Medicine and Urology in Eretz-Israel in the first half of the 20 th Century and in the Shadow of the Holocaust

The purpose of this article is to shed new light on the entry of Jewish women into the public sphere in this period and on their achievements, and to briefly hint at the difficulties they encountered. It will outline the contours of the collective contribution made by professional women to the civil society of pre-State Israel during the first half of the twentieth century. In this pilot study, I will discuss only a few extraordinary professional women who strongly influenced their respective fields. I will focus on four areas-medicine, social work, education and dance-with special attention to the new social approaches that these professional women tried to institute. My goal is to consider the subject from a comprehensive perspective: How did the work of women contribute to the public sphere in the Mandate years, and to the forging of another kind of new Hebrew woman? Despite impressive developments in the historiography of the yishuv (the Jewish community of pre-State Israel) concerning the lives of women and their place in society, a bird's-eye view confirms the widespread assumption that their contribution to the public sphere is virtually excluded from history books. 1 Some attention has been paid to women's involvement in areas generally perceived as masculine-agricultural settlements , kibbutzim, defense forces and various political parties-but this has largely confirmed their place in the "women's section," on the margins of society. 2 Moreover, these "New Hebrew women" have mainly been depicted either as housewives and mothers or as laborers, working in the fields like men or aiding them wherever necessary. They have barely been considered as meaningful in the public sphere. 3 The study of professional women moves women to the forefront.

The article presents in a preliminary manner, a historical and geographical phenomenon that has yet to be dealt with extensively: The settlement and activities of Jewish medical personnel working alone in Arab towns and villages from the beginning of the Mandate period till the outbreak of the Arab Revolt: , the motives which led Jewish doctors to settle in Arab cities; the characteristics of their activities, medical and cultural; the relations they formed with the local Arab populace; and the circumstances which eventually led to the end of their activities in these cities. A sensitive reading of related sources may offer a deeper insight into the phenomenon as it was perceived within the bi-national context – mainly on the Jewish side, but on the Arab side as well. The article is based on current research dealing with Jews in Arab cities during the Mandate period, with a primary focus on several Jewish physicians who worked within an Arab milieu before the the Arab Revolt.

Israeli feature films in the first decades of Israel were dominated by ideological considerations and focused on the importance of establishing a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. As part of this process, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous negative entity, broken in body and in spirit that, according to the films, can be changed only in Israel. This paper analyzes the sexual stereotypes of women Holocaust survivors from the 1940s until the present. It shows how from the 1940s-1980s women Holocaust survivors were portrayed through negative sexual stereotypes: they were accused of prostitution in order to survive, and were transformed in the films from indecent Jewish women to virtuous Israeli mothers. The paper argues that even though, from the 1970s, the hold of Zionist ideology gradually began to weaken in Israeli society, the cinematic negative sexual stereotype didn't dissolve but expended. From the 1980s women Holocaust survivors in Israeli feature films don't undergo a change and are represented in the Israeli sphere as seductive & destructive prostitute, Lilith or deviant femme fatale.