Watching Whiteness Work: The Racialization of Jewish Women in Iraq and Israel/Palestine

“Watching Whiteness Work: The Racialization of Jewish Women in Iraq and Israel/Palestine,” intervenes in scholarship on Jewish belonging in Iraq, Iraqi Jewish belonging in Israel, and studies of race in the modern Middle East. It reveals that multiple conceptions of racialization existed in the worldview of Iraqi Jews which were then carried with them upon the community’s mass immigration to Israel in the early 1950s. Of the roughly 150,000 Jews residing in Iraq by the mid-twentieth century, 123,000 would immigrate to Israel. Half of these Jews were women, and this dissertation focuses on their racialization in particular, due to the fact that racialization is always gendered, and women are often subordinated in most other histories of Iraqi Jews. This dissertation departs from Iraqi histories that commonly explain Jewish belonging in the region through lenses of religion or nationalism. It also departs from Israeli histories that view Iraqi Jewish and more broadly Mizrahi (Eastern) Jewish problems with acclimation in the Ashkenazi (Western) dominant Israeli state as mostly an ethnic issue. In contrast, my work shows the range of mutually constituted gender and race logics that informed Iraqi Jewish women’s worldview and insists that because Jews were racialized differently according to Zionist, Communist, Iraqi nationalist, and Arab nationalist dictates in Iraq, this impeded their path to full belonging in Israel because there they encountered racialization that was much more restrictive. My work also proves that experiences of belonging on the one hand and discrimination on the other were not ephemeral or singular, but systemic and deeply personal. I base my findings on memoirs, Israeli state collected oral histories, medical reports compiled when Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel, personal letters and interviews with political dissidents in Iraq, British Foreign Office documents, and political biographies