Mind the gap: the cost of overlooking gender in the Jewish nation-state question

I am an Orthodox Jew and a feminist,¹ a proud Zionist whose children intentionally attend a Jewish-Arab school, a middle-class, educated, light-skinned Jew of Ashkenazi origins living in the Negev, Israel’s southern region – an ethnically and socio-economically marginalized periphery. These seemingly divergent elements intertwine to shape my identity, affording me different forms and degrees of social capital and grounding my multiple belongings. Yet in Israel’s increasingly polarized politics such complexities are often denied. I am frustrated daily by how rarely non-binary identities are represented and articulated in mainstream media. Israeli public discourse rarely recognizes intersectionality – how social experiences,...