Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as Assistant and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press, 1990), receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn Books 2014, University of Nebraska Press 2018) receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell UP, 1993) and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke UP, 1996). Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.