Background
Throughout the past year war has raged in Israel and the Middle East on a scale that has not been seen for dozens of years. The characteristics of the current war include the hybrid use of warfare technologies combined with an intensification of conventional military combat and an extensive call-up of military reserves, use of communications technologies to disseminate propaganda and misinformation, massive harm to civilian population centers, kidnapping of civilians, use of sexual violence, broad harm to ecological systems, collapse of various state services, an increase in organized crime and the dispersion of small arms, and the erosion of the taboo against the use of nuclear arms.
Although we are just beginning to understand the social, economic, and political effects of these characteristics, it is clear that the status of women continues to be determined by familiar historic patterns that are expressed, among other things, by the absence of women from the war cabinet, and the expectation of Jewish women in Israel to fill civilian roles of care for, and support of, the home front, and to enlist in combat roles in their compulsory military service and in the reserves. At the same time, they are depicted as the main victims of the war. Small groups of women who refuse to go along with these roles or who are not members of the Jewish majority are required to cope with widening patterns of social and political supervision, both formal and informal.
We ask: Is it possible—and if so, how—to conduct critical feminist thinking in a time of war? How do women create knowledge and engage in research in a situation of collective existential threat? What is the connection between the war’s effect on women and their status on the eve of October 7? What can we learn about women’s experiences and thoughts from their stories? How do women’s experiences at the personal level connect to broad political and social processes? What can be learned about current wars and their effects from an analysis of the state of women in Israel? And what are the conditions for creating alternative spaces of freedom of thought and moral responsibility in times of extreme violence?
About the Research Workshop
The research workshop is intended to create a space for jointly thinking about these issues and will be conducted in accordance with the principles of an open, supportive, and growth-promoting academy, with the aim of encouraging the publication of multidisciplinary and multigenerational research and making knowledge accessible to various audiences. The workshop will operate for 18 months, in the course of which there will be five concentrated meetings and a conference at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Scholars in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities, including graduate students (following approval of a research proposal), who are actively engaged in research (theoretical, quantitative, or qualitative) or who are in the process of writing a paper, are invited to present proposals. Presentation of the research and shared reading of drafts of papers will be the focus of the group’s meetings and discussions. Participation in the workshop requires active presence at all the meetings and presentation of the research at the conference, which is open to the public. In addition to participants’ own publications, at the end of the workshop a joint publication (a special issue of a journal or an anthology of papers) will be considered.
The group will be led by Dr. Sarai Aharoni, the head of the Gender Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and will be supported by an advisory committee whose members will be Prof. Naomi Chazan, Prof. Hanna Herzog, Hadass Ben Eliyahu and Ronna Brayer-Garb.