Shenhav criticizes new encyclopedia for ignoring Israel’s Mizrahim and women
September 21, 2007 7:51 am Israeli Culture War, ShasNo room for ‘misfits’ - Haaretz - Israel News, September 21, 2007
“Zman yehudi hadash” is a white project that corresponds with Europe and North America while casually erasing entire Jewish histories, those lived by the Jews of the Islamic countries.
As I pointed out last week, the encyclopedia’s editorial board consists of 14 learned members, among them only one woman (Shulamit Volkov) and one Mizrahi (Michel Abitbol). And what about the contributors? The five volumes contain some 380 entries written by about 240 different authors. Of the 380, 67 were written by women (about 18 percent), three by Arabs (on “Arab topics”), and 15 at most were written by Mizrahim (about 4 percent).
This bias, which is even more severe than the outrageously low representation of these groups among Israeli university faculty members - where the numbers are 20 percent women, 7 percent Mizrahi and about 1.5 percent Arabs - is also evident in the contents of the different entries. It is astonishing to see, for example, how for most of the writers, Mizrahi Jews simply do not fall within their field of vision.