The Path toward the Concrete Boxes: Revisiting “You Have an Authentic Voice” (vol. 11, 1997)

Two decades after the publication of her essay “You Have an Authentic Voice” in Theory and Criticism (itself a translation and adaptation of her essay titled “Writing Birthright,” originally published in English in 1997 in Deborah Reed Danahay’s edited volume on autoethnography), Mizrahi anthropologist Motzafi-Haller traces the reception of her Hebrew essay depicting the hostility of Israeli academe to her reflexive work. She closes her analysis with two observations. The first is that reflexivity remains a genre that may harm the careers of those few young scholars who have attempted to employ it in their writing. The second observation is that despite (and maybe because of) its subversive potential and its ability to reformulate accepted categories of knowledge by linking the personal and the political, reflexive writing has been all but undermined in Israeli academe, which remains aggressively positivist. The essay concludes with an invitation to rethink the potential of reflexive writing in Israeli settings.