Esther Fuchs (ed.) Israeli Women's Studies: A Reader.(Book review)

Esther Fuchs (ed.) Israeli Women's Studies: A Reader New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xv + 342 pp.

Israeli Women's Studies or Studies about Israeli Women?

Israeli Women's Studies is a collection of eighteen cross-disciplinary articles written about Jewish and Palestinian women in Israel. The editor, Esther Fuchs, has divided them into five thematic sections: myth and history, law and religion, society and politics, war and peace, and, lastly, literature and culture. Most of the articles (as the editor notes) are "classics" written by some of the leading scholars in the field, and their importance is indisputable. All have been published previously elsewhere over the course of the last two decades, which in itself does not preclude their inclusion in a new reader. However, the significance and scholarly contribution of such a collection of previously published (at times overlapping, and at times dated) articles should have derived from the new interpretive framework within which the editor placed them, linking the studies in a manner that would have revealed their interconnectedness, emphasizing shared concerns and themes, and charted (in this case) the evolution of a new field of knowledge. It is on this point that the reader does not live up to expectations.

In the attempt to put together an anthology geared to the sensibilities of a non-Hebrew speaking audience and to include the work of scholars working outside Israel, studies published in Hebrew are disregarded (with the exception of Manar Hassan's early article, which had been translated for a previous anthology), as are those with a more theoretical approach. The collection would also have benefited from the inclusion of the work done by a younger cohort of Israeli feminist scholars, whose research interests have expanded into science studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and communication studies (to name ...