Israel and the daughters of the Shoah : reoccupying the territories of silence /

This book promises much but delivers little. The author intends to "break the silence about the Shoah [Holocaust] in a society which constructed itself as the Israeli antithesis to the Diaspora Jew, and to excavate a 'truth' from underneath the mountain of Zionist nation-building myths and silences," with direct impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From a feminist perspective, the Holocaust's survivors, like Diaspora Jewry more generally, are perceived in Israel as weak and feminine in contrast to the masculine strengths embodied by the Israeli State. The issues raised here are certainly provocative, but the methods used to test them fail the canons of good scholarship. For informants, the author selects only nine women peers, all authors or screenwriters and children of survivors. Even this narrow sample provides mixed responses, failing to strongly support her thesis. Despite talking much about "ethnography," the author offers little description. The reader's puzzlement is partially resolved by the author's admission that this is a personalized study "about me and my generation." A "reflexive" work, the book supplies much information about the author and what has long troubled her, but there is no compelling evidence that this speaks of Israeli society more broadly. L. D. Loeb University of Utah