Ahoti – for Women in Israel

Ahoti describes itself as a Mizrahi feminist movement working to advance women in disadvantaged circumstances.[2] Its activities include economic empowerment through fair-trade commerce, art activism, community organizing in South Tel Aviv, research and advocacy concerning gender and ethnic discrimination, and publishing.[5][6] Its South Tel Aviv community center, Beit Ahoti, hosts cultural and community activities.[5][7]

In a 2015 session of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, Shula Keshet was listed as Ahoti's CEO, Carmen Elmakies as project manager, and Tal Dekel as a board member. Keshet described the organization as addressing the overlapping forms of oppression experienced by Palestinian, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian women.[8]

Ahoti's leadership also included actor and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz, who served as president for five years. Elkabetz promoted the organization's livelihood projects by purchasing artisans' work as gifts for the New York premiere of her film Gett and organizing a sale of clothes from her wardrobe to raise funds for the association.[2]

Ahoti emerged from broader tensions within Israeli feminism during the 1990s, when Mizrahi women active in the feminist movement began expressing a sense of exclusion and marginalization by the Ashkenazi women who dominated it.[9] A scholarly account identifies the First Mizrahi Feminist Annual Conference, held in Netanya in 1995, as a peak moment in that process.[9] The emerging Mizrahi feminist discourse brought into public discussion relationships between Palestinian and Jewish women in Israel, tensions between middle-class intellectual women and working-class or underprivileged women, and the political implications of non-essentialist ethnic definitions of community.[10]

Sources describe the movement's formation through slightly different chronologies. The Jewish Women's Archive describes Ahoti as a movement founded in 1999 by Arab-Jewish women to promote the labor rights of lower-class women.[3] Its history of Mizrahi feminism describes a women-workers project formed in 1999 and renamed Ahoti in 2000.[4] A Jewish Virtual Library account more broadly places the organization's founding in the 1990s and says women of Mizrahi origin formed it because existing women's organizations did not reflect the full variety of women in Israel, including Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Arab, and socioeconomically disadvantaged women.[1]

Vicki Shiran and Shula Keshet are identified as founding members.[3][5] A 2005 profile also identified feminist activist Esther Eilam as one of Ahoti's founders.[11]

Keshet has connected Ahoti's establishment to memories of community life in Neve Sha'anan. She recalled that in the 1950s her grandmother and friends collected donations to provide housing for older women living alone, including widows, divorced women, and single women in their seventies and eighties. Keshet said the later dissolution of that community was among the things she had in mind when Ahoti was established.[7]

By 2004, the movement had developed from a small core of marginalized women publishing brief essays in radical, little-circulated journals into what one academic account called a "thriving" organization with a distribution list of approximately 90 members.[12]

One of Ahoti's most visible practical initiatives is "Ahoti – Fair Trade," a shop launched in 2009 to sell handmade work by women from across Israel.[6] An announcement before its opening said it was scheduled to begin operating on June 12 at 4 Shlomo Hamelekh Street in Tel Aviv and would feature goods made by 100 craftswomen from different sectors and national minorities.[13] The makers receive the profits from sales without intermediaries.[6]

The opening announcement listed Ethiopian, Palestinian, and Bedouin embroidery, pottery, lampshades, jewelry, soaps, olive oil, and jams, with prices ranging from NIS 20 to NIS 600. It said the store would be operated by women volunteers, was supported by several funds, and was intended eventually to become profitable.[13]

Ahoti also operated an online feminist shop that offered products made by Ethiopian women living in Kiryat Gat.[14] A separate collaboration with the fashion brand Kum Il Fu involved a planned fair-trade product line using Ahoti's embroidery center; the contemporary report described this as a forthcoming project rather than a completed launch.[15]

Keshet framed the fair-trade model as a way to make marginalized women's labor visible and economically viable, emphasizing local communities rather than international supply chains.[13] The initiative sought to bring products made by communities facing hardship in Israel's social and geographic periphery—many of them in southern Israel—to consumers in central Tel Aviv.[6]

In 2018, Ahoti was reported among 37 Israeli nonprofits selected for a Genesis Prize Foundation and Kahn Foundation grant initiative focused on women's empowerment and gender equality. The grants totaled $1 million across all recipients, and the program described Ahoti's work as economic empowerment for women facing hardship in Israel's geographical and social periphery.[16]

Art activism is central to Ahoti's identity and to Shula Keshet's work as an artist and curator. The organization and its associated projects have used visual art, writing, exhibitions, and publishing to document marginalized women's experiences and connect artistic production with social and economic advocacy.[5]

Keshet developed a community-art practice in which women in peripheral communities received hard-bound journals and were asked to write about their daily lives for six months. Participants were initially reluctant, but later produced writing that Keshet described as remarkable. The project was intended to enable expression and break down divisions between high and low culture and between professional artists and community members.[17]

"Women Creating Change" featured portraits of 38 feminist activists working in community and academic settings, accompanied by texts describing their public work.[5] A separate 2011 project comprised six simultaneous exhibitions at six locations, focused on Mizrahi and Arab women and organized around themes including identity, roots, space, meeting, and forgetting and remembering; it also included seminars and a book.[17]

Keshet's "Black Labor" project developed through meetings, art events, and mutual-learning sessions involving Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Palestinian, and Bedouin women artists. Artifacts were displayed in a beehive-like arrangement intended to reflect their collective origins, and the works were offered for sale with proceeds going to their creators.[5]

In 2021, Ahoti published Creating Change: Art and Activism in Israel. Edited by Tal Dekel and Shula Keshet, with Keshet and Yaara Raz Haklai as curators, the book presents works by dozens of artists from different communities alongside essays, notes, and poems about how art can prompt action and promote social change. Its back-cover description presented it as the first comprehensive Israeli book devoted to artistic activism.[18]

In 2022, Ahoti published The Cry of Art — On Violence Against Women in Israel, combining articles and poems about violence against women with artwork by women from different sectors of Israeli society. It included 75 works by 38 artists, selected by Keshet and Raz Haklai from 150 open-call submissions and works obtained through direct outreach. Subjects included domestic violence, rape, and murder in the name of family honor.[19] Ahoti planned an accompanying exhibition for November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, with the goal of presenting the work outside conventional galleries and museums.[19]

Ahoti's base in South Tel Aviv has shaped its community work. In the mid-2000s, Keshet and the organization opened Beit Ahoti to asylum seekers arriving in the neighborhood, hosting them for six months until they settled in apartments of their own.[7]

In 2017, Ahoti's "Power to the Community" initiative mounted an exhibition at Beit Ahoti presenting portraits of women from the neighborhood's diverse communities. The exhibition addressed violence against women, housing shortages, poverty, equality in education and higher education, and LGBTQ rights.[7]

Ahoti also partnered with the Jaffa-based women's organization Arus al-Bahar on the "Black on White" project, which produced a report on racism and sexism in civil society. It was based on a year of group work with Palestinian, Mizrahi, Russian-speaking, and Ethiopian women aged 20 to 60. The report said most participants felt civil-society organizations did not represent them and recorded accounts of exclusion, discrimination, and barriers to senior roles.[20]

Ahoti has functioned as a publishing entity alongside its organizational activities. The 2007 Hebrew anthology לאחותי, פוליטיקה פמיניסטית מזרחית (To My Sister: Mizrahi Feminist Politics), edited by Shlomit Lir and published in Tel Aviv by Babel, lists Ahoti as an additional creator. The National Library of Israel catalogs the volume as comprising 372 pages.[21] Shula Keshet has served as editor-in-chief of Achoti Press.[5]

A National Library bibliographic record lists the publication Our Mothers: 20 Years of Ahoti, a Mizrahi Feminist Movement, edited by Shula Keshet and Liat Arlet Sides. The title records how the publication identifies the organization and its twenty-year milestone, although the catalog entry does not itself specify the anniversary's calendar year or provide a founding date.[22]

Ahoti occupies a distinctive place in Israeli civil society by explicitly linking ethnic identity, class, and gender in its analysis and practice. Mizrahi feminism more broadly is characterized as attentive to racism, class divisions, immigration, and ethnic discrimination, with a focus on the intersection of gender and ethnic oppression. The Jewish Women's Archive notes that Mizrahi activists took more than twenty years to make their voices heard within mainstream Israeli feminism.[4]

Through labor-rights advocacy, fair-trade commerce, exhibitions, community writing, parliamentary testimony, and publishing, Ahoti became an institutional expression of that broader movement. At a 2015 Knesset committee session, Keshet discussed police violence and sexual harassment, women's inherited skills in embroidery, basket weaving, and pottery, and barriers preventing many women from entering the labor market.[8]

Some of Ahoti's advocacy concerns disputed interpretations of cultural funding and social inequality. Its annual "Heart at East" report stated that during 2008–2011 almost 90 percent of the government's cultural budget went to what the organization characterized as white or Euro-centered works, and that the entire dance budget went to classical ballet or modern dance. These figures were reported as Ahoti's findings rather than as independently verified statistics.[17]

Keshet has also advanced attributed political arguments about South Tel Aviv. In a 2018 interview, she argued that real-estate development and gentrification were displacing longtime residents, including poor Mizrahi residents, and criticized the absence of discussion about affordable housing. These statements represent Keshet's analysis of neighborhood development rather than an independently established causal finding.[23]