Graduate Student, Politics and International Relations
St Antony's College
Thesis Title: War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel, 1948-2010
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Professor Avi Shlaim
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About
Rebecca Steinfeld's specific field of research is the history and politics of fertility policies in Israel, 1948-2010.
Her doctoral research examines the nature of, and motivations behind, Israel's various fertility policies from the state's establishment in 1948 up until 2010. The research question focuses on the extent to which the archival sources substantiate the claim, made in the existing secondary literature, that Israel has established and maintained an ethnically selective pro-natalist policy that seeks to simultaneously encourage a higher Jewish birthrate and a lower non-Jewish, specifically Palestinian-Arab, one with the aim of ensuring a Jewish majority through internal population growth. Her research thus seeks to answer the question of whether Israel's demographic need, or desire, to maintain a Jewish majority has extended into the formulation of its fertility policies - as well as its immigration and territorial policies. Moreover, in parallel, her research project looks into the various other key factors and actors that may have influenced the formulation of Israel's fertility policies, including religious ideas about fertility stemming from the ultra-Orthodox, ideas about reproduction and the body emanating from feminist women's rights groups, and concerns about the welfare of women and their families shared by many in Israeli society. As such, her doctorate contributes further to the understanding of the specific ways in which bodies, and the most seemingly intimate decisions connected to them, have become the sites of larger state and non-state projects.
Her thesis, War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel, 1948-2010, will be submitted in late 2011.
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