Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar
are solely my responsibility.
I was blessed with numerous talented assistants who took part in various stages of the research. Most of them were my graduate students; some even wrote their MA theses on specific topics within the larger frame of the research. I thank Chava Nishri, Chava Rubin, Tamar Kaneh-Shalit, Ya’ara Buksbaum, Itay Alter, Guy Bruker, Nisreen Mazzawi, Adi Romano, Yevgenia Gorbachevich, Ma’ayan Agmon, Yael Shostak-Pascal, Noor Falah, Kifah Daghash, and Samiyya Sharkawi for conducting sensitive interviews, collecting archival and public materials, coding and analyzing, and helping me think through the many paradoxes that emerged with the unfolding of the research.
A wonderful reward of working on this book was the opportunity to forge intellectual partnerships with other feminist colleagues who, like me, have been fascinated by the effects of the neoliberal turn on Israeli civil society, and by the penetration of the ideology of self-governmentality into feminist and human rights circles. I am grateful to Nitza Berkovitch, Adriana Kemp, and Mimi Ajzenstadt for inviting me to the Van Leer research group on the NGOization of civil spaces and for the opportunity to converse in a common theoretical language. Additional critical sustenance came from friends and colleagues in the field itself, who were a constant source of ideological and intellectual innovation. I thank Ruti Gur, Khawla Reihani, Michal Dagan, Nabila Espanioly, and Johayna Hussain for allowing me a close look at the wonderful work they have been doing, and my many friends at Isha-L-Isha, the Haifa Feminist Center, which has been my political home for so many years and which has served as a springboard for important feminist empowerment initiatives. I thank and acknowledge, with love, Ayelet Ilany for her wisdom and insights, for teaching me so much that I did not know, and for inspiring me with her capacity to imagine and fight for a better society, while keeping her heart open to human injustices and human beauty.
I wrote the book in Boston, during my sabbatical year at the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. I thank Rob Weller for offering me the affiliation and for his kind and warm hospitality. My gratitude to Chuck Lindholm, also from Boston University, dates long before this book, whose progress he accompanied with careful reading and thoughtful comments. As my former dissertation adviser, Chuck has been a true teacher, setting a very high intellectual standard combined with an open mind and a good sense of humor. Diana Wylie read and commented on the entire manuscript and contributed to making my year in Boston a nourishing writing period by engaging me in stimulating intellectual conversation along with wonderful social and cultural recreation. I thank Val Moghadam, whose rich feminist scholarship on women in the Middle East and North Africa has been a major analytical reference point for me, for her warm, generous friendship during my stay in Boston and for her attentive reading of some of the chapters of this book. Other colleagues who enriched and supported me during the writing period away from home were Michal Frenkel, Alanna Cooper, Joyce Dalsheim, Pnina Lahav, Shahla Haeri, and Paula Rayman, and of course my beloved aunt and cousins Lea (Loly), Tammy, Marc, and Daniel Kamionkowski.
In Israel, I thank my colleagues at the University of Haifa Department of Anthropology and surrounding departments, Tamar Katriel, Carol Kidron, Nurit Bird-David, Yuval Yonay, Debbie Bernstain, Dalit Simchai, Alisa Lewin, Tally Katz-Gerro, Asaf Darr, Rebeca Raijman, and Regev Nathanson, for providing a sound intellectual environment for debate and discussion. Particular thanks go to Tsipy Ivry, whose feminist anthropological outlook converges so perfectly with mine and who therefore has been among the most immediate partners for sharing ideas, dilemmas, frustrations, and revelations.
I have been fortunate to receive generous financial support for several of the projects that comprise this research. I thank the Israel National Insurance Institute, whose three-year research grant to evaluate an empowerment project effectively jump-started my decade-long immersion in the field. This grant was followed by a three-year grant from the Israel Science Foundation, which allowed me to reorient my research to broader theoretical questions and to conduct time-consuming ethnographic fieldwork. The Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, where I enjoyed a share of a two-year group research grant, allowed me to add an in-depth exploration of the structural contours of Israeli social economy. Lastly, I thank a philanthropic foundation, which preferred to remain anonymous, for a one-year grant to document and explore a back-to-work project for Palestinian women in Nazareth.
I am grateful to Berghahn Books for believing in this manuscript and for the smooth production process of the book, and I thank the anonymous readers for their excellent comments.
Lastly, at home, Murray Rosovsky was a pillar of strength and reassurance throughout. I thank him for his careful language editing of the entire book, and much more—for taking care of our daughter when I was out doing fieldwork and during the long hours of writing. I thank him for believing in me, and for his unconditional love. I thank my family—Oscar and Olga Sircovich-Sa’ar, Yashi Sa’ar, and Dafi Hochman-Sa’ar—for their love and support, and Lyla for being the light of my life.
Introduction
April 2008, graduation party of a business-entrepreneurship course in Haifa. After some speeches and handing out the certificates, while women were enjoying the refreshments, each graduate was asked to say a few words about her business. Rachel Rosen, who had asked to be the last one, used the opportunity to perform a short standup piece that she had written for the occasion. Rachel was a certified medical masseur and self-employed for more than fifteen years. Although like many of the others she had to supplement her income through work as a shop assistant because her business was not economically sustainable, her profile was somewhat atypical in that she had more cultural and social capital than most other participants. A never-married mother of one in her late forties, she had a university education, her father was a white-collar professional, and her social circle included many friends with higher education. “My name is Rachel and I’m a love-and-energy entrepreneur,” she opened, talking in a very soft voice. “I sell capsules that will make you fill out with love and help you give love. You should try one of them, because love is really necessary for your economic success. …” She continued like that for a few more minutes, then said, “You’d never guess what happened to me last week when I went down to the desert to meditate. I opened one of my love capsules, sat down and did some breathing. All of a sudden I heard a weird sound, like thunder. Before I knew what was going on, a huge sack came down from the sky and landed right in my lap. And guess what, it was full of money! Just like that, all that money came tumbling down on me. …” As I was standing in the audience, listening with a big grin to what I thought was a really witty parody, I got a nudge from one of the other graduates. “Why is Rachel talking in this odd voice and using her hands like that?” This woman, it suddenly hit me, didn’t get it. “She’s doing standup,” I said, “It’s a joke.” “Ah,” she said, then turned around and passed the explanation on to the women on her other side. “It’s a joke. …” I could see the nods from the corner of my eye.1
This book tells the story of economic empowerment projects for low-income women in Israel and dwells on the manifold paradoxes that they engender. I portray the institutional context, called “social economy,” in which such projects are operated, and describe how the women at the receiving end accommodate the new expectation that they should become economically independent with existing cultural scripts of feminine propriety. As the opening anecdote conveys, the projects are saturated with a New Age lingo of love and money, itself the upshot of emotional capitalism, which collapses together work, care, entitlement, and the very notion of self, in an ever-expanding imaginary shopping mall where “everything,” from moral value to utility value to personhood, is marketable.
On a broader level, this is a book about neoliberalism and its localization in a particular cultural context. The Israeli social economy field features collaborations between business tycoons, social services professionals, state functionaries, grassroots activists, and women from disempowered backgrounds, who together create a discourse full of contradictions. On the one hand, economic empowerment projects are replete with talk about individual self-sufficiency and open opportunities; they urge low-income women to abandon the positon of needy, passive recipients of public support and see themselves, instead, as agents of change and the key to their own failure or success. On the other hand,