This paper examines visual materials from the archive of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which was established in 1912 in order to support the health and well-being of the Old Settlement in Palestine. Through research in the organization's archive in New York City, I found that in addition to the organization’s medical aid system that sought to introduce concepts of modern hygiene to both the Muslim and Sephardic Jewish native populations in Palestine, Hadassah also held and maintained a busy visual aids department that distributed images from Palestine among the American Jewish community. Therefore, this paper presents a new depiction of Hadassah as an organization that was actively engaged in spreading American medical aid in Palestine while simultaneously propagating images of native Palestinian women to members of the organization back home in the U.S. Among the many visual documentations that are stored in the archive of Hadassah, this paper focuses on photos of mothers and nurses that appeared in the organization’s brochures. It reveals that the exchange of “medical aid for images” established by Hadassah was formulated within a stereotypical dichotomy of West vs. East, and depicted the native mothers as exotic, static, Oriental entities that stood in stark contrast to the active and modern educated nurses. As those images were preserved in the Hadassah archive and sorted in accordance with the organization’s agenda, their meaning was captured in a fixed context. As the paper shows, taking a photo of “the native” without including her perspective is a known characteristic of the colonial visual archive that was designed to emphasize national master narratives. While the submissive nature of the native mothers was interpreted as gratitude for the help they received from the American nurses in the context of the Hadassah archive, rereading the photo a century later brings attention to the silent voices and empty gazes of those capture, disconnecting them from their former functions as fundraising tools to confront ongoing hegemonic oppressive mainstream narratives.

During the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to the mid 1950s, hundreds if not thousands of babies disappeared from immigrant absorption and transit camps throughout Israel and from the transit camp Hashed in Yemen. According to testimonies given to the Kedmi Commission (1995–2001), the absorption policy governing Yemenite Jews required separating children from their parents; babies, who were housed in stone structures, were usually taken without parental knowledge or consent. Despite the over 1,000 testimonies given to state commissions, this affair is still contested in the public sphere, and officially unrecognized by the Israeli government. This story illustrates how Western definitions of motherhood, guided by the Zionist Eurocentric view of the Yemenite and other Mizrahi immigrants as inferior and unfit parents, ultimately became the ideological justification behind the power of the state to separate children from their mothers (Hertzog 2003, 2005, Lavie, 2010, 2014). For decades, the establishment’s efforts have been centered on framing family narratives as isolated cases, thereby hindering the ability of discussing the state’s responsibility in its full historical context. In this essay, I argue that the public denial of this affair is tightly linked to what Shohat (1988) defines as the Zionist narrative of ‘rescue.’ It brings to the forefront questions about Western domination, “otherness,” memory, and practices of silencing of dissenters. A breakthrough in the public discourse didn’t emerge until the dominance of the mainstream press was disrupted by alternative voices on social media (Madmoni-Gerber 2019). While a clear shift in the visibility of Mizrahi narratives can be marked, is the tide really turning? Can it be attributed to a change in ideology? Is this act as a first step toward restorative justice? Using a Cultural Studies approach, and especially Stuart Hall’s (89, 92, 96) notion of representation, I analyze mainstream media framing practices (Madmoni-Gerber 2009) in contrast with the emergence of new digital narratives. Through textual analysis and interviews with journalists and social activists, I locate contested narratives, while highlighting the connection between ideology and power, which ultimately motivated and dictated the news coverage of this Affair.

Despite the large scale of families that lost their babies between in what is known as the Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Kidnapped Children Affair, this affair has gone unrecognized by the Israeli government, media and legal system. In the forties and fifties of the last century, thousands of young children were kidnapped through the state medical system in the newly established State of Israel, This paper uses trauma studies as developed in the US to capture and understand families’ experiences using quantitative measures, qualitative interviews and the analysis of home movies and photographs as types of unconscious expressions tracking the unnamed impacts of trauma. After being told that their child had died during routine medical care, but were provided with neither death certificate nor body, this paper asks: How did families continue to function in the shadow of ambiguous loss? How did they reconcile the betrayal of the state and its medical institutions? And how did they contend with the governmental denial of the affair?

How does the study of Mizrahi notions of home and practices of language challenges the presumption that all Jews feel a sense of belonging within conventional, hegemonic understandings of “Jewish identity” and confining binaries of “Jewishness versus Arabness” prevalent in Israel and the US? Born in Yemen and immigrating to Israel with her family at 10, and launching her career as a poet in Berkeley, CA, feminist poet, educator, and activist Bracha Seri brought back the Arabic in and through her poetic work in Hebrew, weaving Arabic words and sounds to expose the silencing force of the Hebrew. Bracha Seri and poet and songwriter Naomi Amrani, both appearing in Israela Shaer-Meoded's Queen Khantarisha, are Yemenite Mizrahi women who speak about and perform their ongoing relationships to the Arabic language despite Israel’s silencing of the Arabic language in the public sphere and the undermining of traditions of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries previously practiced in Arabic. Utilizing feminist, anti-racist, and film scholarship, this presentation takes a close look at how the documentary performances of Mizrahi women deliver their trauma and pain resulting from Israel’s oppression and silencing of them, and their multifaceted contested connections to their homes. For Seri and Amrani, home is the physical location where exploitative labor takes place and where the Arabic language is supposed to serve a very limited utility, and also where their connection to Yemenite traditions and to the Arabic lives on. Queen Khantarisha foreground speech performances of the women in or by their homes, where the national and patriarchal measures of silencing were placed on their voices and their mother tongues of the Arabic, and where their access to the Arabic nevertheless remained intact.