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Smadar Lavie. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014. 202 pages. $39.95
Rarely one encounters a comprehensive, nuanced, insightful, and realistic exposition on Israeli society packaged in such a slim book. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture is such a research and book.
The work is extraordinary, imaginative, and creative; it is a fruitful presentation of the anthropological imagination's tremendous abilities to see a social world encapsulated in a drop of "fieldwork." Indeed, this is a tour de force of the unique abilities reserved to anthropology's insight production.
The research aims at analyzing the bureaucratic procedures by which single parent families, usually headed by the mothers, are treated in Israel. The empirical research and observations were done in 2003 during a short period of a cease-fire (Hudna) between Israel and Hamas. The research is focused on Mizrahi single mothers who marched to Jerusalem and camped on a hill (Wohl Rose Park) facing several government ministries' offices.
Hence, Mizrahi single mothers constitute the empirical center, the research focus, and the human drama. The march on Jerusalem raised much interest and media coverage; however, and despite the media noise, the march and the encampment in Jerusalem utterly failed. Single Mizrahi mothers failed to achieve any significant changes in their social standing or in the welfare policies enacted toward them. Like most Mizrahi social protest movements so far, the single mothers' march in Jerusalem was of no avail.
The research focuses on Vicky Knafo, an Israeli Mizrahi woman, and on Smadar Lavie, an Israeli welfare mom who is also a PhD, Berkeley trained ethnographer who wrote the book. Generalizing the "Vicky Knafo march," its personal as well as political circumstances enabled Lavie in producing a plethora of sharp concepts and penetrating insights. She minted the bureaucratic torture concept; she coined Knafonomics, Knafoland, as well as produced a genuine and enlightening analysis of Israeli society. Using such concepts, Lavie presents Israeli society's power distribution, its ethnic and gender composition and division of labor, and its constant war on Palestinian society and people. All these are factors in Lavie's report and analysis. In Lavie's description, the relations between these personal social problems and...