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.

This paper examines the formation of a subversive Mizrahi, or Oriental Jewish, identity within Israel as expressed through social justice protests during the 1950s and 1960s. The discussion is centered on how Mizrahim conceptualized their dual belonging to the East and a supposedly Westernized Israel, despite their marginalized position in both societies. I make use of Israeli police reports and multi-lingual (French, Arabic, and Hebrew) newspapers published and circulated in the ma’abarot, or transit camps, in Israel. I examine the slogans and protest tactics of Mizrahi demonstrations in order to discern their sense of belonging to Israeli society. I contend that these protests were demonstrative of and helped to forge the convergence of a heterogeneous Mizrahi identity. This converged identity was comprised of diverse immigrant communities hailing from imagined Eastern or ‘Oriental’ countries, ranging from Morocco in the West to Afghanistan and India in the East. Prior to 1948, the development of an Arab-Jewish identity was not the explicit goal of most Middle Eastern Jewish communities, it was simply a reality. With the emergence of the conflicting Arab and Jewish nationalist movements, the false binaries of Arab versus Jewish identity, and the mass immigrations of Jews from Africa and Asia to the State of Israel, a heterogeneous community of Mizrahi, or Oriental Jewish, collective identity formed. Due to the lack of scholarly focus on this issue and period, Mizrahi political involvement and thought is either assumed to be non-existent or associated with right-wing reactionary political circles and anti-Arab sentiment. While this talk will place heavy emphasis on grassroots protests, I link these social justice protests to the discourse of Mizrahi intellectuals as expressed in newspapers and cultural magazines catering to the Mizrahi community. Contrary to assumptions in Israeli historiography, immigrants from the Arab World were not embarrassed to make use of their native Arabic language. On the contrary, Arabic continued to flourish as a vibrant language between the immigrant and Palestinian population alike and facilitated fruitful discussions about their parallel struggles against discriminatory practices. This is particularly apparent in the writings of figures like Menashe Za’arur and Gideon Giladi who articulated an anti-colonial stance and encouraged the equal participation of the Palestinian and Mizrahi communities within the political, labor, and social sectors of Israeli society.

Recent work on the identities of Jews who immigrated from the Middle East to Israel has found that they either arrived in Israel with a strong sense of identification with non-Jewish Arabs, or developed one soon after as a result of discrimination in Israel. This research suggests that there is a basis in Israeli Jewish identification for more peaceful relationships with Palestinians and the larger Middle Eastern area. However many Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin also express negative attitudes toward Arabs or claim nonidentification. While some scholars attribute these attitudes to 60 years of Israeli propaganda, others argue that they draw from earlier experiences in Arab societies. In this paper, I analyze life story interviews I collected from a group of Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and who experienced significant pressures to disidentify with Arabs both before and after immigration. These individuals were educated in the Francophile Alliance institutions in Iraq, and in Israel built on their ability to “perform” western – and distinguish themselves from Arabs – to integrate into the higher echelons of Israel’s occupational hierarchy. This group exerts an effect on Israeli collective memory as parents and through such organizations as the Babylonian Jewish heritage center. I find that the vast majority express little identification with Iraq as a society or with Iraqi Arabs. This lack of identification appears to originate from life in Iraq rather than from the effect of Israeli life on collective memory. Immigrants responding to Israeli life would be expected to report on positive or negative experiences with non-Jewish Arabs, but while some do, the more salient point is that Iraqi non-Jews are simply not present in respondents’ recollections of daily life in Iraq. The explanation for this pattern probably lies in the tendency among this group to socialize exclusively within the extended family (i.e. Jewish) networks. Probes on Mulsim/Jewish relations in Iraq do elicit information on parents’ experiences, as well as orientalist stereotypes, but these responses are normally vague, unrehearsed, and have few markers of emotional attachment. In general, then, the memory of Iraq appears to be a memory of an exclusively Jewish world. This suggests that despite a series of pressures across the life course that pushed toward animosity toward Arabs as a group, Alliance-educated Iraqi Jews in Israel have remained more blank slates than either sources of revolutionary identities or anti-Arab collective memories.

My paper looks at Israeli author Sami Michael's early Arabic stories as the intellectual and aesthetic origins of his well-known Hebrew works that were to come decades later. Known popularly in Israel as an author whose Hebrew novels are often referred to as "Mizrahi" (Jews from the Arab world) writing, Michael's activity publishing in Arabic during the 1950s when he first arrived from Iraq is generally relegated to a footnote, if mentioned at all. Born in Baghdad, Michael's native language is Arabic, and as a member of the Communist Party in Israel, he published short stories and articles in al-Jadid, the Party's literary-cultural monthly under the pen name Samir Marid (Arabic for "rebel"). In a 1954 article, Michael calls for "a humane, progressive Hebrew culture dedicated to the interests of its people and with respect for others." This sentiment is reflected in his Arabic stories: realist texts particularly concerned with social inequality and the fate of the Arab minority in Israel. Long before the crystallization (and academization) of critical Mizrahi discourse, Michael's writing was engaged with important social and political questions at the very heart of Israeli culture. I will discuss Michael's Arabic fiction as constituting the early expression of an imagined Arab-Jewish literary self oriented toward a universal ideal - a poetic project that was full of desire for the possibility to re-imagine the future of the nascent Jewish State, as well as to partake in fashioning its cultural and aesthetic symbols. These stories constitute a call to collective social responsibility that would find fuller form in his later Hebrew novels, and I will discuss how Michael already attempted to reinvent the economy of Hebrew culture while writing in Arabic. These early Arabic stories are highly relevant not only for understanding Michael as a Hebrew author, but also because they reflect a sense of belonging among Arab-Jewish intellectuals at a crucial moment in the formation of Israeli society; they also highlight the intersection of ideology, aesthetics, and multiplicity of languages below the surface of Israeli literature.