Ella Shohat, Tikva Levy, Mira Eliezer, Henriette Dahan-Kalev, Neta Amar, and others, initiated an action to "take the mic" at the conference. This time, they consciously chose a plan of action that would ensure they could not be ignored or their issues tabled, even at the cost of open confrontation with the Ashkenazi feminists. The Mizrahi feminists engaged in angry protest at the event, and stormed the stage during the ideological debate, accusing Ashkenazi feminists of racism, oppression and exclusion, and began narrating and describing their experiences as Mizrahi in Israel. Among their stories, the women recounted how their names were taken from them and changed to Israeli names upon their arrival in Israel, the degrading treatment and racism that was and continues to be endemic to Israeli society and institutions, attitudes that pressured or forced them to deny and abandon their Arab culture and their languages of origin in order to integrate into Israeli society. The original discussion planned for the evening was wholly disrupted, displaced by an open battle between the participants, who were divided according to their positions on the Mizrahi issue. The Ashkenazi women vehemently rejected the claims that they were partners in the oppression of Mizrahi feminists and claimed that the ethnic issue was irrelevant to feminism and that it was obsolete. The Mizrahi women, on the other hand, accused the Ashkenazi women of silencing them, and of blindness to the intersections of gender, ethnic and class identity of Mizrahi women and demanding Ashkenazi recognition that the Mizrahi and ethnic struggles also affect women's lives and should be integrated immediately into the Israeli feminist struggle. After the conference, and the refusal of Ashkenazi feminists to recognize the demands of Mizrahi feminists, some Mizrahi women felt that they had no choice but to separate themselves from the feminist movement and to act independently. They organized the first Mizrahi feminist conference in 1996, which dealt with the history of Mizrahi oppression in Israel. Shiran became one of the primary formulators of Mizrahi feminist theory and was a leader in the cohesion of the group into a solidly independent movement, but also participated in grassroots feminist activities. She was one of the founders of Ahoti (my sister), For Women in Israel, a Mizrahi feminist movement founded in 1999. The movement began promoting the labor rights of women from oppressed classes in Israel, and then expanded to various other