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"Girls of the Eastern Communities": The Intersectionality of Iraqi-Jewish Immigrants in Israel/Palestine, 1947–1960

Chelsie May

Journal of Jewish Identities, Volume 11, Number 2, July 2018, pp. 245-266(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/701594

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/701594

245July 2018, 11(2)

Journal of Jewish Identities (2018), 11(2)

“Girls of the Eastern Communities”: The Intersectionality of Iraqi-Jewish

Immigrants in Israel/Palestine, 1947–1960

Chelsie May

“Don’t look over it, if you can’t get over it.” Sara Ahmed, On Being Included (2012)

“I am not willing to get over histories that are not over.” Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017)

Introduction

Baghdad-born, Mizrahi Jew Louise Cohen describes her 1951 immigra-tion to Israel in the memoir ha-Avak Higbia Uf (The Dust Flies Up) as, “I took my children out of Iraq. From happiness and wealth . . . . The regret gnaws at my heart with sharp teeth.”1 This regret is one of Cohen’s themes. She reiterates it several times in her work.

While Cohen’s statement might read as particularly pointed, given criti-cal Mizrahi discourse and post-Zionist research, it is possible to understand why a Mizrahi (an “Eastern” Jew, i.e., from the Middle East or North Afri-ca) like herself could regret immigration to Israel.2 The possibility of regret stems from the fact that the newly established State of Israel lacked ade-quate resources to incorporate all of the Jewish immigrants it wanted for an ethnic Jewish majority. The question Cohen’s memoir and two others to be discussed here provoke is: Were the social positions of gender, race, and class altered for Iraqi-Jewish women when many of Iraq’s Jews moved to Israel in the 1950s? And how did any changes affect Iraqi-Jewish women’s belonging in the state?

With their treatment of subjects who are interpellated within numerous power configurations, these memoirs can benefit from a reading informed by the revelatory theory of intersectionality. Intersectionality (defined be-

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low), as well as the memoirs of three Iraqi-Jewish women who immigrated to Israel, including Cohen’s, demonstrate that when Iraqi-Jewish women and men were disparately marginalized upon their arrival in Israel in terms of gender, race, and class, the limits of their belonging in Israel were not only realized, but made more complex. To speak most succinctly, precise-ly, and urgently, this article will privilege the intersectionality of female Iraqi-Jewish immigrants. The adherence to brevity and precision is perhaps self explanatory, given the nature of article-length work. It is in fact urgen-cy that most informs the scope of this work. As Orit Bashkin has noted, “As much of the scholarship on ethnic relations in Israel has directed its attention to the state, the voice of the individual (especially that of women and children), as well as his or her daily experiences, were often lost.”3 This article attempts to remedy such a loss. Nevertheless, this is a focus that does not displace the need for self-consciously male positionality, which I hope to address in the future.

In the wake of critical Mizrahi discourse and post-Zionist research many scholars have asserted that the state’s architects—the Ashkenazi Jewish he-gemony—poorly accommodated Mizrahi Jews in particular.4 Detailing this particular discrimination, Sami Shalom Chetrit has written in Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews:

For the European Zionist revolution’s ideologues and leaders, the Mizra-him were a negligible factor, primarily because they accounted for a mere 10 percent of world Jewry (according to European Jewish estimates), but also because political Zionism was a European Jewish solution to a Euro-pean Jewish problem.5

In the newly established Zionist state, with power vested in Ashkenazim, Chetrit describes the interplay between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim as “op-pression-relations,” wherein Ashkenazim were a “governmental-economic” hegemony vis-à-vis Mizrahim. Within these relations, Mizrahim struggled for “. . . the power of mobility, the power to live and produce their own culture,” which their immigrant citizenship status did not permit them.6 Labeling the interplay between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim during Israel’s early years as “oppression-relations” is important because it underscores that power operated asymmetrically. Informed by the intellectual example of Patricia Hill-Collins and Sirma Bilge, it can be said that power in this in-stance is a set of relations, or a relationship—not a singular entity operating divinely. This definition of power is inextricably linked to intersectionality as an analytic tool that “. . . examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing.”7 Finally, power is also here, ever pervasive due to its existence in four domains: interpersonal (people relating to one anoth-er, sometimes asymmetrically), disciplinary (people disciplined to correlate their subjectivities with what they think they deserve/do not deserve) cul-tural (people internalizing and acting upon “taken for granted” or “given” wisdom about coalitions of people), and finally, structural (the organization

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of societies, institutions, and overarching structures). It is important to spell out power within an intersectional analytic now, as this article references these domains throughout.8

The historical narrative of Iraqi-Jewish immigration to the State of Israel lacks an explicit intersectional analysis. The question of Iraqi-Jewish immi-grant status and intersectionality matter not only because they reveal fur-ther aspects of Mizrahi immigration, but because they allow for a reexam-ination of nation-state belonging for Mizrahim after Israel’s War of 1948. As the war ended with the establishment of the Israeli state and Israeli citizens, citizenship, i.e. membership in the Israeli community, was contested. In her book The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, Nira Yuval-Davis reveals that belonging within states at the institutional level is numerously discriminating; a reality that calls for a specific analysis. She writes:

Contemporary political projects of belonging, whether formal state cit-izenships, memberships in nations and/or religious, ethnic, indigenous and diasporic communities, but also cosmopolitan and transversal ones, are always situated and always multi-layered, which serves to contextu-alize them both locally and globally, and affect different members of these collectivities and communities differently. This is where the importance of intersectionality lies.9

Paying heed to Yuval-Davis’ influence, this article will employ intersec-tionality to read and discuss the immigration of three Jewish women from Iraq.

These women immigrants are Cohen, already introduced, Shoshana Levy, with her memoir Al Em ha-Derech (In the Middle of the Road), and Shoshana Almoslino, with her memoir me-ha-Mahteret be-Bavel le-Memshelet Yisrael (From the Underground of Babylon to the Government of Israel).10 As the text Memoir: A History explains, memoir—as opposed to autobiogra-phy, which requires a more extensive research methodology—is “. . . how one remembers one’s own life,” in a way that is understood by the writer, publisher, and audience as truthful.11 This assumed truthfulness and the shared structure of each of these women’s memoirs—they begin from their birth in Iraq, through confrontation with Israel-Palestine, and up until an extended period of time in their new country has been lived—are common-alities that make them germane to this article, as it explores self-expressed notions of belonging or not belonging. The year 1947 is our entry point for delving deeper into the lives of these Iraqi-Jewish women because it is the year that the first of them, Almoslino, immigrated. We dwell on and remain in the 1950s for the majority of the article because it is a time period that has been somewhat veiled. As Bashkin has insisted, the ways Liberal Zionist discourse crafted a myth of pre-1967 Israel, where the state lacks culpabil-ity for the hardships Mizrahim faced, and other Middle Eastern national-ism’s insistence on the efflorescence of politics, culture, and education in the 1950s, has, in some instances, obscured some of the difficulty individuals themselves faced.12



With various political affiliations and cities of origin represented by these three women as well as the commonality that they all immigrated around the 1950s and were settled in ma’abarot (Israel’s immigration transit camps) they are representative of the general Mizrahi existence presented by other Iraqi-Jewish women’s memoirs. Furthermore, when it comes to Iraqi im-migrant experiences in Israel with respect to education level, lack of return on education, time spent in ma’abarot and development towns, lack of sta-ble employment (or lack of employment commensurate with their skills), strained family structures, and difficulty finding partners, Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino variously reflect the general population of new Iraqi women im-migrants more broadly.13 While other Iraqi-Jewish women have authored memoirs, in the interest of a more succinct and readable article, my focus will remain on three.14 The women’s lives in Israel are in contrast to the Iraq of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, when Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino came of age and women like them experienced changing circumstances that made it possible for them to develop a subjectivity that was a part of the Iraqi state.

Bryan Roby and Orit Rozin have pointed out that in the early 1950s, most Jews who immigrated to Israel from the Middle East came from Iraq.15 Be-tween 1948 and 1953 about 125,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel/Pales-tine.16 This Iraqi majority is a didactic reason for why Iraqi Jews are particu-larly noteworthy. As the story of Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino unfolds and is analyzed here, there will be some slippage in the terms Iraqi, Iraqi-Jewish, Arab Jewish and Mizrahi. Such a slippage exemplifies the fact that these Jews employed the terms Iraqi, and Arab Jew, in both Iraq and Israel (at different times), took on and self-described as Mizrahi in Israel, and are, by country of origin and religion, Iraqi and Jewish. Bashkin has explained a fac-et of Iraqi-Jewish identification in Israel, writing: “Living in Israel and fight-ing discrimination there changed the Iraqi-Jewish community’s identity. As they became part of Israeli society, Iraqi Jews were transformed from being Iraqi citizens into Mizrahi Jews . . . .”17 While these are not an exhaustive set of descriptors, they are the most presently relevant.

Intersectionality, “. . . refers both to a normative theoretical argument and an approach to conducting empirical research that emphasizes the in-teraction of categories of difference . . . [it] considers the interaction of such categories as organizing structures of society, recognizing that these key components influence political access, equality, and the potential for any form of justice.”18 What intersectionality can do is both render visible those socially constructed to be marginalized and reveal that categories of differ-ence are never operating in a unitary fashion. Additionally, differences do not impinge on individuals additively, but often much more perniciously by way of a cumulative affect.19

As Brittany Cooper clarified in discussing canonical essays by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the lawyer and critical race theorist who coined the term “inter-sectionality,” it is an account of interlocking systems of power at the site of the individual—not an account of personal identity.20 The lived experience and theorizing of black women in the United States are the foundation of

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intersectionality. As Ange-Marie Hancock has shown, the genealogy of in-tersectionality can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and inter-sectional-like thinking in the works of Maria Miller Stewart (1830), Harriet Jacobs (1860) and Anna Julia Cooper (1892).21 The categories of difference that can intersect in a person are infinite, but this article will focus on how race, gender, and class intersect. This focus is supported by the fact these social positions are particularly politically salient in the history under ex-amination. This is because, as discussions of Cohen, Levy and Almoslino’s lives can demonstrate, the nascent Israeli state used these social positions to mark difference and to justify unequal power distribution because of this difference.

In other words, the State of Israel, like all states, is not neutral in terms of its fulfillment of its social contract.22 Melissa Harris Perry defines, the “social contract” as the basis of democratic citizenship, wherein citizens agree to constraints of the state in exchange for its services.23 Services can be con-ceived of as a kind of right. Following Rozin’s articulations, rights can be understood in two ways: “The first [is] the accepted and familiar one used today in liberal democratic and social democratic societies, the citizen’s in-herent right to freedom from government interference. The second meaning [is] the citizen’s right to receive certain services from the state.”24 When so-cially constructed differences affect individuals’ ability to participate in the social contract, the operation of democratic citizenship is called into ques-tion.25

Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino can be understood as women in part be-cause each of them talks about themselves as a wife, mother, or occupying the female category in spaces typically reserved for men in Iraq or Israel such as the Zionist movement or the government. Didactically speaking, since Hebrew is gendered, insofar as the women use feminine forms of verbs or adjectives to describe themselves and when she/her/hers pronouns are used to describe them, one could gather a female gender performance. They are women of color because each positions herself as Mizrahi vis-à-vis Ashkenazi citizens of the state. As Ella Shohat’s theorizing showed, Miz-rahim were considered racially black in Israel because they were seen as sources of imported, cheap labor and of a primitive culture vis-à-vis Ash-kenazim.26 These origins encouraged further racist discrimination that took many forms, including racist speech acts, the proliferation of stereotypes, housing discrimination, and unequal access to education and long term em-ployment.

It is important to note that understandings of race and racism in the twenty-first century are not being projected back to 1950s Israel. One of the best reasons for recognizing the constructed blackness of Mizrahim in 1950s Israel has to do with the fact that Mizrahim themselves saw connections between their positionality and that of black people in the United States and colonial Africa. Certainly by the 1960s and 1970s, this parity was well ex-pressed. For instance, Shohat has written of Israel’s Black Panthers party, an organization of Mizrahi activists: “‘Mizrahim’ took on some of the resistant



quality of the black/white discourse established by the Black Panther move-ment in the early 1970s, itself a proud reversal of the Ashkenazi racist epithet schwartze khayes (according to Shohat: Yiddish for “black animals”) and an allusion to the black liberation movement in the United States.”27 Further-more, literature put out by the Council of the Sephardi Community of Jeru-salem noted that Mizrahim understood their inability to rent apartments in certain neighborhoods, send their children to schools of their choosing, or find jobs in the face of Ashkenazi preference, as similar to the situation of “. . . Negros in America, or to Africa under colonial rule.”28 However, even as early as 1951, popular uprisings among Mizrahim in ma’abarot and pe-ripheral cities employed racialized language to define discontent. Residents of the Pardes Hanna ma’abara, for instance, understood their relationship to elite Ashkenazim as a master-slave dynamic where ma’abara guards filled the role of slave overseers.29 Finally, each memoirist is poor, at least when they first arrived in Israel and for many years after, due either to the politics of migration that expropriated most of the money they had in Iraq, their placement in physically marginal development towns with little or halting upward mobility, or both.

Noting that gender relations were expanding in Iraq for women like Co-hen, Levy, and Almoslino is not to suggest that any sort of long-lasting gen-der parity for all women in Iraq was developing in a way that would be for-ever sustainable. More narrowly, as stated previously, because these women were all formally educated through their departure from Iraq, married at least on or after the age of eighteen, and had the opportunity to participate in broader society, mainly through political movements, their sense of self was not entirely dependent on their role as daughters, mothers, or wives. Simple access to education in and of itself was a wholly progressive possi-bility for these women. Expanding educational opportunities for women, while fought for by both Iraqi women and men since the British mandate, practically speaking, needed Iraqi state support to come to fruition. Even with increased education and public possibilities, women were still forced to reckon with systemic discrimination such as Iraq’s 1925 constitution that did not allow them to vote and the question of how education figured in the creation of the modern Iraqi women. With Iraq’s increasing interest in gov-ernmentality in the 1930s, women participated more and more in the public sphere.30 Talk of women’s education increased in the name of educating the nation.31 In the 1940s, after World War II in particular, women saw their educational opportunities expand as they were given greater access to Iraqi colleges and vocational schools.32 While these greater educational opportu-nities were always contingent, what they allowed for in terms of building subjectivity contributed, at least abstractly, to women inserting themselves, crucially, into Iraq’s political and literary scenes. Specifically, it was with these developments that middle- and upper-class Jewish women were first able to enter Iraq’s workforce as teachers and directors of girls’ schools.33

In the Jewish community, the 1930s saw many women begin to publish in journals and newspapers like al-Hasid (The Reaper), al-Siyasa (The Poli-

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tics), and al-Fatat (The Young Girl) concerning issues such as Jewish mar-riage practices.34 Upper-class Iraqi-Jewish women also engaged in philan-thropy centered around educating young women and assisting the poor.35 Several Jewish writers, male and female, understood greater Iraqi women’s concerns as pertinent to them as well.36 This fact is expressed in the writings by Anwar Sha’ul, Shalom Darwish, Esterina Ibrahim, and Miriam al-Mulla who wrote about “. . . arranged marriage, honor killings, limited educa-tional opportunities offered to women, and women’s poverty—all of which hindered the progress of Iraq women.”37 Jewish women also took part in the Iraqi Communist Party, acting as messengers and organizers for women’s groups.38 According to Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, women comprised roughly one third of Iraq’s Zionist movement (admittedly only about 2,000 members at its height).39 In sum, while modern realities are always gendered, and Iraq was a society organized along lines, where many social differences were ascribed meaning, for much of Iraqi-Jewish existence in the modern period, prior to 1948, Iraqi Jews had economic and vocational freedom, as well as social mobility.40

Louise Cohen

In February 1951, Cohen, her husband, and their children left Iraq and found themselves in Israel’s main immigration absorption camp Sha’ar Ali-yah. Similar to many Iraqi immigrants, they wore their best, new clothes and were immediately met with disinfectant powder (DDT). Cohen notes that the worker spraying her and her family with DDT was a blonde woman with blue eyes, a rhetorical way of revealing the woman was Ashkenazi.41 She writes that the worker sprayed her family, “. . . as if we were a herd of livestock,” ruining their new clothing and making the children cry.42 Cohen asked the woman in English and French why she has sprayed them with chemicals and the woman answered contemptuously in Hebrew that she does not speak English or French.43 The family was initially hopeful that they would receive help from two family members who moved to Palestine in 1940, until they realize that neither of them knew enough Hebrew or were settled enough to lend support. Thus, the family was forced to remain in the absorption camp for eight months while Louise looked after the children and Dr. Cohen unsuccessfully searched for work. Cohen noted that while in the camp, all families had to stand in line for food, of which there was never enough. She writes that she was naïve to initially assume that all she needed to do in order to integrate was learn Hebrew and find a profession.44

The specifics of Cohen and her family’s initial experiences with absorp-tion inform the rest of her memoir. Following their immigration, the rela-tionship between her and her husband was irreconcilable. He is only ever referred to as “Dr. Cohen” and while he found work for a time as a doctor with Israel’s state health care service kupat holim he was fired soon after.45 Married to him for several years prior to their leaving Iraq, Cohen charac-



terized him as a “family man” and “the ideal partner”46 but the “dismissal broke him,” she wrote. “He became another man.” Thus Cohen was forced to raise their four children while her husband struggled to find reliable em-ployment and enough money to purchase a house for them outside of the immigration camp.

After an immigration that altered Cohen and her husband’s relationship, she was most noticeably oppressed in her role as wife and mother when he began to physically abuse her. About this, she writes, “He [my husband] raised hands also on me. I walked bruised. Hurt. My sisters asked me, ‘What is the blue and red on your face?’ I answered, ‘I received a blow from a window.’”47 After confiding in her mother, Cohen was encouraged to go to the police, but was hesitant to, for fear of having to raise her children alone.

At this juncture, a web of power relations typified by the marginaliza-tion of Mizrahi female immigrants, immobilize Cohen and entrench her in her plight. The cycle of transit camps and development towns that many Iraqi families faced not only particularly challenged women because their filth, overcrowding, and lack of resources made it all the more difficult for women to feed, clean, and provide for their children and husbands econom-ically, but because they trapped Iraqi women in the derogatory assumptions of the state and its functionaries, such as social workers.48 Those architects of the very structures of Israeli society did not find themselves responsible for the “hunger, disorder, and malaise in the transit camps,” but accused Iraqi-Jewish women of generating their own station in life, by way of their “primitiveness.”49 Tacitly included in this accusation of primitiveness is al-ways anti-Arabness (as opposed to non-Arab Jewishness), easternness (as opposed to being of the West), backwardness (as opposed to modernity) and blackness (as opposed to whiteness, or Ashkenazi) bias.50

Coming up against deeply unsatisfactory infrastructure, aid, and state-sanctioned social support, there was essentially nowhere for a woman in Cohen’s circumstances to find solace. This helplessness and feeling that she had nowhere to turn made itself into a portable burden for Cohen. To understand the nagging of Cohen’s anxieties one must allow intersection-ality to attune them to the disciplinary effects of power wherein “. . . power operates by disciplining people in ways that put people’s lives on paths that make some options seem viable and others out of reach.”51 As we will see, Cohen remains persistently enmeshed in a survivalist and accommodating mindset. It is immensely difficult for her to ask for help. When she does, ne-glect and erasure still follow. For example, although Cohen does eventually go to the police to report her husband’s abuse, which placates Dr. Cohen for a few months, he abandons their family soon after. She later rationalizes his behavior by stating, “This isn’t Dr. Cohen in Iraq. It’s Dr. Cohen in Israel.”52 While it is impossible to predict how the relationship between Cohen and her husband might have unfolded in Iraq, given the nexus of immigration bureaucracy, Dr. Cohen’s inability to fulfill the role of sole provider that was thrust upon him, and Cohen’s perceived inability to survive without her husband’s presence, it is clear how, as a poor Mizrahi immigrant, she was

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made vulnerable in way that her discussions of life in Iraq do not suggest she had been before.

Given the consistency with which Cohen mentions her husband’s strug-gle to find gainful employment, the depth with which she describes his firing, and the attachment she expresses to him—an attachment ever pres-ent, despite his shortcomings and deterioration—economic issues are fore-grounded in Cohen’s plight from the outset. Cohen and her husband were among the Iraqis who attempted to take illegal amounts of money out of Iraq by transferring funds to her brother-in-law in the United States. After successfully having this money transferred back to them in Israel, Cohen and her husband were able to buy an apartment for them and their four chil-dren near the town of Petach Tikva, where they had recently lived in anoth-er ma’abara called Amishav. This ma’abara’s clinic was where Dr. Cohen was initially employed, then fired. Cohen suggests that he was fired in order to hire more Ashkenazi doctors in the clinic. Dr. Cohen was eventually sent to work at a clinic in a town near the Dead Sea. His work there was ultimately not an adequate solution for two reasons—it was a temporary position and it was not an easy commute from where the family had just purchased their apartment. Cohen writes that her husband’s firing, and its impact on the life her family had built, made her feel that all of their work to leave the ma’abara was done in vain.

The poverty that Dr. Cohen’s firing catalyzed later worsened when he abandoned their family, after Cohen filed charges against him for physically abusing her and one of her daughters. He left the family in 1956 and by 1959 no longer paid child support.53 Without his financial support and given the difficulty Cohen had in finding a job, the family grew more impoverished. When Cohen did find work as a primary school teacher she had trouble keeping this work as a single mother. After teaching for six months, her manager demanded that she take a second shift that required her to teach later in the day. She had difficulty meeting this request because it meant having to leave her four small children at home alone after they returned from school. She wrote to the school’s general manager to request an as-signment change, but did not receive an answer, and when her manager re-mained intractable in his demands, she was forced to resign. Given her hus-band’s firing and abandonment, her necessary resignation, and the state’s failure to accommodate poor or relatively poor Mizrahim from the outset of immigration, the poverty Cohen and her family faced clearly occurred by way of a cumulative affect.

While Cohen’s personal experience as a Mizrahi mother and educator in Israel is demonstrative of her and her family’s poverty and relationship to Israeli’s education system, her critique of this system does not only remain at the individual level throughout the memoir. When she focuses on the systems of power in the Israeli education that she and her family contended with, she reveals the inextricable link between gender, race, and class op-pression. To do so she suggests that one of the tangible effects of Ashkenazi racism is that generations of Mizrahim have been denied equal access to



education. Because she is an educator and mother to four Mizrahi children, this denial matters particularly for her. She notes that the cycle of Mizra-hi impoverishment began in the ma’abarot, when Mizrahim were primarily only given avodat dehak (workfare jobs or relief work).54 Historical evidence suggests that the problem with these jobs was that they were temporary, often involved public works projects, and did not always yield the pay they promised.55 Cohen problematizes these jobs further when she concludes that they impoverished Mizrahim to such an extent that they disposed of [Mizra-hi] identification with education, which, as Cohen summarized it, practical-ly meant their descendants were not encouraged to learn, or granted equal access to learning.56 She characterizes this as a “cruel method” by which Ashkenazim perpetuated the gap between themselves and Mizrahim.

Much later in her memoir, in a letter to Israel’s education ministry,57 she cites archival documents found by the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Co-alition,58 a socio-political movement to disrupt Ashkenazi hegemony, that shows that even in the 1940s, the architects of the Israeli state discussed how to guide children of Mizrahim into vocational schools (commonly associat-ed with trade work, peripheral employment and low pay in Israel) even if their parents objected.59 Corroborating what is implicit in Cohen’s critique when she says that Ashkenazim perpetuated an education gap, by the mid-1950s her contemporaries noted that almost half of Mizrahi youth were not formally enrolled in school, a fact that a 1958 article published in Israel ex-plicitly attributed to racism.60 Given these facts, as well as Cohen’s appraisal of Ashkenazi intent to marginalize Mizrahim at Israel’s founding, it is pos-sible to suggest that she is describing institutionalized discrimination. As an intersectional analysis lays bare, the very structure of Israeli society is such in order to work for some, it must fail individuals like Cohen.

Shoshana Levy

Levy, along with her mother, father, and two brothers left for Israel on the morning of April 16, 1951. The family wore beautiful, Western clothes and arrived in Israel at exactly 1:06 pm. As the doors of the plane opened, young soldiers entered. They took pictures of the new immigrants immedi-ately after each of them had been identified.61 Upon exiting the plane, Levy notes, “From now, matters were conducted as if on an assembly line.”62 First, everyone was registered and received an immigration certificate and number. Second, everyone was brought to “the sanitary station.” Here, Levy notes that her family was caught off guard when a man sprayed them with DDT. She reveals the effect of this incident when she writes, “We didn’t know why they were disinfecting us, after all before we left for the airport in Baghdad we washed and dressed in our best clothes.”63 She continues that the disinfectant turned their black hair white, and added a dust to their new clothing that made them look as if they had wandered a desert in a sand storm. In contrast to Cohen, who immediately confronted the Ashkenazi

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woman who sprayed her, Levy and her family did not ask questions. While Levy’s response to DDT was seemingly more passive, it is not a coincidence that both her and Cohen make mention of this aspect of immigration. The spraying of DDT is literary trope in the works of Mizrahi immigrants. Sho-hat explains this trope when she writes about Mizrahi immigration and the spraying of DDT, stating, “Mizrahi cultural practices revisit the traumatic moment of entry into Israel that redefined a new collective identity born on the ruins of a hasty departure from one geography and a disturbed entrance into another.”64 Levy and Cohen’s descriptions, lucidly convey their confu-sion and feeling of discrimination in such an action.

At 8:30 pm, Levy and her family arrived at Sha’ar Aliyah where every family head was required to register their family. Life in Sha’ar Aliyah was tough enough for the Levy family that when Shoshana’s uncle Rachmim, who had immigrated to Israel several years prior, suggested that Levy and one of her brothers would be better off in kibbutz Mishmar ha-Emek with him and his wife, her parents seriously considered it. Levy and her brother Ephraim were soon transferred to the kibbutz named “Youth Aliyah,” which in this manifestation meant housing Mizrahi children from struggling fam-ilies in various kibbutzim in order to acclimate them to the state.65 This knowledge of the program of Youth Aliyah reveals why Levy was brought to live with her uncle in Mishmar ha-Emek and is particularly necessary to know when it comes to discussing the education she received, discussed later in this section.

One of the first ways Levy’s immigration is gendered is through her inter-actions with kibbutzim women in Mishmar ha-Emek. Specifically of interest is the way her uncle Rachmim’s wife treats her. Levy writes that Rachmim’s wife (she is not given a name in the memoir) took her and her brother’s hands the first time they met and said what she thought might be a blessing, but was ultimately unintelligible to her because his wife was Romanian and did not speak Arabic. This meant the wife communicated mostly in hand gestures to Levy and her brother.66 Soon after their arrival, Levy and her brother were separated and taken to shower. The binary gender reality of this separation is further enforced when her brother’s male unearned ad-vantage allows him to stay with their uncle, who is fluent in Arabic, and thus receive a more transparent introduction to the kibbutz. Forced to be introduced to the kibbutz by Rachmim’s wife, Levy experiences confusion and unease as her first experiences are negotiated with hand gestures and context clues. She learns that she is expected to shower when Rachmim’s wife presents her with soap and a towel. She is then escorted to where the women of the kibbutz bathe. Arriving at the showers, Levy is embarrassed to realize that all of the women of the kibbutz bathe together. As she stands outside the showers, women pass by, staring at her, before undressing and entering together.67 She states that this situation made her nervous because, “In Iraq, outside of childhood, I didn’t undress completely even in front of a woman, not even in front of my aunt or mom. How am I supposed to do this in front of women who are strangers?”68 Despite her unease, Levy’s



aunt does not realize why she will not undress. Without wanting to, Levy removes her clothes and enters the shower.

Beyond her descriptions of how her father acted as her family’s head of household in order to obtain all of the family’s initial immigration rights, the shower scene is the most gendered aspect of Levy’s arrival that she elab-orates on at length. However symbolic, it can be understood as a kind of introduction to the life of women in Israel. She did not arbitrarily describe the highly gendered space of the shower as embarrassing, a place she was led to by other women, a site where she noticed a difference between herself and other Israeli women, and finally a location that she entered unwillingly.

In addition to what it suggests about Levy as a gendered subject in Is-rael, the interaction between her and her uncle’s wife upon her arrival to Mishmar ha-Emek, reveals her relationship with race as well and how she responds to a highly racialized society. Levy begins her discussion of the trip to the shower by noting that she had been unable to bathe or wash her clothes since arriving in Israel seven days prior. This is due to the fact that Sha’ar Aliyah had no hot water and lines to wash clothing were always pro-hibitively long. She also explicitly states that she was in need of a shower. These details inform Levy’s description that, “On our way to the shower I noticed that the wife of my uncle frequently stared at my clothing.”69 The gaze of Rachmim’s wife perplexed Levy. She describes her clothing, at least as it was before her initial, trying days in Israel, as expensive, new, and Western. Levy admits that she could not discern what kind of opinion the wife’s glances allowed her to form about her “cultural status.”70 She could not decide if the gaze meant she found Levy’s family wealthy or if she was disappointed that her external appearance did not give any indication of backwardness.71 Despite Levy’s own uncertainties, it is not necessary to definitively conclude that the wife felt a single way about her appearance and cultural status in order to suggest that this exchange itself points to a distance between Levy, a Mizrahi Jew, and her uncle’s wife, a Romanian Ashkenazi Jew. It is a distance that leaves Levy feeling self-conscious and inferior vis-à-vis her aunt and the other women of the kibbutz for whom her aunt is an archetype.

As this distance saturates Levy’s negotiations in her new world, it be-comes difficult to define her introduction to the women of Mishmar ha-Emek in anything resembling progressive terms like “symbolic baptism,” a phrase used by Bashkin in “An Autobiographical Perspective: Schools, Jails, and Cemeteries in Shoshanna Levy’s Life Story.” This is because, as Bashkin details, this snapshot in Levy’s life did little to strip her of her cumulative female, poor, and Mizrahi (i.e. racialized black) identity, and “purify” her for dominant Ashkenazi society.72 Pointedly speaking to the culmination of social differences, Levy cannot simply shed herself by disrobing, Bashkin says. Rather, “Shoshanna’s narrative exposes how the kibbutz, a place that was intended to erase differences between Jews of different backgrounds by molding them into a socialist community, actually accentuated the dis-tinctions between Iraqis and the native Israelis.”73 This skewed reality, in

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which assimilation was assumed and exalted but was only ever out of reach, on the horizon, and could not be actualized, exists within the cultural do-main of power. Within this domain, Israeli society is projected to be a place where the starting line of belonging is equal and fair for all, without the acknowledgement that social differences alter this field.74 Stating the fact of this skewed society also demonstrates the difference between applying an intersectional analysis to Levy’s complicated relationship to belonging—in the kibbutz and beyond in Israel—and other summations, such as when Bashkin writes, “Shoshanna does not construct binaries of either heroic kib-butz feminist members vis-à-vis the weak oriental newcomers, or Ashkenazi oppressors vis-à-vis oppressed Mizrahim, but rather notes the challenges she met and the varied people who either assisted her or stood in her way.”75 What is missing here—that an intersectional analysis reveals—is that it is not Levy who needs to construct or write these divisions into society in the first place; they are there all along, invisible to the untrained eye, but always affecting. The greater context of Levy’s life that follows here, underscores the intractability of her difference in Israel.

As Levy’s life in the kibbutz continues, one of the ways she notices a dif-ference between herself and Ashkenazim is in the realm of food. She gains particular insight into this difference through her work assignment in the kitchen of her kibbutz. One of the first types of food she is forced to prepare is herring. She notes that encountering this type of very salty fish was so surprising to her due to the fact that in Iraq, her family mostly ate fresh fish. Because she had not encountered this type of fish previously in her life, she describes the first times she is forced to work with it as “almost traumatic.”76 While working with it in the kitchen, she felt that other kitchen workers looked at her contemptuously due to her assessment of it. She surmises that these judgmental looks seemed to say, “How am I able to be disgusted by herring that is considered a delicacy in the food of Ashkenazi Jews.”77 This criticism of herring is related to Levy’s earlier criticism of the anemic lunch she was first offered on her first day in Israel. That something so seemingly mundane as cooking herring for the first time, or any food more generally, elicited such a negative reaction from Levy is far more telling than it might seem at first. Summarizing a multitude of Iraqi-Jewish articulations from memoirs and novels about first encountering Israeli food, Meir-Glitzenstein has written, “Among the often traumatic changes brought about by emigra-tion are those connected with food and diet.”78 Her analysis also specifically corroborates how Levy felt during some of her first interactions with her-ring: “In the case of the Iraqi Jews, it appears that their revulsion toward the herring symbolized their ambivalent contact with the new land. Expressions of ridicule and disgust toward ‘Ashkenazi’ food were a form of opposition to the drastic reduction of their social status.”79 With her criticism of herring, Levy establishes herself as not only non-Ashkenazi, but also cognizant of the fact that she is looked down upon for this. As Meir-Glitzenstein reveals, Levy, along with many Iraqi Jews, are not simply noting a difference or admitting any inferiority when they articulate their revulsion for Ashkenazi



food like herring. They are voicing their refusal to be pejoratively labeled, especially by means of Ashkenazi food that their Iraqi preferences led them to believe was disgusting at any rate.

What would begin to render Levy an impoverished woman was the poor access to education she had upon moving to Israel. Levy was thirteen years old when she immigrated and anticipated that she would resume her stud-ies immediately upon her arrival, but she was not able to. Frustrated, she asked her uncle why her and her brother had not been taken to school.80 He tells her that she will be joining a youth group, as part of the Youth Aliyah project. As part of this group, she worked in a factory in the morning and went on trips in the afternoon.81 Levy begins to discuss her education dif-ferently when, a month after she arrives at Mishmar ha-Emek, a group of Iraqi youth arrive at the kibbutz. The group called themselves “Amir” and consisted of forty young men and women.82 Two guides were assigned to it to teach Hebrew. These studies were limited however, because they did not prepare Levy to take the Israeli matriculation exam. She specifically points also to a lack of English language learning as a disadvantage she faced.83

Eventually, because the system of Youth Aliyah was technically only temporary, Levy was forced to choose if she wanted to remain in the kib-butz or not. Despite knowing that returning to life with her parents would be difficult, she chose to leave the kibbutz and was reunited with them in 1954.84 Immediately upon rejoining their household, she realized she could not continue her studies because she had to look for work to help support her family. She found work in a restaurant, store, factory, and as a feeder of bed-bound patients in a psychiatric hospital. While working in the factory, Levy writes, she envied a female, Israeli born co-worker who had the means to register for the teaching course that Levy herself wanted to matriculate, but could not afford.85 Levy’s dream of taking part in this course would eventually come true when, while working at the psychiatric hospital, she was invited to participate in a kibbutz’s teacher training course.

Despite this course being the fulfillment of a dream, it presented chal-lenges. Levy discusses how she felt inferior to women from the north of Tel Aviv who previously had access to great educations.86 Being the only new immigrant in her cohort, she was often too intimidated to speak up in class because she felt her accent was different than that of the students born in Israel. Eventually, the educational expenses proved too large a burden for Levy and she decided to work while she went to school. During her last few years in her teaching program, she worked in a hospital for the mentally ill.87 When Levy was drafted into the Israeli Army in 1958, she was forced to leave the program before finishing two exams. While Levy would eventual-ly become a teacher after her army service, and thus seemingly transcended economic barriers, the fact remains that she had access to few educational opportunities as a newly arrived Mizrahi woman in Israel. Not only was she marginalized as the only Mizrahi woman in her teaching training course, nearly all of the jobs she was forced to take to support herself and her family existed on the margins of society.

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Shoshana Almoslino

On the morning of August 23, 1947, Almoslino found herself in Israel unaccompanied by any of her family after a trip from Mosul and through Baghdad. She was sent to Israel, along with other youth, by ha-Helutz, the underground Zionist pioneer movement, in Iraq. This makes her story slightly different than Cohen’s and Levy’s since she arrived in the coun-try before 1948 and was ideologically oriented explicitly toward Zionism. She first heard of the establishment of ha-Helutz while in a training course for teachers in Baghdad. She suggests that her interest in Zionism stemmed from a 1944 meeting with two Jewish soldiers from Palestine (she uses the term Eretz Yisrael) who were serving in the British army.88

Toward the end of the Passover holiday of 1946, the daughter of one of her family’s closest neighbors invited Almoslino to hear a Zionist emissary from Palestine speak. When she arrived at her neighbor’s house, she found no emissary, but rather a group of men and women her own age discussing the possibility of establishing a ha-Helutz branch in Mosul. Two months later, a branch of the organization was established in Mosul and Almosli-no was invited to a three-week seminar in Baghdad that trained guides for ha-Helutz. Throughout 1946 and 1947, she continued to attend ha-Helutz meetings in Baghdad while working as a teacher at a young women’s high school in Mosul. After participating in the movement for about a year, she was visited by police at her family home in Mosul. They searched her home and took her to a police station for hours of questioning about her possible Zionist activity. Based on this incident, Almoslino felt that the police would arrest her for Zionist activity at some point, so while she had promised her family she would never leave Iraq without them, she determined that the only way to save herself and them was to move to Israel. She reached out to Zionist emissaries, asking them to do whatever they could to help her move to Israel.89 By August 22, 1947, she was able to leave Iraq with other young ha-Helutz members as part of Operation Mikelberg.90

Upon arrival in Israel, Almoslino and others on her flight were taken to the kibbutz Degania Aleph and given instructions for their coming days. They were told not to tell anyone that they were from Baghdad or how they got to Israel, and reminded that they were illegal immigrants with no iden-tity certificates.91 They were then divided into smaller groups. Almoslino makes mention that all she had with her were the clothes she was wearing. By August 31, Almoslino had joined kibbutz Sde Nachum.

Established in the late 1930s under the strategy of “Wall and Tower” (a defense tactic that included building a watch tower and wall around new kibbutzim to secure as much land for Jews as possible), Sde Nachum was initially populated entirely by Ashkenazim.92 When Almoslino first finds herself in kibbutz Sde Nachum she encounters individuals who, “Had met for the first time with immigrants from Eastern countries and they proved to have prejudiced opinions. They were sure that we arrived from a backward and lagging place, and that we ourselves lacked all knowledge of education



and were completely cut off from all progress and technology of the modern world.”93

The questions these kibbutzim asked further revealed their prejudiced opinions of Mizrahim. They inquired whether Iraqis knew about electricity and radio and if there were universities in there. As a retort, Almoslino and her Iraqi cohort facetiously suggested that cannibalistic tribes could still be found in Iraq. This prompted the ignorant interlocutors to ask if any of these new Iraqi immigrants had themselves encountered such cannibals. Addi-tionally, it was hard for the Ashkenazim to believe that all of the Iraqi Jews in Almoslino’s cohort graduated high school and received some higher edu-cation, like themselves. Almoslino concludes these incidents by noting that no matter how sincere she and her cohort attempted to be, they could not disabuse the kibbutzim of their ignorant opinions.

In an interesting potential reversal of power, Almoslino was soon asked by the manager of Sde Nachum’s school to teach English in the kibbutz be-cause she had taught it back in Iraq. Almoslino writes that there was not a single student in Iraq who did not learn English since everyone knew it ex-panded one’s educational opportunities and social standing. Having noted the “modern world” standards that Almoslino’s fellow kibbutzim judged her by, it might be expected that they would consider it a privilege to learn English, and her status as an English teacher might have tested their pre-conceived notions. On the contrary, Almoslino suggests that the kibbutzim “belittled English” and that there were tensions between herself and the sa-bras.94 These tensions arose not only because she was an English teacher but also because she was a new teacher that did not yet have full fluency in Hebrew. Almoslino had to gather a lot of her power to continue teaching, but decided to do so.

The pejorative understanding of Mizrahim that Almoslino is confronted with at kibbutz Sde Nachum is entirely a product of how Ashkenazi Zi-onism conceives of Mizrahi immigrants. As Shohat has written, this narra-tive views Sephardim (and by extension Mizrahim) as “an oppressed Third World people” that has been ‘saved’ from their Arab ‘captors’. This saving included being taken out of ‘primitive’ conditions and taken to ‘modern Western society.’”95 Almoslino’s experience provides specific examples of what Shohat describes when the former posits that Sephardim were viewed as backward and in need of saving.

More so than Cohen and Levy, Almoslino is intimately tied with the Zi-onist movement. She began her participation with ha-Helutz in Iraq, and continued in Israel as a member of Ahdut ha-Avoda, a Labor Party precur-sor, and as a member of the Knesset, beginning in 1966. Given that so much of her life was dedicated to Zionism it makes sense that a great deal of her experience would be refracted through these commitments. Thus, her mem-oir conveys the sense that a great deal of her understanding of what it is like to be a woman and a Mizrahi woman, in particular in Israel, comes specifically from her early years in Israel as a worker in a Labor Bureau and as the manager of the Organization of Working Mothers, both in Ramat

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Gan. In 1949, Almoslino met Damascus-born Avraham Abbas, a founder of ha-Helutz in Syria, and he was largely responsible for her coming to learn about the struggles of Mizrahim in Israel. Of his influence she writes, “In our long conversations I heard from him about the problems of the Oriental community and about the effects of discrimination that existed in Israeli society.”96 Abbas informed her of such discrimination because he wanted her to be a part of the Department for Oriental Communities in the Bureau of Labor in Ramat Gan.

In 1952 Abbas, along with a member of Mapam (United Worker’s Party) who held a position in its Bureau of Labor, asked Almoslino to work for the bureau. She states that most of the new immigrants living in Ramat Gan, and thus the individuals she worked with on a daily basis, were from Iraq. Even though Almoslino was handpicked to work there, she notes that many of the older workers in the bureau were not enthusiastic upon her arrival. She suggests many factors for their disapproval, chief among them the fact that she was a “girl of the Eastern community”:

According to them, I was a young new immigrant that parachuted in from outside, a stranger to the place, without familiarity with the employers of the area, without any connections with the officials that had power, and in addition to all of this I was also a girl of the Eastern community—a rare phenomenon in institutions such as these in those days. Completely different from my predecessor in the role—an older woman of the country, who had experience and good public standing.97

Almoslino concludes this assessment by expressing that she felt com-pletely alone when she first started working in Ramat Gan. It is true that Almoslino was young upon her appointment and was a technical outsider, given that she lived in Netanya with her mother and siblings, but as she astutely points out, older employees doubted her for far deeper reasons. These doubts stemmed from Almoslino’s subjectivity as a young Mizrahi woman. She explicitly reveals this when she writes that being a “girl of the Eastern community,” in a position of authority, such as she was, was a rare phenomenon. Beyond such an explicit statement, Almoslino also employs coded language to reveal that the individuals she was working with were not likely Mizrahim too. First she suggests that older employees considered her inept because she did not have connections with officials in power. She then adds that her predecessor was an older woman of the land of Israel, with high social standing. Given that she took her job in 1952 and many Mizrahim began arriving in Israel in the early 1950s, it is unlikely that the possessors of power or the predecessors, given that they are portrayed as entrenched in the region, would be anything other than Ashkenazi. This analysis reveals that despite the fact that Almoslino’s Zionist proclivities afforded her the privilege of being offered meaningful employment, her ultimate status as a young, Mizrahi woman could not shield her from all possible discrimination.



It is Almoslino’s story that most clearly exemplifies the jagged and shape-shifting conundrum of belonging/not belonging some Iraqi women faced. There is no disputing that although she encountered micro-aggres-sions in her Zionist activity and work for the State of Israel, which included serving as a Knesset member and Minister of Health until the early 1990s, she was indeed encountering them in some of the state’s most rarified ideo-logical projects and institutions. Her status of being in, but not of, Israel’s center of power is a function of a predicament Yehouda Shenhav lays out as: “The Arab Jews were perceived in two different paradigmatic contexts by the Zionist consciousness. On the one hand, they were seen as Arabs, and hence as an “other” of Europe and Zionism, and, on the other, as an-cient Jews, hence as exalted, holy objects of the Zionist national-religious discourse.”98 Such a conflict generated an unstable reality for Iraqi Jews like Almoslino. Discourses in friction saw her as exemplary for a Mizrahi Jew—possessing qualities of Westernization such as education—but nevertheless, as always only an approximate—one who could perform elite Israeliness but not convincingly embody it due to her Mizrahiness. Thus, in the in-terpersonal domain of power, she often does not receive the benefit of the doubt or the acceptance that are commonly tacitly included in the positions like the ones she obtained. Alternatively, she is always suspect, lacking, and presumed out of place.99

The precarity Almoslino faced in terms of class was largely influenced by the immigration of her family. They joined her in Israel in 1951 after Iraq decided to reverse its Jewish immigration ban in 1950. Almoslino had the privileged of beginning her Israeli life in a kibbutz given that she came alone and because of her work with ha-Helutz. Her family however, which in-cluded her mother, sister, and brother, given that they came during a much larger wave of immigration and without explicit Zionist ties, was first taken to Sha’ar Aliyah. While there, the family was forced to live together in one tent with few resources, like many of the immigrants there. In order to save her family from such a life, Almoslino petitioned her kibbutz to accept her family as members. While the kibbutz agreed to take her siblings, it said that it could not afford to take her mother. This answer upset Almoslino because she no longer wanted to be separated from the family she so abruptly need-ed to leave several years prior. In order to keep her family together, Almosli-no decided to go live with them in a single tent with few resources in Sha’ar Aliyah, despite the fact that this meant a significant change to her lifestyle.100

When Almoslino began her work in the Labor Bureau, the difficult eco-nomic situation that living with her family in the ma’abara forced upon her was complicated further. By this point, she had been given an apartment in a housing community for Mizrahi immigrants in the Dora neighborhood of Netanya. This living situation was difficult for Almoslino as it was lo-cated very far from her work in Ramat Gan. Almoslino writes: “Therefore my daily journey was very long, to Ramat Gan and back, in two buses both ways. I would leave house early in the morning, returning tired and broken late at night.”101 In order to keep her job and no doubt because many of her co-workers doubted her abilities, Almoslino completed this journey for two

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years before asking if it were possible to transfer her and her family to a place closer to her work. While she was able to have her family transferred to the town of Ramat Amidar, near Ramat Gan, the fact that she was forced to bear the burden of such a long commute for two years suggests she faced job insecurity. Economic security does not only depend on having a job, but having one that is commensurate with one’s skill level and does not bring with it burdens that make it almost prohibitive.

Conclusion

A sketch of Cohen’s, Levy’s, and Almoslino’s intersectionality has been offered through descriptions of the discriminatory ways that gender, race, and class affected them, cumulatively. Life in an intersection for these wom-en was characterized by physical abuse, job insecurity, unequal access to education, presumed incompetence, prolonged economic poverty, and psy-chological threats; all of which ultimately disrupted their belonging in Isra-el.

The intersectionality of Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino shows exactly how difficult immigration was for poor, Mizrahi women like them. Mov-ing to Israel in its pre-state or early-state years was undoubtedly difficult for many immigrants. What seems to have separated those who could inte-grate into Israeli society and those who could not is opportunity. This article has shown that Mizrahi immigrants were not given the same opportunity as Ashkenazi. Indeed, as Chetrit has noted, Mizrahim have taken part in a movement of struggle in the name of socioeconomic and cultural freedom, state acknowledgement of inequality and legitimation of their struggle, in direct response to the discrimination they faced since the establishment of the state. Building from this general analysis, this article has discussed some of the intersectional aspects of Mizrahi social and cultural oppression.

Because it has been shown that Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino were dis-criminated against in such a cumulative way it is possible to question wheth-er or not Israel might have accommodated intersectional subjects like them. With the existence of Zionism in Iraq, and Israel naming itself a Jewish state in the wake of the War of 1948, life for Iraqi Jews was subject to change. Yet Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino’s accounts do not illustrate an Iraq that exploit-ed them as Jewish women for at least thirty years. Whether or not post-1950s Iraq could have accommodated women like Cohen, Levy, and Almoslino, who would have been intersectional subjects, for contextually specific rea-sons, is difficult to tell based on the memoirs of Iraqi-Jewish women who immigrated to Israel. What the evidence of experience contained in these memoirs suggests is that Israel was not founded with the ability to provide equal opportunity for poor Mizrahi women. A fact that potentially clarifies that while Cohen, Levy, Almoslino, and other Mizrahi women were tech-nically granted immediate Israeli citizenship upon immigration, belonging was not as immediately guaranteed.



Notes

I must thank the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago, and Sarah Tuohey in particular, for funding this project and remaining in my corner. The completion of this project is thanks to advice from Orit Bashkin, Na’ama Rokem, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Bryan Roby, and Almog Behar. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the reviewers and editor of this journal.

1 Louise Cohen, ha-Avak Higbia Uf (Tel Aviv: Kedma Books, 2011), 19.2 There is presently a growing English language literature regarding Mizrahim in both Is-

rael and, as it relates to the current work, Iraq. Some titles that are not cited extensively elsewhere in this article include: Nissim Rejwan, Outsider in a Promised Land: An Iraqi Jew in Israel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Post-colonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/ West and the Politics of Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke Universi-ty Press, 2006); Reuven Snir, Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?: Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities (Boston: Brill, 2015); Sasson Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2007). This is not to mention the ever-growing lit-erature about Mizrahim in Israel more broadly from the likes of: Ammiel Alcalay, Moshe Behar, Almog Behar, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Gil Hochberg, Smadar Lavie and Lital Levy.

3 Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 10.

4 Based on writings from Laurence J. Silberstein, I understand post-Zionism as a critique that, “Beginning in the 1970s, challenged the prevailing scholarly representations of Is-raeli history and society.” The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 89. When I use the terms “State’s architects” and “Ashkenazi Jewish hegemony,” I am referring to the Ashkenazi Zionists who immigrated to Palestine beginning in the late nineteenth century (i.e. the Yishuv) and the institutions they imple-mented to colonize the land. For more information, please see Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014) 42–43.

5 Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (New York: Rout-ledge Press, 2010), 23.

6 Ibid.7 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 7.8 Ibid., 7–11.9 Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Thousand Oaks,

CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), vii.10 Shoshana Almoslino, me-ha-Mahteret be-Bavel le-Memshelet Yisrael (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibutz ha-

Me’uhad, 1998); Shoshana Levy, Al Em ha-Derech (Tel Aviv: Sh. Levy, 2001).11 Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 3.12 Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 20.13 Ibid., 56–58.14 Other Hebrew memoirs from Iraqi Jewish women I am familiar with include Tikva Agas-

si’s me-Baghdad le-Yisrael (2001); Esperance Cohen’s mi-Gedot ha-Hidekel li-Gedot ha-Yarkon: Sipurim ve-Zikronot (2006); Nuzhat Kabtsab’s Senuniyot ha-Shalom: Im ha-Nashim ha-Arviyot ve-ha-Druziyot be-Yisrael (1998).

15 Bryan K. Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948–1966 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 63; Orit Rozin, A Home for All Jews: Citizenship, Rights, and National Identity in the New Israeli State (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016), 119.

16 Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus (London: SAQI, 2005), 143.17 Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 11; Yehouda Shenhav and Hannan Hever, “‘Arab Jews’ after

Structuralism: Zionist Discourse and the (de)Formation of an Ethnic Identity,” Social Iden-tities, 18:1 (January 2012), 104.

18 Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (March 2007): 63–64, italics in original.

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19 Ibid.20 Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.21 Ibid., 30.22 Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and

Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (London: Routledge, 1993), 32.23 Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 75–76.24 Rozin, A Home for All Jews, 12.25 Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries, 32.26 Ella Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” in

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 222.27 Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29:1 (Autumn

1999): 14.28 Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, 158.29 Ibid., 101.30 Orit Bashkin, “Representations of Women in the Writings of the Intelligentsia in Hashem-

ite Iraq, 1921–1958,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 60.31 Ibid., 61.32 Ibid., 65.33 Ibid., 88.34 Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 2012), 88.35 Ibid., 89.36 Ibid., 93.37 Ibid., 92.38 Ibid., 94.39 Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (New York:

Routledge, 2014), 116.40 Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 13–14.41 Cohen, ha- Avak Higbia Uf, 23.42 Ibid.43 Ibid.44 Ibid., 24.45 Ibid., 30.46 Ibid., 32.47 Ibid.48 Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 54.49 Ibid., 55.50 Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” 8, 14–15.51 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 9.52 Ibid., 36.53 Ibid., 34, 44.54 Ibid., 21.55 Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, 80, 133.56 Cohen, ha- Avak Higbia Uf , 21.57 The letter was in response to a potential school closure in her neighborhood and it is not

elaborated on it here because it was sent in 2004, well outside the time frame of this arti-cle. Some of the examples Cohen uses to make her case against the school closure are the nevertheless relevant.

58 The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow is a Mizrahi non-governmental organization (NGO) in Israel. Founded in 1996 by Mizrahi intellectuals, such as Yehouda Shenhav and Vicki Shi-ran, it is a socio-political movement to disrupt Ashkenazi hegemony. See Smadar Lavie, “Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7:2 (Spring 2011), 80; Erez Tzfadia, “Public Policy and Identity Formation: The Experience of Mizrahim in Israel’s Development Towns,” in Israelis in Conflict: Hegemonies, Identities and Challenges, ed. Adriana Kemp, David Newman, et. al. (East Sussex, UK: Sussex Aca-demic Press, 2004), 70.



59 Cohen, ha- Avak Higbia Uf , 113.60 Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, 81–83.61 Levy, Al Em ha-Derech, 71.62 Ibid., 72.63 Ibid.64 Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 315.65 Levy, Al Em ha-Derech, 77; Marian G. Greenberg, There is Hope for Your Children: Youth Ali-

yah, Henrietta Szold and Hadassah (n.p.: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America), 5.

66 Levy, Al Em ha-Derech, 78.67 Ibid., 79.68 Ibid., 72.69 Ibid., 79.70 Ibid.71 Ibid.72 Orit Bashkin, “An Autobiographical Perspective: Schools, Jails, and Cemeteries in Shosha-

na Levy’s Life Story,” in Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 284.

73 Ibid., 287.74 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 10–11.75 Bashkin, “An Autobiographical Perspective,” 288.76 Ibid., 86.77 Ibid.78 Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Longing for the Aromas of Baghdad: Food, Emigration, and Trans-

formation in the Lives of Iraqi Jews in Israel in the 1950s (Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press, 2016), 91.

79 Ibid., 98.80 Levy, Al Em ha-Derech, 80.81 Ibid., 81.82 Ibid., 85.83 Ibid., 94.84 Ibid., 95.85 Ibid., 96.86 Ibid., 97.87 Ibid., 98.88 Almoslino, me-ha-Mahteret be-Bavel le-Memshelet Yisrael, 29.89 Ibid., 41.90 Ibid., 42.91 Ibid., 50.92 Ibid.93 Ibid., 52.94 Ibid., 54.95 Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” 3.96 Ibid., 58.97 Ibid., 73. Italics added.98 Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 70.99 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 7.100 Almoslino, me-ha-Mahteret be-Bavel le-Memshelet Yisrael, 65.101 Ibid., 73.

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