"We Are Not Mizrahi . . . We Are Indian Jews: Issues of Culture and Identity in the Indian Jewish Community in Israel."

Friday, October 23
12:30 p.m.
Ballantine Hall 137
Professor Maina Chawla Singh

This talk is based on Dr. Maina Singh's recently published book 'Being Indian, Being Israeli: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Homeland'(New Delhi: Manohar, 2009). This book presents a deeply researched analysis, examining for the first time, all three Jewish communities from India holistically as ‘Indian-Israelis’-- with shared histories of migration, displacement, acculturation and identity in the Jewish Homeland. Based on extensive fieldwork and ethnographic research conducted among Indian Jews across Israel between 2005-8, the book draws upon over 150 interviews and reflects the author’s own deep engagement and familiarity with Israeli society and the complexities of ethnicity and class that underlie the clevages within Israeli Jewish society.

Maina Chawla Singh, a visiting faculty member at American University of Washington, D.C., and associate professor of vocational studies at the University of Delhi