In 1940s Iraq, of the roughly 150,000 Jews residing there, 2,000 of them participated in the illegal Zionist movement and 300 participated in Iraq’s illegal Communist Party (ICP) (which was roughly 3,000 members strong overall). Despite being a tight-knit, thoroughly Arabized community where in many cases, Communists and Zionists lived side by side in Jewish neighborhoods, the Jews of these two political persuasions were diametrically opposed to one another. Zionists considered Communists a danger to Jewish unity. Communists considered Zionists imperialist tools who prevented Iraqi autonomy following the British Mandate and sustained British influence in the region. What can be made of the divide between Communism and Zionism as well as the rhetoric, idioms, and summations that were used to articulate this divide? Using the analytic of race to answer this question, my paper contends that what characterized the gulf between the ICP (including its Jewish members) and Zionists in Iraq was not hollow hyperbole, superficial quibbling, or mere political difference. Given that discourses around women’s status in Iraq and within these two movements were often central to the critiques, actions, and ideologies each of them espoused, my paper sees centering women’s voices and experiences as particularly fruitful. Sources I draw on include memoirs, biographical dictionaries and personal letters. Thus, employing the analytic of race to understand Jewish Communist and Zionist opposition in Iraq, my paper argues that a parallel study of Jewish women's participation in these illegal movements shows that due to influence from British imperialism and political Zionism, Zionist Jewish women longed for imperial whiteness as a way to rescue them from what political Zionism (influenced by racial conceptions of nationhood and theories of scientific racism) labeled a degenerating existence as Jews and Jews in Iraq specifically. Communist Jewish women, in their rejection of Zionism and imperialism and due to overall Iraqi Communist attempts to at least not make religion or ethnicity a barrier for entry into their movement, rejected whiteness. All of this matters not only because it gives specific definition to a case of Iraqi Jewish communal division which provides a more complete picture of the community and Iraq overall, but because it shows that racializations, rather than a single racialization, occurred for the community during the mid-20th century. This in turn, reveals that Iraqi Jews were informed by an Iraqi racial logic that, while stratified, did not pointedly and immediately racially oppress them.