A Community Dwelling on the Hyphen: Negotiations of Identity Among Iraqi Jews in New York City and Long Island

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A Community Dwelling on the Hyphen: Negotiations of Identity Among Iraqi Jews in New York City and Long Island A COMMUNITY DWELLING ON THE HYPHEN: NEGOTIATIONS OF IDENTITY AMONG IRAQI JEWS IN NEW YORK CITY AND LONG ISLAND by GABRIELLA C. KALLAS Amal Eqeiq, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in American Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 20, 2016 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..3 Preface……………………………………………………………………………………5 Introduction: An Identity Torn Apart By History………………………………………..10 At the Intersection of the Tigris and Hudson: Writing Iraqi Jewish New York History...31 Iraqi Jewish Community-Building and Identity Formation in the Post-9/11 Era...……...57 “Rocking and Rolling…From Homeland/To Homeland”: A Case Study in Iraqi Jewish Identity…………………………………………………………………………………...77 Conclusion: The Iraqi Jew We Can Become…………………………………………….98 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………112 3 Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the help, love, and support of so many people. I would like to express all the gratitude in the world to my advisor, Amal Eqeiq. Without her class on Arab women memoirs, I would have never even come to this topic, and I am so grateful for her constant motivation, incredible insight, and for always, since my sophomore year as an Arabic student, pushing me to keep bettering myself and my work. Her dedication to her students is absolutely inspiring. I am so fortunate to have been able to work with her for three years. I am also so thankful to have had the chance to work with Mérida Rúa and Mark Reinhardt, both of whose comments improved my work tremendously. Mérida Rúa’s advice on writing my interviews and observations, and our conversations both in and outside of class, really brought my work to life and returned me to the people my thesis was really about. I am so grateful for Mark Reinhardt’s work with me throughout my thesis, from the proposal stage to my final draft, for challenging me to continue adding nuance to my narratives and histories, and for his patience and support in all stages of the process as I rambled through my thoughts and hopes for my project. I have had so many professors and teachers whose lessons have inspired the work in this thesis. To Magnus Bernhardsson, and my tutorial partner and close friend Olivia Daniels, thank you so much for a semester of intensive engagement with Israeli-Palestinian history, and for helping me build more nuance and understanding into my work. I am thankful to Carmen Whalen and Ondine Chavoya for engaging me in many works in Latino/a Studies that made their way into this project, as well as to Dorothy Wang for inspiring me in my first American Studies class to pursue this major, and spend my college career studying oppression and social justice. I am also indebted to my incredible high school teachers, Mr. DeVito, whose dedication improved my writing drastically in my last two years and finally made me feel like a writer, Mr. Rosenberg, for his enthusiastic lectures and creative projects and prompts that made history come alive for me, and Ms. Schutt, whose class in 10th grade was the first time I truly felt intellectually passionate. I am lucky to have so many supportive friends and family members who helped me through this project. I could not have done this without my lovely carrel buddies, Brandon Mancilla, Cleo Nevakivi-Callanan, and Hayley Elszasz. You’ve all inspired me this year with your dedication to and passion for your work. To Brady Hirsch, thank you for countless days spent in cafés, for always lending your ear and your thoughts in times of thesis confusion and crisis, and for continually pushing me to consider new ideas and to reach new heights. To my family, who have instilled a love and passion for learning in me since birth: Dad, thank you for listening to my crazed late night (and midday) phone calls, and for your tireless copy editing—I’m glad that law review training continues to come in handy. Mom, your endless support and love (and pictures of Stevie) kept me going throughout this project. Joe, thank you for always pushing me in my work and asking questions to 4 improve it. To my older brother Johnnie, thank you for continually inspiring a love for social justice in me. I am so grateful for all of you, and for the love you have given me. Finally, I am so, so indebted to all of the Iraqi Jewish New Yorkers who have lent their time, words, and stories to my project and for welcoming me into their synagogue and community with open arms. This project, obviously, would not exist without all of you, without your commitment to your histories and culture, and I am so blessed to have been able to briefly be a part of such a beautiful community. 5 Preface My interviewees always asked me why I was interested in Iraqi Jewishness, and, often, I was dishonest with them. I generally used my background as a way of explaining my thesis topic. I am an Ashkenazi Jew on my mother’s side, I would explain, and my father’s family is Greek (and Greek Orthodox). I had always been interested in Sephardic Jewish culture as a fusion of the two sides of my family, and my interest grew even further once I began a major in Arabic Studies. I hadn’t even known that Arab Jews really existed in any large numbers until junior year of college. And so, I saw the study of Arab Jews as a synthesis of all of these areas that I was interested in: Jewishness from my own background, Arabness from my major, and Arab Jewishness through many of its shared customs with Sephardic Jewry. The explanation wasn’t completely off, and my background did allow me better entry into the world that I was studying. I was able to understand many of the Jewish practices, prayers, and holidays that my interviewees referenced, although, there were many that I, embarrassed, had to ask for clarification about. I could joke with an interviewee about whose baklava was better, and in the same breath rattle off ten people that they might know from their local (Ashkenazi) reform synagogue. In all honesty, though, my work on Iraqi Jews was often about my fervently Jewish, pro-Palestinian politics. I come from a family that, like many Jewish families, emphasizes education and social justice. My brother is a labor organizer and my mother represents patients and doctors against greedy healthcare companies. Growing up in wealthy (and Jewish) Scarsdale, New York, my parents never let my brother and me forget that having more did not mean having worked harder, and having less did not 6 equal laziness. There were reasons, I was taught, why certain groups of people had more and others had less, and these reasons came from different forms of injustice. In spite of my mother’s and grandmother’s pro-Israeli sentiments, it was really their fault that I ended up joining Students for Justice in Palestine my first semester at Williams. I did not understand why I was allowed to go on a free trip to Israel, paid for by the government, and attain citizenship whenever I pleased, when my Palestinian friend, with deeper roots there than I could ever imagine, could not even enter the country. I did not understand why I could not criticize the bombings and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, the open-air prison that human beings were kept in in Gaza, or the blatantly apartheid- style policies that separated Palestinians and Israelis, without being called a self-hating Jew. Friends at home called me anti-Semitic, while new friends at school wondered aloud what a shame it was that I felt the way I did, being such an intelligent, young Jewish woman. I often had to ask myself: was I betraying Jews everywhere with my beliefs, as everyone seemed to think? Well, I came to this position through my Jewishness, I thought, so maybe I could study and understand it better through Jewishness. I hadn’t gotten anywhere by distancing myself from Judaism, a process that had been going on since high school, and only intensified in college when I found myself uncomfortable walking through the Jewish center my first couple years, confident I was known as “that” pro-Palestinian Jewish girl. All that had done was plant seeds of self-hatred in myself, as I began to conflate Judaism and Zionism and downplay my Judaism in any way I could (“I’m not really Jewish, I barely even went to Hebrew school,” “I don’t even celebrate holidays,” etc.). My Jewishness only came out as a political tool to make people listen to the pro- 7 Palestinian arguments that my non-Jewish friends, and, specifically, my Palestinian and Arab friends, had made a hundred times (but of course hadn’t been listened to), and usually more articulately than I had. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I needed to engage Jewish experience as far more nuanced than support of Zionism, free trips to Israel, and clubbing in Tel Aviv. Luckily, Ella Shohat’s “Reflections of an Arab Jew” fell in my lap one day in my Arab Women Memoirs class. I read about an entire group of Jews I had never heard of— Arab Jews—and how they had been forcibly displaced from their homes after the establishment of Israel. These were Jews who did not want or need Israel; in fact, they were directly harmed by its establishment. I began to study Arab Jews in any class or context that I could in order to better understand and complicate my conception of their historical and cultural experience.
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