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This chapter examines the experiences and responses of Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel to stigmatization and discrimination. It first explains the historical and socioeconomic context for the three groups, taking into account the legacy of Zionism that shapes their experiences, the status of Arab Palestinians in the Jewish polity, and questions of ethno-national identity, exclusion, and inclusion affecting Mizrahim and Ethiopians in Israel. It then provides an overview of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa metropolitan area, the research site, before discussing the role of national belonging, race, and ethnicity in the formation of groupness among the respondents, with emphasis on self-identification and group boundaries. It also analyzes the groups' experiences of stigmatization and discrimination, and especially assault on worth, before concluding with an assessment of their reactions to such incidents as well as their views about the best ways to deal with social exclusion.

This chapter examines the lives and writings of a few Mizrahi Jews who succeeded in Israel despite the challenges they faced there. Focusing on the first wave of immigration and its aftermath through novels, poetry, autobiographies and films, this chapter uses the asylum metaphor to describe Israel. Initially, Israel was an asylum for European Jews (Ashkenazis) until they turned the asylum into their state. From that point on, they created asylums for various constituencies, including Jewish Arabs. The chapter also considers the process of acculturation in the asylum of Israeli transit camps, which has figured prominently in Mizrahi literature; how ‘foreigners’ in Israel achieved nationalisation through religion and not-religion; and the exodus of thousands of Iraqi Jews to Israel; the role of language in Jewish Arabs' self-fashioning in Israel; and the political awakening of Jewish Arab intellectuals.

Among Israelis, Jewish ethnicity is usually understood as a dichotomy between Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) and Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern descent). The feature most stereotypically associated with Mizrahis is the production of the pharyngeal segments ([ʕ] and [ħ]), which all extant research suggests has been lost in the speech of most contemporary Israelis. In this chapter I examine Israeli metalinguistic discourse, and demonstrate that, despite the reported infrequency of pharyngealization, it is highly salient in the speech community. I argue that pharyngealization is enregistered as a Mizrahi feature, and that it is a stylistic resource with a rich set of indexical meanings that goes far beyond an ethnic marker. Using data from two Israeli reality TV shows, I show that participants on these shows, who do not consistently pharyngealize, do so when performing attributes associated with a stereotypical Mizrahi persona.

This chapter examines two intertwined processes related to the emergence and consolidation of the Jewish diasporist social movement in the US: ethical outrage and unlearning. It focuses on the stories activists tell about their own self-transformation, or how they came to reorient their solidarities through emphatic indignation, reinforced by their unlearning of ideology. The chapter analyzes the stories captured in semi-structured interviews with activists, as well as the testimonies shared on social media. The interviews show how activists portray their processes of re-narration, which inform the shift of their solidarity from Israelis to Palestinians. The chapter likewise investigates the relationships between prior politicization on LGBTQI+ issues, antimilitarism, humanitarianism, and neoliberalismm and assuming the cause of Palestinians. It also introduces the complex operation of pinkwashing and accusations of antisemitism on anti-occupation Jewish activism and broader Palestine solidarity.

This book explores the stigmatizing or discriminatory experiences of ordinary people and how they respond to such experiences, along with the factors that affected their courses of action. Drawing on more than 400 in-depth interviews with African Americans in New York suburbs, Black Brazilians in and around Rio de Janeiro, and Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the book investigates how national configurations of cultural repertoires and group boundaries influence experiences of and responses to stigmatization and discrimination. To this end, the book describes the incidents where respondents—middle- and working-class men and women—were treated unfairly and the interactions where they felt underestimated, overscrutinized, misunderstood, feared, overlooked, shunned, or discriminated against. This introduction explains the book's approach for analyzing how groupness is organized around race, ethnicity, phenotype, nationality, or religion, as well as the challenges and questions it addresses, and how the study was undertaken.

This chapter examines the influence of categorization practice on the study of Jews in Israel. It describes the shift from old frameworks of modernization in favor of the pan-ethnic and Orientalist frameworks for research dealing with the 1950s immigrants. It suggests the shift away from the binary classification of “Mizrahi” Jews (originating in Muslim countries) and “Ashkenazi” Jews from Christian countries toward a split approach based on countries of origin.

This prologue describes the 1959 Wadi Salib riots in the city of Haifa in Israel. After the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, the Arabs who inhabited Haifa fled. Their homes were then occupied by Mizrahi Jews—Jews who were born in Muslim-majority countries, mostly from Morocco. Unfortunately, their background made them a target for discrimination by local Israeli Jews. On 9 July 1959, police confronted a Wadi Salib resident, Ya’akov Akiva (Elkarif), who was drunk and disturbing the peace. Akiva resisted arrest and was shot at by Israeli police. For the Mizrahi Jews, Akiva’s shooting was the last straw. The first episode of the Wadi Salib riots began the following day, as approximately 150–200 people gathered in front of the Rambam synagogue, waving black flags and placards and calling for justice.