“Will you listen to my voice?” cries the poet Rachel. Is the voice of Israeli women listened to? This book offers us a broad range of representations of women in Israeli culture: in literature, religious ceremonies, national events, the media, and in the historiography of the Zionist movement, and examines how women are represented in various spheres.
The book opens a large window through which to investigate the problem of the feminine voice being heard: Do women indeed have a unique voice? Is it indeed silenced and not represented in the public sphere? Is it actually a multiplicity of vocal expressions of women from various social groups? Is there a Mizrahi or Ashkenazic feminine voice?
The book is divided by topic into four sections:
Women in the formative periods of Zionism
Women’s body—the appropriation of the feminine body as a wife and mother and the relations between the body and consciousness
Women in the public discourse
Women and the masculine hegemonic culture as different groups of origin (gender and multiculturalism)
The authors are from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences: history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Together they present the complex problematics of women’s lives.
The papers are the outcome of an interdisciplinary workshop at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Out of print.