A woman in advanced labor arrived at an Israeli hospital. Seeing that she was a newly arrived Iraqi Jew, a nurse attributed her delay to her primitive Iraqi ways: This woman was probably used to giving birth at home with witches as her attendants. The woman calmly replied, however, that she had been a teacher in Iraq and spoke Arabic, English, and French. Lack of access to services, supercilious attitudes from Ashkenazi Israelis, and a massive decline in the status of Iraqi Jews in Israel combined in this situation to create an experience of misunderstanding and humiliation.
Stories like the one above, culled from the letters, memoirs, and fiction written by Iraqi Jewish immigrants to Israel, form the backbone of Bashkin’s Impossible Exodus. Confronting a historiography of the Iraqi immigration largely drawn from official Zionist agency records, Bashkin constructs an interdisciplinary cultural history of Iraqi Jews’ immigration and rocky...