Anthology Summaries
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| Farideh Dayanim-Goldin |
| "Feathers and Hair" |
| In preparation for her cousin Farnoush's wedding, young Farideh Dayanim
joined a group of family women plucking chickens for the feast. Little
did she know that in the room adjacent to the kitchen, the bandandaz
was plucking the bride's body hair. The women in the kitchen were
almost at the end of the pile of chickens, when Farideh heard heart-wrenching
screams coming from her cousin and ululations of women covering the screams.
She jumped up to help, when her mother pulled her down with a knowing
smile on her face. What was going on? No one seemed to want to talk about
it. Instead, the women in the kitchen joined the other women ululating,
to help drown out the screams... |
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| Ruth Knafo-Setton |
| "The Life and Times of Ruth of the Jungle" |
| Ruth was the only family member allowed on Sa'adia's rooftop paradise,
where he kept fifty pigeons in two brass cages. The cage doors were left
open, the way the doors to the mella the Jewish ghetto were
left open. At a whim, Sa'adia could lock in the birds, and the Sultan
could lock in the Jews. Seeking a new life free of harassment, the Knafo
family fled to America and tried to pass as French Christians...until
Ruth's aunt, psychotic from years of beatings and humiliation by her anti-Semitic
husband, followed Ruth and her sister like a witch out of horror movies,
crying, Jews! Morocco! They're lying! Jews! Morocco!² |
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| Gina Bublil-Waldman |
| "Souvenir From Libya" |
| As Libya turned against its Jewish citizens in a campaign of rape, murder,
and destruction, nineteen-year-old Gina Bublil and her family boarded
an empty bus to the airport, in a desperate attempt to flee. In a remote
area outside the city, the bus driver stopped and poured gasoline around
the perimeter of the vehicle, attempting to set it on fire. Gina raced
off the bus and pushed past the burly men standing in her way, in a bold
plan to save her family's lives. |
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| Julie Iny |
| "Ashkenazi Eyes" |
| My mom is from Missouri and my dad is from India,² she replied. Indiana?²
he asked, confused. No. India.² she clarified. As Julie mapped out her
father's migration from Iraq to India, David informed her that Mizrahim
(North African/Middle Eastern Jews) are violent, racist, and greedy, in
contrast to civilized Ashkenazim (Northern European Jews). Feeling suddenly
paralyzed, disembodied, and violated, Julie realized that yet again, her
hazel-green eyes and light skin crossed her over the border and into hostile
territory, where she was accepted only if she gave up half of her self. |
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| Bahareh Mobasseri-Rinsler |
| "Vashti" |
| Purim is a holiday celebrating the liberation of Jews in the Persian
Empire. Central to the story are two women, Vashti and Esther. Queen Vashti
outright and publicly defies the king and subsequently is punished with
exile. Esther a beautiful, virtuous, and self-sacrificing Jew is chosen
to replace Vashti. Bahareh Mobasseri-Rinsler challenges the Esther-Vashti
dichotomy as the classic virgin-whore split and explores the ways in which
Iranian Jewish girls are brought up in the cult of Esther.² Bahareh raises
the flag of sexual rebellion, embracing Vashti's passion. |
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| Yael Arami |
| "A Synagogue of One's Own" |
| Whether teaching older women to read the prayers at her Yemenite-Israeli
synagogue, or refusing to wait on the men in her family during the Sukkoth
holiday, Yael Arami's defiance challenges divisions between religious
observance and feminism. Well-versed in ancient Jewish law and ritual,
and the first Yemenite woman to receive rabbinical training, Yael leads
the way for the newly-forming religious Mizrahi feminist movement. |
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| Rachel Wahba |
| "Benign Ignorance or Persistent Resistance?" |
| The daughter of an Egyptian Jewish refugee father and an Iraqi Jewish
refugee mother, Rachel Wahba was born in India and grew up stateless in
Japan. Throughout her life, she clung with fervor to the only identity
she had: Jew.² When she immigrated to the United States as a young adult,
however, she found herself rejected by the very community to which she
clung. Unable to fathom a dark-skinned Jew who had strange, exotic² ways
and did not speak Yiddish, American Jews refused to accept Rachel as one
of their own. Standing tall as an Arab Jewish lesbian, Rachel demands
recognition and inclusion on all fronts. |
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| Ella Shohat, Tikva Levy, Mira Eliezer |
| "Mizrahi Women in Israel" |
| At the Tenth National Feminist Conference in Israel, harsh confrontations
broke out between the Mizrahi participants and the conference leaders
confrontations parallel to those that broke out in the late 1970s and
1980s between African-American women and American feminist leadership.
Ella Shohat, Tikva Levy, and Mira Eliezer led the way in challenging the
hegemony of Ashkenazi women in their formulation of feminist theory; their
attempts to silence Mizrahi women; and their attempts to distance from
leadership Mizrahi feminists who would not accept the thinking and strategy
of Ashkenazi feminists. |
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| Mojgan Moghadam-Rahbar |
| "Secrets" |
| After Hayat gave birth to her fourth daughter, Yahya put together an
ancient herbal formula for having a son. The formula worked repeatedly
for himself and others, and everyone began demanding it: couples who were
desperate to have sons, because they had too many² daughters; couples
who had sons but wanted more; and women who wanted to avoid the evil tongue
and gossip of their in-laws, as well as the cold shoulders of their husbands,
should they not produce sons during their first pregnancies. When an overdose
killed a mother-to-be, the formula was finally put to rest. But three
generations later, as Hayat and Yahya's great-granddaughter Mojgan scanned
the women's faces at her son's circumcision, she knew that times had not
really changed. |
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| Kyla Wazana Tompkins |
| "Home is Where You Make It" |
| From the African Students and Arab Students groups on her college campus,
to an International Gay and Lesbian Jewish Conference, Kyla Wazana Tompkins
navigates non-stop through the world of identities. The daughter of Irish
Catholic and Moroccan Jewish immigrants to Canada, Kyla defies our stereotypes
and pushes our comfort zones, challenging us to re-examine perceptions
of who we are in relation to each other. |
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| Hanriette Dahan Kalev |
| "Illusion in Assimilation" |
| You're so pretty; you don't look Moroccan.² Hanriette Dahan Kalev heard
this statement repeatedly since immigrating from Morocco to Israel in
1949, when she was an infant. She learned two lessons from this experience:
1) the more European/less Moroccan she could be, the better; 2) with her
green eyes and light skin, she had the ability to pass. So pass she did.
From a very young age, Hanriette built up an illusion of who she was
a young French girl. She erased her Arabic accent; she never invited friends
home; and she learned everything she could about French history, culture,
and language. She kept up this charade until the day she looked in a mirror
and saw nothing there. |
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| Homa Sarshar |
| "In Exile at Home" |
| For two days in a row in October 1978, renown journalist Homa Sarshar
was informed there were no reports for her to translate for Keyhan, the
daily paper in Tehran. For two days in a row, French reports somehow appeared
in the paper. On the third day, Homa confronted the editor of news services.
What are you thinking, little girl?² he spat angrily, hatred filling his
eyes. You think they're going to let some Jew translate reports on Ayatollah
Khomeini? And a woman Jew at that? The news will be defiled!² Shocked
and humiliated, Homa cleared out her desk and left her work of 12 years.
As she drove home, she had the sinking feeling that it was time to leave
Iran and that the 2,500 year history of Jews in Persia had just come to
an abrupt halt. |
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| Caroline Smadja |
| "The Search to Belong" |
| Surrounded by Tunisian Jews of her parents' generation,
Caroline Smadja grew up with other people's memories and gestures, from
a home that was lost. Family friends added spice, laughter, and boundless
animation wherever they went. They told stories that made Caroline and
her sister collapse in giggles on the floor. They cut each other off constantly,
accompanied each sentence with wide hand gestures, and peppered their
exchanges with Judeo-Arabic exclamations. They had a sense of belonging
that Caroline could never feel among her peers in France. In search of
her own place to call home, Caroline began a lifetime journey crossing
the sites, sounds, and cultural textures of four continents, ultimately
realizing she may never find that illusive sense of belonging. |
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| Ella Shohat |
| "Reflections of an Arab Jew" |
| War is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities.
The Gulf War intensified a pressure already familiar to the Arab Jewish
Diaspora in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict: a pressure to choose
between being a an Arab and being a Jew. Ella Shohat's personal narrative
questions this Euro-centric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the
denial of Arab Jewish voices, both in the North African/Middle Eastern
and American contexts. |
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| Lital Levy |
| "The Flying Camel" |
| Lital Levy spent her 26th birthday at an academic conference addressing
unity between Arabs and Jews. The featured movie told the story of a European-Israeli
professor and a Palestinian sanitation worker, united in a common quest
to restore the famous statue of the Flying Camel, symbol of the Tel Aviv
of pre-State Palestine. Their efforts were thwarted when the camel's wings
were located on a statue in possession of the Angels, a Mizrahi family
that refused to relinquish the wings. The Angels dark, stupid, and violent
were stereotypical, pejorative representations of Mizrahim. Distraught
by the movie, Lital Levy uses the images of the film as a multi-layered
metaphor. She explores the displacement of the hybrid category of Arab
Jew and questions what is at stake in putting that category back together
again. She links her experiences in America and in Israel, revealing the
difficult process of self re-memberment. |
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| Loolwa Khazzoom |
| "We Are Here, and This Is Ours" |
| In 1996, Loolwa Khazzoom flew from the U.S.A. to Israel to attend the
first feminist conference for indigenous African and Middle Eastern Jewish
women. Throughout this conference, multiple identity issues came to a
head, resulting in numerous confrontations and a violent shouting match,
where women stormed out. Documenting and evaluating these conflicts, Loolwa
shares Mizrahi feminist perspectives on complex and volatile issues such
as the Arab-Israel conflict, religious-secular battles, and tensions between
East and West. She holds out the torch for hope that Mizrahi Jewish women
will finally be recognized for who they are and that they will have a
space to call their own. |
