Frankely Judaic: Explorations In Jewish Studies

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.

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 enabl

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

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Catherine Bonesho Project Title: Gentile Rulers in the Early Jewish Imagination

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge Diversity Fellow, Rodney Caruthers Project Title: Judaism and its Practice Beyond Rivers

2021-2022 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Alexei Sivertsev "Construction of Jewish Identities in 2nd Temple Period"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Liane Feldman Project Title: The Myth of Cultic Centralization in Second Temple Judaism

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity M Tong Line 3: Project Title: "Circumcision and Bodily Discourse"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Oren Ableman Project Title: Resistance to Rome in Second Temple Literature

2021-2022 Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Gregg E. Gardner Project Title: "The Archeology of Diversity in Rural 2nd Temple Era Palestine"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Mark Leuchter Project Title: So Let It Be Written: Persian Imperial Myth and the Formation of Early Jewish Textual Identity

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Lucia Finotto Project Title: Republic of Scholars: Jewish Translators in Medieval Sicily

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Maya Barzilai Project Title: Love and the Zionist Translation Project

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alex Moshkin Project Title: Russian-Israeli Poetry

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Oren Kosansky Project Title: Jews, Alcohol, and Moroccan Mahia

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Roni Masel Project Title: How Jews Became Modern Readers

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alessandro Guetta Project Title: "A Common Tongue": Jewish Translation from Hebrew in Early Modern Italy

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Anita Norich Project Title: Yiddish Women Writers

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Naomi Seidman Project Title: Freud's Jewish Languages

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Julian Levinson Project Title: Flames from the Earth