About
It's good to host you here. Thank you for coming.
Among multiple versions of “I”, at this (web)site “I” am mainly a writer, an independent scholar and an activist.
I was born in the Galilee, in the north of Israel, at the end of 1948 and I’ve spent most of my life in Jaffa-Tel-Aviv or its environs. I’ve been living in Herzlia since 1990. Seven years in the U.S.A. (in Kansas and Missouri) from age 4 to 11 entrusted and encrusted me with another language for sensing, thinking and writing, no less than I do in Hebrew.
Part of what I’ve written over the years has been published, mostly by literary publishers or academic ones, but also on some occasions by news sites and civil society organizations. This accumulated body of publications is available here on the site.
No less and maybe more important, the site is a channel for publishing my unpublished work, both pieces that have been waiting in the wings and newly completed work.
This worksite, as I’ve come to call it, was first aired in February 2023. In its original version, the site was supported, planned and constructed with patience, creativity and much hard work by Hadas Peery, “composer / sound artist / constructor of electronic things that make noise.” The graphic design and images were contributed with love, flights of the mind and the pen, by the one and only Nushke’e, graphic designer and illustrator, expert in branding processes, especially for women-owned small businesses, who is also my amazing daughter.
Kae Zack, virtuoso website constructor, offered expert assistance from the outset and later reconstructed and still maintains the site.
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For more about the kind of writing on the site, see the “Writing” and “Research” sections.
For more about me see the writing itself, which is often (though not always) a close study of versions of self or selves in surroundings.
Rela Mazali, writer, independent scholar and feminist anti-militarist, was born in Israel, where she has lived most of her life. She was also born Jewish and Ashkenazi, placing her within Israel’s hegemony. Recognizing and problematizing this position she uses aspects of her privilege to oppose and challenge privilege. Mazali writes hybrid-genre literary research, in both her m/other tongues, Hebrew and English. She has studied and written on the gendered character of spatial mobility and scrutinized the militarization of Israel’s state and society from a feminist standpoint. She has been active since 1980 in opposing Israel’s militarization and military occupation, in the broader historical-geographical context of colonization. In 1996, Mazali co-founded the New Profile movement to demilitarize society and state, with which she remains active. In 2010, she was one of two founders, and is still the Coordinator, of the Gun Free Kitchen Tables Coalition (GFKT), working for the small arms disarmament of civil space and tightened control of gun bearers in Israel. Rela Mazali’s body of work includes three volumes of literary-style, narrativized research, a study of small arms proliferation in civil spaces in Israel, and dozens of short stories (essay tales), academic articles and opinion pieces. Mother of 3, grandmother of 7, she lives in Herzlia, just north of Tel Aviv, with her partner.
