Rachel Wahba

Read Sami Michael’s novel “Victoria” and tell me we were not Arab Jews. Read Albert Memmi, Naim Kattan, Sasson Somekh. Respect. It’s a no brainer. How could we live in what became Arab lands under Arab rule, for a thousand plus years without becoming Arabic? We were not Jewish Arabs but Arab Jews, as Albert Memmi unpacks in What is an Arab Jew? (“Jews And Arabs”). My parents were Arab Jews, from deeply rooted Iraqi and Egyptian Jewish communities predating the Muslim Conquest

When I have to leave my synagogue because its progressive agenda includes distancing from Israel, I fear feeling something I thought I was done with once I got to the United States. Unlike my parents I never knew what it felt to belong to a country, to have a native language, a national anthem, a passport. Until her Iraq and his Egypt took their passports away. Jew became our nationality. I never had any other. Born in India but not Indian, Japan was home for twenty years unt