MESA Banner
Intersectionality, Belonging and the Immigration of Arab Jewish Women: Reading Louise Cohen, Shoshana Levy and Shoshana Almoslino between Iraq and Israel
Abstract
This paper discusses the question, How 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 subjectivity of belonging in the State? In order to answer this question I employ intersectional feminist theory (Crenshaw 2009; Yuval-Davis 2009) to discuss the immigration of three Jewish women from Iraq. These women are Louise Cohen, Shoshana Levy, and Shoshana Almoslino writing in the respective memoirs Haabak Higbia Uf (The Dust Flies Up), Al Im HaDerech (In the Middle of the Road), and Meha-mahteret be-Bavel le-memshelet Yisrael (From the Underground of Babylon to the Government of Israel). I use these memoirs (written from the late nineties to the early 2000s) as my primary source documents because they allow Iraqi Jewish women to give an account of their immigration after many years of living in Israel. This question and methodology matter not only because they further explain the process of Arab Jewish (Jews from Arab countries) immigration, but because they allow for a reexamination of nation-state belonging for Arab Jews after Israel's War of 1948. An intersectional feminist analysis shows that when Cohen, Levy and Almoslino were oppressed upon their arrival in Israel in terms of gender, race and, class and the men of their community were demoralized by the way immigration impoverished and emasculated them, their possibility to actualize a subjectivity that made them feel a part of Israel was foreclosed. This is in contrast to the Iraq of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, when Cohen, Levy and Almoslino came of age and women like them (lower middle class to middle class Jewish women) experienced changing circumstances that made it possible for them to develop a subjectivity that was not exclusively familial based and more a part of the Iraqi state. Both Israeli historiography and dissenting voices within the State have discussed Arab Jewish immigration to Israel as either a failure of accommodation due to lack of resources (Shapira 2012), a mixture of resource lack coupled with discrimination (Segev 1986), or as a discriminatory process due to Zionism's relationship with Europe (Chetrit 2009, Shohat 1988). While scholars have discussed Iraqi Jewish women's experience (Meir-Glitzenstein 2004), the narrative about Arab Jewish immigration to the State of Israel lacks an explicit and specific feminist analysis, which this presentation seeks to remedy.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries