Bøger af Esther Hertzog

There are diverse and complex problems faced by women in Israel. This book explores women's roles in teachers' labor conflicts, threatened motherhood within the welfare system, bureaucratic encounters faced by Ethiopian immigrant women, the lack of political representation amongst women, feminist activism against the sex industry, and gender power dynamics in gyms. It is a comprehensive feminist examination of women's diverse experiences in Israeli society over four decades and analyzes society during this time. As an ethnography, the book emphasizes a commitment to social justice and equality, and challenges prevailing social and gender research approaches.

'...From out of a world of death and destruction, extermination camps, ghettos, starvation and disease, there rises the figure of the woman in the Holocaust... the core of the fascinating studies in this collection. The importance of these research essays is, above all, their historical documentation of situations and events related to women in the Holocaust...'....In the face of imminent death, there was kindness to be seen, self-sacrifice, and the saving of another's life. And from a world that had lost all semblance of humanity came a sense of independence that welled up in the survivors, infusing them with the spirit of life as they emerged from the inferno. 'And what is for me the most moving, the most exciting thing of all, is the ability of those who endured to climb to their feet and shake themselves free of the killing fields, to begin a new life, to start a family....' Ayala Procaccia, Israel Supreme Court Justice'The book contains articles by some of the most prominent scholars in the field... They tell the stories of women who were humiliated, tortured and murdered; their eternally etched-in-the-memory stories of struggle and survival. 'This collection of articles is based on two international conferences on women in the Holocaust, held in recent years at Beit Berl Academic College, Beit Theresienstadt, and the Ghetto Fighters' House in Israel. Hertzog is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, who never spoke about the subject at home. She discovered a feminist perspective on the Holocaust at a conference at Oxford she attended, almost by chance, seven years ago. That experience motivated her to speak with her mother and document their conversations in the article that appears herein.'Ruth Sinai ('"Their heroism was never acknowledged')Haaretz

Since Israel is primarily a country of immigrants, the state takes on the responsibility for the settlement and integration of each new group. It therefore sees its role as benevolent and indispensable to the welfare of the immigrants. This be true to some extent.

Assuming that women's empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a "e;Gender Activities Project"e; within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing "e;development expert,"e; she demonstrates that the professed goal of "e;women's empowerment"e; is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of "e;development"e; projects and of women's development projects in particular.