2022-23 Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity

2022-23 Frankel Institute: Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity
Project Title: Mizrahim and the Local Politics of Ethnicity in Development Towns

If you’ve ever visited Israel, you most likely spent some time in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, maybe also Haifa and Eilat. But chances are you didn’t go to places like Sderot, Ofakim, and Kiryat Shmona–development towns that are typically poorer and less glamorous than Israel’s larger and more famous cities. 

But while development towns may not attract many tourists, they are fascinating places for scholars such as Erez Tzfadia, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Sapir Academic College, in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, whose current research project explores how the demographics of development towns have changed over time, and what the changes mean for Israeli society.

In this episode, we explore how development towns gave rise to a distinctly Mizrahi Jewish culture and ethnicity, and how waves of new immigrants, starting in the early 1990s, have shaped Mizrahi identity.

The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Erez Tzfadia, "Mizrahim and the Local Politics of Ethnicity in Development Towns"

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for treatment, and when their families inquired after them, were told that they’d died; and the Ringworm Affair, which subjected thousands of Mizrahi immigrants to multiple radiation doses as a treatment for the fungal skin infection ringworm–a treatment that raised the risk for cancer and other diseases.

In this episode, legal scholar Inbal Blau, a legal scholar and assistant professor at the Ono Academic College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, examines how tort law has enabled the victims of these affairs to gain a measure of compensation, and questions to what extent monetary compensation can help right past wrongs, known in legal scholarship as “transitional justice.”


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Inbal Blau, "Mizrahi Discourse on Transitional Justice"

Mizrahiyut, or Mizrahi identity and consciousness, is an Israeli phenomenon, born in the decades after hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and North African lands immigrated to Israel.

But recently, a version of Mizrahi identity has taken root in the United States among the sons and daughters of Mizrahi Jews who have relocated to America. 

In this episode of Frankely Judaic, scholar and Frankel Institute fellow Gal Levy discussed this burgeoning of Mizrahi identity in the US, exploring how and why it developed and what it means for the evolution of Jewish identity in America.


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Gal Levy, "What kind of diversity are we?": Mizrahiut from the Occident

Like most Jews living in Muslim lands, the Jews of Algeria had over the centuries built a vibrant culture, with homegrown traditions, institutions, and religious practices. Tying it all together was the Algerian Jewish community’s unique dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which rendered Arabic in Hebrew script–much like Yiddish, a German dialect written in Hebrew, spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe.

For centuries, the Algerian dialect of Judeo-Arabic was spoken and written by Jews as an everyday language, and also had some liturgical function. But starting around the 1860s, Judeo-Arabic began to be used by Jews throughout the Muslim world for writing and commenting about the modern world of ideas and politics.


In this episode of Frankely Judaic, historian Avner Ofrath, a lecturer in modern history at the University of Bremen, in Germany,  and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, explores the rise and fall of Judeo-Arabic political writing, delving into what drove the phenomenon, the impact it had on Algerian-Jewish life and culture, and why it matters today.


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Avner Ofrath, "A Language of One’s Own: Writing politically in Judeo-Arabic, c. 1860-1914"

Since the earliest years of the modern state of Israel, Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, known as Mizrahim, have had to fight for equal rights and opportunities. Mizrahi Jews were looked down upon by the Zionist establishment as primitive–in many ways the very opposite of the image of the New, Western-style Jew that the establishment hoped to foster.

And so, Mizrahi activists have for decades struggled to be recognized as full and equal members of Israeli society.

But often lost among the larger struggle are the voices and experiences of Mizrahi women, who fought not only for Mizrahi rights but also for the rights of Mizrahi women to prosper and determine the course of their own lives.

This episode of Frankely Judaic features Yali Hashash, a social historian and head of the gender and criminology program at Or Yehuda College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Hashash’s book, Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism, explores the lives of Mizrahi women throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and culture as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Yali Hashash, "Whose Daughter Are You?: Ways of Thinking about Mizrahi Feminism"

A Jewish Studies podcast series featuring the research of Frankel Institute fellows at the University of Michigan.

Inbal Blau, "Mizrahi Discourse on Transitional Justice"

Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan