Women From Israel

"…Obviously Israel will always be home. I feel it most intensely when I'm there for a long enough period. When I first arrive, I'm not so sure about it, but once I stay for a few weeks, it feels like I could easily move back and live there. It's beyond the fact that my entire family lives there: It's a visceral thing, an attachment to the physicality of the place, to how the place smells and tastes. I also have an intense connection to the sea in Israel; I actually have to say goodbye to it whenever I leave and it's always a difficult parting…"

"I've always been a storyteller. Before I could write, I used to make up stories and tell them to my friends and family. They were always really dramatic, with ghosts and people falling into holes in the ground, and ships lost at stormy seas. Then, I started drawing comic strips and I would show them to my mom and narrate them. As soon as I learned the alphabet I started writing stories and poems. I wrote every day, usually in the afternoons, when my parents were napping. My sister (who is seven years older) and my father recognized my love of storytelling and writing early on, and they fostered and encouraged it…"

"I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance."

"I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind"

"The sky cracked open like an eggshell"

"Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different."

"Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it."

"Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to."

"Growing up, I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?"

"Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)"

"On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface. Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)"

"Jerusalem, a city surrounded by thick forests and rolling hills, where the air was fresh and cool, where everything was ancient, biblical, suffused with meaning. (chapter 18)"

"Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)"

"I woke up with an urge to write, to document everything [they] had shared with me about the women's songs. For the first time in forever, I felt inspired by something. The idea of oral poetry that was created and disseminated by a community of women fascinated me, the fluidity of it, the riffing and rewriting and borrowing, which stood against the idea of authorship as it was known and celebrated in the West. There was so much more I wished to know. (Chapter 14)"

"It was my sister, Lizzie, who told me. Her voice-transmitted through telephone lines that ran underneath seas and borders from Sha'ariya, our Yemeni neighborhood at the edge of a suburb east of Tel Aviv, to this guesthouse counter in the Thai island of Ko Pha-ngan-echoed faintly. "Zohara," she said. Not Zorki, I noted. "You have to come home." You have to come home, a tinny version of her repeated."

"Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he'd say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew. (first lines of book)"

"The day Lily meets Lana is her two-week anniversary in Israel. She's lying on her belly in the dried grass outside the apartment building she now calls home, watching insects through her macro lens. She's sweating in her faded blue jeans and Converse high-tops. Then a shadow eclipses her sun."

"I'm just about to cross the street to Café Rimon when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart skips, trips and falls over itself."

"you write what you have to write. Life is too short to censor yourself. (2015)"

"You’ve been writing your whole life, having published your first poem at age ten. What drives you to write? AT I can’t explain it. It’s like love. I feel like it chose me, not the other way around. (2015)"

"maybe the best place is the in-betweeness, or the search for a home and a belonging, which is a very Jewish theme, or the act of wandering, the movement between places. In my twenties I wanted to believe that. I romanticized wandering and wore my nomadic lifestyle on my head like a crown, but it wasn’t a sustainable choice and eventually I got tired of travelling and living without some stability. So what is the best place on earth, then? Ultimately, the place where you feel most at home. In my case, it might have to be wherever my husband and child are. And other times, or actually at the same time, it is the page. (2016)"

"I never read Mizrahi writers or writers of color growing up, and never found myself or my family reflected in the books they assigned to us in school. I actually believed that there were no published Yemeni writers in Israel (of course they existed but I didn’t know that, because they had not received media attention, and were not taught in schools). It made me feel as though our stories weren’t worth telling and as though my dream of becoming a writer myself was far-fetched. The exclusion of Mizrahi writers (and Palestinian writers) in the school curriculum, to me, is an act of erasure that has yet to be rectified, and one which puts limitations on children’s dreams. It infuriates me. So as a result, my favorite poets growing up were all male and Ashkenazi, like Yehuda Amichai (whom I still love), Natan Zach, David Avidan. (2016)"

"I think there is an expectation when writing about Israel for it to be political, to be about the conflict, the situation (“hamatzav”) and this can be frustrating for someone not inclined to focus specifically on war stories. I’m interested in many conflicts: cultural clashes and dynamics within families and romantic relationships. I also wanted to capture how the political situation is always in the background: the way we live our lives with the sense of contention that is always present but not always on the forefront. The question is also what is political, because to me the book is political. My decision to write strictly Mizrahi characters was a political decision for me. To shed light on characters who are marginalized in Israeli society was also a political choice. Whenever I watch news from other places these are the things I want to know too: I want to see the family dynamics and love stories, and how people live amidst tragedy and war. This is one of the things I think fiction does best. (2016)"

"The revolution of Mizrahi artists in Israel is really exciting and something I craved as a child, growing up without seeing myself portrayed in literature or history classes. I find the idea of what it means to be Jewish to be pretty narrow also outside of Israel. The majority of the books translated from Hebrew have been mostly by Ashkenazi authors, and so hopefully this book might contribute just a tiny bit to the act of complicating Jewish identity and showing that there’s more to Jewishness and more to the Israeli story. (2016)"

"(Is her memoir consciously undergirded by feminist assertions of agency, and standing up to patriarchy?) I think this is an essential element of my memoir that is rarely discussed. As a young woman, it absolutely felt subversive and defiant in a way, wishing to break free from patriarchal expectations of me. But also, the fact that it felt so radical was on its own a testament to how oppressed women still are. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal, you know, to want to be free, to follow your heart. (2022)"

"I returned to Israel after 20 years in Canada because I wanted to see if I belonged here. The jury is still out. I’ve been gone for so long that I feel a little bit like an immigrant here, in Israel, too. This may be a case of the immigrant predicament: you no longer belong anywhere, or maybe you belong everywhere? I think my writing tries to make sense of that question (2022)"

"(Do you think things are getting better here in terms of people’s understanding about the differences between Jews from different cultures?) AT There definitely seems to be more in the media now, and more books by Jewish authors whose background isn’t Ashkenazi. It’s improving, for sure. I feel like there’s more awareness about Mizrahi and Sephardi inclusion within Jewish spaces. But I still have to be that person who says things on social media, like, when there’s a post about Jewish food and the entire conversation is Ashkenormative, “Actually, that is not Jewish food. That is Ashkenazi Jewish food.” (2025)"

"Celebrating Yemeni Jews and Mizrahi stories has been one of my goals with this book and my work, in general. I think what you describe here is a common misconception in North America, because Ashkenazi Jews are a majority there. Not so in Israel, obviously. We’re talking 50-50 [population split], which is another thing people in North America are surprised to hear. But despite this, disparities in higher education and income still persist. And Mizrahi authors have still not made it into the canon in Israel, so most Israeli literature that is being read in Israel and abroad is written by Ashkenazi authors. I wanted to grant my community a place in literature. (2025)"

"Some days I feel a physical ache for Arabic, a tug in my heart. How do you miss something you've never known? Can a language be lodged inside your body, folded into your organs, the same way we inherit memories from our ancestors, like trauma? How else can you explain the warmth that spreads inside my body when I hear it? The yearning?"

"There are two Arabics I long for-my ancestral tongue and the language of this place-or is it really one? Arabic existed alongside my mother tongue for generations, a sister language whose words are often recognizable: bayit and beit, yeled and walad. They share many words, a similar ring, an etymological root, a lingual family, and yet they are estranged. If this is not a parable about the state of this region, I don't know what is."

"Mizrahi Jews, some of whom came later than Ashkenazi, faced prejudice and inequity in Israel. Their need to assimilate required an erasure of their past, a denial of their heritage and language, which wasn't just foreign, or diasporic, but also associated with the enemy. Yiddish and other European languages were also lost, but Arabic was more politically charged. Despite sharing roots with Hebrew, which should have made it feel familial, it became viewed as dangerous, and hearing it instilled fear."

"Being away from home and its prejudice toward the Arabic language allowed my body to remember Arabic, lament what was lost, and reclaim my own Arabness."

"Writing in a second language...is like wearing someone else's skin, an act akin to religious conversion."

"I delight in the sound of Yemeni rolling out of my mouth, rejoice in accentuating the letters in that deep, melodic way, feeling as though in my own small way I'm keeping something alive-an endangered language, yes-but also more personally, our past, my childhood, as though in using these words I am channelling my ancestors."

"While Einstein's belief in an objective reality is similar to that of Weinberg and Sokal, his arguments for his conception of reality are not. In fact, Einstein was no "naive realist," despite such caricaturing of his stand by the Copenhagen orthodoxy. He ridiculed the "correspondence" view of reality that many scientists accept uncritically. Einstein fully realized that the world is not presented to us twice-first as it is, and second, as it is theoretically described-so we can compare our theoretical "copy" with the "real thing." The world is given to us only once - through our best scientific theories. So Einstein deemed it necessary to ground his concept of objective reality in the invariant characteristics of our best scientific theories."

"Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr; Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks."

"Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal's hoax, Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists relate to Derrida's and Bohr's obscurities in fundamentally different ways: to Derrida's with contempt, to Bohr's with awe. Bohr's obscurity is attributed, time and again, to a "depth and subtlety" that mere mortals are not equipped to comprehend."

"Mara Beller has probably succeeded in making what may well be the first truly penetrating assessment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists have been too much in awe of the mystique of their topic to have done anything comparable. [...] I am sorry if this role reversal of old and new is an anticlimactic answer to three quarter century of Copenhagen riddle. Mara Beller made me do it!"

"Shapin’s admirable essay misses, however, the point of Mara Beller’s piece in Physics Today (1998). Beller is not urging a more thoughtful attitude on physicists by pointing out that the wisdom of Bohr would sound like nonsense if it came from sociology or cultural studies. Quite the opposite. She is denouncing the great icons of quantum physics for uttering what she takes to be nonsense, and she is urging scientists to clean up their own act before they get on with the business of mocking others."

"I read the Beller article in Physics Today. In fact, I’ve read several of her articles before: she writes very well. She of course has a point about Bohr’s intractable language; I’ve spent many hours myself trying to make some sense of it all. To the people with less patience than I, I’m sure it’s not obvious that they should struggle to find some meaning there. That’s exactly why someone has to get in and say something reasonable about (a modernday version of) the “Copenhagen interpretation” before things get out of hand."

"Indeed, in 1998, after the physicist Alan Sokal mocked humanists for delving into physics to support their ideas in a way that seemed ignorant at best and zany at worst – in what has come to be known as “Sokal’s hoax” – historian Mara Beller published an article in Physics Today entitled “The Sokal hoax: at whom are we laughing?”. She cited remarks by Bohr – but also by Heisenberg and Pauli – to make the point that in this respect physicists could sometimes be as zany as humanists, and there is no neat way to distinguish between the two."

"We find ourselves in agreement with most of the points made in Mara Beller's article "The Sokal hoax: At whom are we laughing?". … Beller is right to point out that this quasi-religious attitude can arise in any field, even in physics. Thus, many physicists have for years blindly repeated Bohr's and Heisenberg's views on the foundations of quantum mechanics, without having a clear idea of what they meant. We are pleased to note that the grip of the so-called Copenhagen orthodoxy is weakening and that physicists are beginning to consider alternative views on foundational questions with an open mind."

"The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science condude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes." But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?"

"In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we know better now." What exactly do we know better now? Do we know better that one should not infer from the physical to the political realm and if yes, why? Or do we know better that the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum physics the one that confidently announced the final overthrow of causality and the ordinary conception of reality is not the only possible interpretation, and that, ultimately, it might not even be the surviving one?"

"By using only simple analogies and intuitively appealing, yet misleading, metaphorical images, Bohr established supposedly necessary connections between acausality, wave-particle duality and the impossibility of an objective unified description in the quantum domain. One needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to read Bohr's operational analysis of mutually exclusive experimental arrangements consisting of bolts, springs, rods and diaphragms. While publicly abstaining from criticizing Bohr, many of his contemporaries did not share his peculiar insistence on the impossibility of devising new nonclassical concepts-an insistence that put rigid strictures on the freedom to theorize. It is on this issue that the silence of other physicists had the most far-reaching consequences. This silence created and sustained the illusion that one needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to fully comprehend its revolutionary epistemological lessons. Many postmodernist critics of science have fallen prey to this strategy of argumentation and freely proclaimed that physics itself irrevocably banished the notion of objective reality."

"I don't understand why people would find my views abhorrent. If you ask any Israeli to put himself in a similar situation of occupation and oppression for 36 years - everyone would say they would do the same, including [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon. I never heard any similar criticism from those Israelis who are shocked by the killing of women and children in suicide attacks, of an Israeli rocket attack that kills Palestinian civilians."

"I grew up in an Israeli culture where suicide attackers are really heroes. Look at Samson, who in order to fight the Philistines in Gaza made the theatre collapse on himself and all the civilians there. He is a very big hero among Jewish children. I grew up on the myth of better suicide than surrender. So what is so special about suicide bombers?"

"Everyone fights with their abilities - the Israelis have helicopters and rockets and the Palestinians have nothing but themselves and some very primitive home-made explosives."

"I don't support such actions or see this as the solution, but I can very well understand how suicide bombings became a very popular way of fighting - first, because it is quite successful; secondly, because people are ready to risk everything in order to achieve some progress in the national struggle."

"The occupation made it very clear to me that there was something wrong, and I started to ask myself all kinds of questions and came to the conclusion that Zionism is negative and bad, and that we are oppressing the Palestinians."