice girl’—positions her as a risk. Meanwhile, while teachers try to ‘hold tight’, Noa was actually completely in tune with the purpose of the discussion. Indeed, she actually put herself in Abraham’s place, really fleshing out the story in her mind and making it relevant and current, not abstract and archaic. In fact, Noa’s actions can hardly be called resistant. After all, despite her friends being kicked out of school she works very hard at being a good student, gets good grades, and has even gone up a track in several subjects. ‘I’ve become such a bookworm,’ she smirked. Despite her outrage, and despite the teachers’ gaze, in practice she is constructing her own identity as academic achiever. Indeed, for Noa to be both Mizrahi and academically high-status entails reworking of constructs. ‘I’m really trying. I listen in class, I study for tests. But [my friends] don’t listen in class. I want to succeed. … I want to give my kids whatever they want. I don’t want to feel helpless …’. So while she challenges religious hierarchies that 232 E. Sztokman marginalize her morally and academically based on her ethnicity, she remains actually quite obedient, adhering to the rules in a world that sees her as less equal. Her agency comes not from being watched and threatened by the school administration, but from her own desire to ‘not feel helpless,’ and from not wanting to be ‘other’ or ‘different.’ She says, ‘I want to be a woman with respect … I want to be someone “normal”, something that will bring me respect.’ Thus for her to acquire the agency to reconstruct herself as ‘good’, she has to be different from her friends and from her family—where her sister is 20 and only now studying for matriculations—while simultaneously calling herself ‘normal’. And she has managed to do all of that on her own, despite the troubling religious cultural hierarchies around her. Noa is, in fact, fundamentally good (Noddings, 1989). She boldly risks her own position to demand justice and fairness in the world around her. Noa is likely to succeed in this system, having mastered the Ashenazi-privileged hegemonic value system and found ways to achieve academic success. But while the Levy School has given her the tools to extricate herself from the religious and academic margins of Israeli society, it has all happened within a constant panoptical gaze, with force, ‘threats’, and being constructed as ‘rasha’, with the silencing of her proud Kurdi voice and ultimately with the maintaining of the social hierarchies that constitute religious Zionist culture.

Conclusions At the Levy Girls’ Junior High School, religious identity is constructed as an Ashkenazi, linear-hierarchical system, an absolute construct with no questioning Rashi, no questioning of the law, always one right answer, and a constant ‘moving up’ or ‘fortifying’ in practice (Rapoport & Garb, 1998). Here, religious texts are about obedience and memorization, about exams and tracks. Individual connections to religion are preempted by the panoptical gaze (Foucault, 1977), a constant disciplin- ing stare in which girls’ identities are objects to be watched, measured, manipulated and controlled. The Ashkenazi religiousness delves into girls’ privacy, whether in home life, private conversations, or sexuality. Entire identities are constructed within religious ethnic–gender hierarchies. Moreover, Ahkenazi textual religiousness dominates almost exclusively, even when it causes family rifts, while Mizrahi religiousness (Dehen & Shokeid, 1999) is precluded. Thus, a small act like flipping a light switch builds entire hierarchies, even within families. Whilst Noa’s large act of showing a passionate commitment to social justice, or a desire to connect between biblical narratives and her own world, may be construed by some as very religious, in the Ashkenazi-constructed hierarchy around halacha-as-religion, Noa doesn’t even make the slightest mark. Many girls struggle with these constructs. Against the backdrop of black and white constructs, girls describe their own blurry grays, identities as complex, fluid and shifting rather than the singular, unmoving, unquestioned and unshakable ones constructed at the school. They are rarely in a comfortable position as ‘religious Zionist’ but are pulled between other identities but are mostly struggling, unsure, Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 233 flexible, in motion, in between, and not in one place. They are all searching for a ‘normal’ that they can call themselves, but for now they mostly know what they are not. Mizrahi girls in particular, for whom the male, Ashkenazi religiousness leaves them marginalized, lack defining religious symbols in the wider society. At school, the marginality of the Mizrahi girls is even more pronounced as religious identity inter- sects with academic hierarchies which is constructed around notions of correct gender behavior. A Mizrahi girl who doesn’t pray or who is ‘spacy’ in class gets moved further down along religious and academic hierarchies, while Ashkenazi girls begging to move down tracks are held up. Indeed, a Mizrahi girl in a low track who talks to non-religious boys is on the farthest edges of the school, waiting to drop out. Most strikingly, all those who dwell on that farthest fringe are of Arab Jews. It’s all connected; in the school it becomes one blended hierarchy around religion, academ- ics, ethnicity, and class—a divinely rationalized panoptical gaze. Resistance takes place in various corners, especially around religious classes. Many girls are frustrated, but the different forms of resistance are responded to unevenly While Sephardi students, like Noa, resist the injustices, and are simply put back into place, Ashkenazi agents like Revital are encouraged to go to the highest track. Mizrahi students are asked to leave; Ashkenazi students are begged to stay. An Ashkenazi resistance does not threaten the resister, while a Mizrahi resistance—even if only a perceived resistance—is charged with danger. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are ethnically defined values, in which Revital’s desire to go down a track is ‘bad’ in one way, while Noa’s insistence on challenging social injustices is bad in a different way—that is, threaten- ing. Injustice and social hierarchy are institutionalized—by hearing Revital and not Noa. In a sad irony, the more Noa feels unheard, the more she disconnects, the more she is constructed as ‘needing to be watched.’ It is a vicious cycle of constructing and reinforcing religious–ethnic–academic hierarchies. Thus, ultimately, the Ashkenazi girls own the most powerful resistance—the ability to be not-religious and still be considered ‘in’. Hierarchies can be deconstructed, but it requires work. It entails seeing rather than watching the girls. It means letting students connect to religious texts on their own, valuing family-transmitted religion at least as much as legalistic dictates, embracing a panoply of religious cultures, and creating space for all religious identities to flourish. It entails a profound understanding that our search for social justice is, ultimately, an essential central component of spiritual growth, perhaps the penultimate expression of goodness.

Notes

1. The other pragmatic issue that the idealism is challenged with is, of course, the question of the Arab-Israeli conflict within this redemption process. This aspect of religious Zionism is beyond the scope of this paper. 2. All names and identifying details have been disguised in order to protect the anonymity of the informants. 3. The term ‘chozer betshuva’, literally ‘returned with an answer/returning’, is a euphemism used in Orthodox circles to refer to a person’s transition from being non-Orthodox to Orthodox. 234 E. Sztokman

Interestingly, the more recently adopted euphemism in secular circles from Orthodox to non- Orthodox is ‘chozer besheala’, literally, ‘returned with a question’. For a more extensive rhetor- ical analysis of some of these terms, see Rapoport and Garb, 1998. 4. ‘Floralism’ is a distortion of the word ‘pluralism’, a pronunciation that fits the way in which ‘pluralism’ would be written in Hebrew without vowels. It indicates, among other things, that Chanit’s exposure to the word comes from seeing it in Hebrew rather than from discussing it or ever reading about it in English. It takes on a rather humorous sound to an English speaker from its similarity with the word ‘floral’.

Notes on contributor Dr Elana Maryles Sztokman lectures in gender and education at the Bar Ilan University Gender Studies Program and at the Efrata Teacher Training College, and teaches feminist theory at the Hebrew University School of Education in Jerusalem.

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