Visibility, Inclusion, and exclusion: three generations of Russian-Israeli women journalists

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on Russian-Israeli women journalists who resettled in Israel during the mass wave of immigrations from the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s. More specifically, it examines their experience of intersecting exclusion due to gender, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Based on narrative interviews with 18 Russian-Israeli women journalists, the study conceptualizes how their complex subjectivities emerge in their journalistic work. The findings demonstrate that their work experience is constructed by their positioned identity as it relates to their generation of immigration – the first, second, and 1.5 generations. The conclusions suggest that each generation of women journalists experienced, adopted, and developed distinct mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion deriving from their social visibility. This finding may refine how we understand the challenges and contributions of diversity in journalism and newsrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Women journalists
• immigration
• work experience
• inclusion/exclusion
• intersectionality

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the women journalists who participated in the research for their openness and thrust. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers and Yulia Shevchenko for their attentive read and insightful comments for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I will use the terms ‘Russian’, ‘Russian-speaking’ and ‘post-Soviet’ interchangeably, meaning Jewish immigrants from all the former Soviet states. Because of the dominant status of the Russian language across FSU, it forms the main axis of identity for the 1990s wave of immigrants, which is diverse in many other respects.

2. The current study is part of wider research, from the theoretical perspective of intersectionality, focused on marginalized minority women journalists. See: Lachover (2021). An early version of the study was presented at Gender and media matters – Widening the horizons of the field of study international conference, (15 October 2021–16). https://www.gemmaconference.com/wp-content/uploads/PANEL_13.pdf

3. Few immigrated from Ukraine; however, the Israeli public sphere’s construction of Russianness ignores the vast heterogeneity of the post-Soviet population (Lerner, 2011).

4. The original quotes were in Hebrew. All translations are by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1075/20].

Notes on contributors

Einat Lachover

Einat Lachover (Ph.D. Tel-Aviv University, 2003) is an associate professor at Sapir Academic College. Her work is dedicated to critical analysis of the encounters between gender and a broad range of media forms and contexts, such as: gendered construction of news production; gendered discourse in news media; gender ideologies in popular media; and girlhood and media. She has published in international journals, such as: Communication Theory, Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Celebrity Studies, Communication Culture and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Children and Media, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Gender Studies.