ASHKENASIM / Mizrahim
ASHKENAZIM and Mizrahim by Henriette Dahan Kalev
The term ‘Ashkenaz’ meant Germany. It was used in the past mainly in Europe by Jews. ‘Ashkenazim’ referred to German Jews. In Israel the content of the term changed and its content has been extended. It is applied to indicate all the Jews of European or American origin who live in Israel. The transformation and extension in the utilization of the term is related to political, cultural and economic context and marks ethnic struggles between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim (in Hebrew, “Orientals”).
Mizrahim is the term applied to Jews of Arab and Moslem countries.
In 1959 in Wadi Salib, an Arab neighborhood in Haifa, and in 1971, and in Mussrara, yet another Arab nationhood in Jerusalem, Jews of Moroccan origin rebelled against racism and their being discriminated against. They accused the Zionist establishment because of their suffering and pointed the accusations in the direction of the Ashkenazim who controlled all the states’ cultural, economic and political institutions. Hashkenazim mostly belonged to the hegemonic groups and Mizrahim were marginalized to poor area. Therefore when Mizrahim employ the term Ashkenazim it often marks a
pejorative sense. Because of the negative connotations that echo from the term ‘Ashkenazim’, it is immediately denied and the person approached as such often responds by stating: “I am not an Ashkenazi, I am an Israeli”.
Henriette Dahan Kalev is the head of the Gender Studies Program in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben Gurion University.
Ashkenazim by Rachel Leah Jones
Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) are Israel’s “white folks.” And like most white folks in a multicultural society, they see themselves as the social norm, and don’t think of themselves in racial or ethnic terms because by now, “aren’t we all Israeli?” After all, Yiddish has been replaced with Hebrew, exile with occupation, the shtetl with the settlement, and old-fashioned irony with post-modern cynicism. But the paradox of whiteness in Israel is that Ashkenazim aren’t exactly “white folks” historically. A story that begins in the Rhineland and ends in the Holy Land (or is it the other way around?), Ashkenaz looks at whiteness in Israel and wonders: how did the “Others” of Europe become the “Europe” of the others?
Rachel Leah Jones, filmmaker of the film “Ashkenaz”
ASHKENASIM by Shlomit Lir
Tony Morrison opens her novel “The Bluest Eye” by citing extracts from Dick and Jane, a popular series of textbooks used to teach reading skills to schoolchildren, which depicts the life of a happy white family. On one level, the role of these extracts in the novel is to emphasis the gap between an idealized happy life and the difficult life of poverty experienced by the heroine of the book. On a deeper level these extracts demonstrate how stereotypes are structured into the language and work similarly to a compiled computer virus: they enter subconscious models of thought and narrate ideals which can lead to self-alienation, as is the case with the black kids reading these stories, wishing they looked like their heroes. Believing that there is something wrong in the way they are as they are.
In Israel, to be an Ashkenazi is to belong to a subtext which narrates superiority. A subtext which is hidden but quite clear. It presents a hierarchy based on ethnic background and on color. This subtext is written into commercials, textbooks, TV shows – all in which there is dominance of Ashkenazic people.
But what does it mean to be an Ashkenazi in Israel? To a certain extent it means to pretend; for though most Ashkenazi Jews came from Eastern European countries, there is an assumption of being of Western European descent. A creation of an idealized Europe. Idealized European features. The I Am OK You Are Not Ok game taken from years of living in the Diaspora with new players. Jews from Islamic countries are now regarded as inferior to enable the fantasy of superiority to go on.
Shlomit Lir, Co-Founder of the feminist organisation “Achoti”
