@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3427},
      author = {May, Chelsie},
      title = {Watching Whiteness Work: The Racialization of Jewish Women  in Iraq and Israel/Palestine},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {247},
      abstract = {“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. 
},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3427},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3427},
}