Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 1980
Abstract
Israel has a population of 3½ million people who, for the most part, speak, read, and write an ancient, patriarchal language recently revived and fortified by an infusion of new terms and even some new syntactic constructs. The result of this self-imposition of a parochial language upon a people who, as a people, had been at home in at least one European language as well as Yiddish and Ladino, was to transform the People of the Book into a rather ill-informed and culturally isolated society. The few channels of information from the West that do existmainly films and books-are institutionally monitored by male publishers, distributors, bookstore owners, translators, and editors, not to leave out the political, military, and moral censors. For women this has meant that the amount and quality of feminist literature available in Hebrew (or in English, for that matter) have been minimal.