3. Economic Empowerment for Women, accessed September 2013, http://www.womensown.org.il/en/template/?mainCatId=2&catId=34.
4. Al-Tufula Center, the Nazareth Nursery Institute, accessed September 2013, http://www.altufula.org/media-eng/.
5. “Atida, Your Gate to the Workforce,” accessed September 2013, http://atida.altufula.org/articles.aspx?catid=1&id=1.
6. Mahut Center, Information and Training for Women, accessed September 2013, http://www.mahutcenter.org/index.php?tlng=english. See also http://mahutcenter-hebrew.blogspot.co.il/.
7. For several decades, Hebraizing names in Israel was common practice. It emanated from the Jewish exile complex, which led Israeli Jews of certain generations to attempt to reinvent themselves as the antithesis to their exilic ancestors. For many Ashkenazim, the motivation would have been primarily to disguise the marker that identified them with the generation of the Holocaust; for many Mizrahim, it would have been to disguise the marker that identified them as Arabs. In the early years of Israeli statehood, the absorbing authorities pressured or coerced new immigrants to change their first names too. Otherwise, new immigrants commonly chose—and continue to choose—modern Hebrew names for their newborn offspring, and young immigrants chose to change their own first and/or last names. In my family the initiative to Hebraize our surname was mine and my brother’s, both of us Israeli-born. In recent years this trend has been subsiding, and sometimes even reversed as some people tend to resurrect their original non-Hebrew surnames.
PART I
Paradoxes of the Pursuit of Solidarity amid Polarizing Social Inequalities
CHAPTER 1
Social Economy
The Quest for Social Justice under Neoliberalism
The miracle of EEW is the tension that you see here between the business approach and the ideological attitudes. Women come to work here for ideological reasons and use business tools to promote their ideology. Here’s an example: I was sitting with Amit1 when she got a phone call from Phillip, one of our donors. He called to consult her on something that was not directly related to his support of EEW. There’s this American billionaire who wants to invest in Israel and his representatives are now exploring the terrain to help him decide where to invest. So Phillip, who was preparing for his meeting with these representatives, invited Amit to give him tips on how to include the idea of women’s empowerment in his recommendations, so that despite the fact that we are too small to get into the frame of this major investor, some of the money may eventually trickle down to us as well. I sat there listening to her and could hear how she led him, literally giving him words, to change the way he was thinking, all in a 15-minute conversation. She knows his world and understands that she needs to give him bonuses—to tell him what his foundation, and he personally, may get out of this. She used his business language to insert some of EEW’s ideology into his narrative.
—Ya’el Toledano, a freelance business consultant at EEW. (Interviewed by Amalia Sa’ar in 2003.)
This chapter describes the setting in which economic empowerment—as a practice and a vision—takes place, namely, the Israeli field of social economy. I portray encounters between actors with seemingly very different subject positions, such as the CEO of a philanthropic foundation and the feminist activist in the opening example, and the novel discursive tokens that are created as a result. I treat the accumulation of projects that aim to get low-income women out of poverty as a field of forces, in Bourdieu’s sense (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990), in which actors struggle for positions using diverse strategies and negotiating the value of their assets by imbuing them with meaning. I set out the gaps and ideological inconsistencies among the people who operate the projects, as a precursor for the larger project of this book, which is how the idea of economic citizenship—the conditioning of civil inclusion on economic self-sufficiency—has come to make sense to people as remote from each other as radical feminists, minority rights activists, business philanthropists, and state agents.
I begin by outlining the history of structural inequalities in Israel and their culmination, at the present phase of aggressive economic liberalization, in extreme gaps and overlapping disadvantages. This review provides essential background for the stories of the women whose economic struggles are presented throughout the book, as well as for understanding the sense of urgency that fuels social economy initiatives. I then move to describe the new ideas that have emerged on how to restore social solidarity and social balance, starting with globally circulating notions of community economic development, and ultimately focusing on the local version that emerged in the process of adapting these notions to the Israeli context.
In the second part of the chapter I use ethnographic data to try to convey the spirit of the field. I do so by sketching its organizational structure, which is characterized by cross-sectorial partnerships, and by showing typical profiles of the actors who operate the projects, relating their motivations, their dilemmas, and their ideological perspectives. My intention is to communicate the unique beat of this field and the intriguing encounters and genuine dialogues that it creates among people who are grounded in very different social and ideological milieus.
In the opening excerpt, for example, a head of a middle-range philanthropic foundation, a Jewish-American man, was reaching out to the manager of a very small grassroots feminist organization, an Israeli-born woman, to consult her on how he may incorporate the idea of women’s empowerment into a strategic discussion about the investments of a major Zionist-American donor. Although the parties of this conversation represent different constituencies, they share a passion for empowering minority and low-income women. And while their rationales may be very different—at the time of this conversation, EEW was only three years old and still very attached to the radical feminist circles from which it had emerged, whereas the donor, Phillip, worked for a mainstream Zionist foundation that was a regular strategic partner of several state ministries—they were trying to create a common language in which to talk about social justice. The chapter includes more stories like this one: I use the biographies of different actors to show the diversity of the field, as well as the captivating power of the idea of diversity itself. Lastly, I dwell on some key terms that recur in the actors’ discourse and explore them in the specific context of structural inequalities to ask what is Israeli about this, or how this is a vernacular version of a global phenomenon.
Economic Liberalization and Social Inequalities in Israel
For the first three decades of its existence, Israel showed remarkable economic growth. State-led political economy combined a strong emphasis on nation-building and selective elements of social democracy. Centralist state control of capital, production, consumption, and labor was encouraged by the idea that the state’s central roles were social and economic development, absorption of massive Jewish immigration, and the building of a solid defense system whatever the cost (Levi-Faur 1998; Shalev 1999; Maman and Rosenhek 2012). On the capital front, the state acted as the main redistributor of incoming capital—compensations from Germany, donations from world Jewry, or foreign aid from the US government—either directly or through several Zionist agencies, allowing very little room for private foreign capital. On the labor front, the Histadrut, the General Union of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel, played a key role in stabilizing labor relations by securing