Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0716
• Pages: 716202-723
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Author: Meir Amor

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Meir Amor, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University,

Montréal, Québec, Canada.

REVIEW ESSAY

Smadar Lavie. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers

and Bureaucratic Torture.

New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014. 202 pages. $39.95

Reviewed by Meir Amor

Rarely one encounters a comprehensive, nuanced, insightful, and realistic exposi-

tion on Israeli society packaged in such a slim book. Wrapped in the Flag of

Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture is such a research and

book.

The work is extraordinary, imaginative, and creative; it is a fruitful presentation

of the anthropological imagination’s tremendous abilities to see a social world

encapsulated in a drop of “fieldwork.” Indeed, this is a tour de force of the unique

abilities reserved to anthropology’s insight production.

The research aims at analyzing the bureaucratic procedures by which single

parent families, usually headed by the mothers, are treated in Israel. The empirical

research and observations were done in 2003 during a short period of a cease-fire

(Hudna) between Israel and Hamas. The research is focused on Mizrahi single

mothers who marched to Jerusalem and camped on a hill (Wohl Rose Park) facing

several government ministries’ offices.

Hence, Mizrahi single mothers constitute the empirical center, the research

focus, and the human drama. The march on Jerusalem raised much interest and

media coverage; however, and despite the media noise, the march and the encamp-

ment in Jerusalem utterly failed. Single Mizrahi mothers failed to achieve any

significant changes in their social standing or in the welfare policies enacted

toward them. Like most Mizrahi social protest movements so far, the single moth-

ers’ march in Jerusalem was of no avail.

The research focuses on Vicky Knafo, an Israeli Mizrahi woman, and on

Smadar Lavie, an Israeli welfare mom who is also a PhD, Berkeley trained ethnog-

rapher who wrote the book. Generalizing the “Vicky Knafo march,” its personal

as well as political circumstances enabled Lavie in producing a plethora of sharp

concepts and penetrating insights. She minted the bureaucratic torture concept;

she coined Knafonomics, Knafoland, as well as produced a genuine and enlightening