The UCLA Department of Gender Studies and Center for the Study of Women present Book Talk with Prof. Smadar Lavie Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers & Bureaucratic Torture3:30-5:30 pm Wednesday, February 25, 2125 Rolfe Hall What is the relationship between social protest movements in the State of Israel, violence in Gaza, and the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran? Why did the mass social protests in the State of Israel of summer 2011 ultimately fail? Wrapped in the Flag of Israel discusses social protest movements from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March led by Mizrahi Vicky Knafo, to the “Tahrir is Here” Israeli mass protests of summer 2011. Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—what, arguably, can be seen as torture, Smadar Lavie explores the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens through its bureaucratic system. The book presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology and posits that Israeli State bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that fuses the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. Smadar Lavie is a visiting professor at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork. She specializes in the Anthropology of Egypt and Palestine-Israel.