Abstract: For two decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israeli soccer players participated in Asian leagues and associations. During this period, they achieved much and celebrated significant athletic victories. But at the same time, they were met with hostility and boycotts and excluded from entire tournaments, until August 1976, when the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially expelled the Israeli Football Association (IFA) from its ranks. From the outset, the national team's activities in Asia elicited intense discussions about Israel's membership in the AFC that went far beyond the weighing of practical and athletic issues. By tracing these debates as they raged in the Israeli press, in this article I demonstrate that the question of the IFA's regional affiliation was a platform for deeper deliberations about the country's very place on the Asian continent. The highly ambivalent attitudes that emerged, I argue, reflected deep insecurities about the Jewish state's geo-cultural belonging and self-perception that are best understood against the backdrop of Israeli political realities of the 1960s and 70s and in the context of early twentieth-century debates about the orientation of the Zionist movement.

Abstract: This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives—which need not imply any lessening of the import of such racialization. Second, and more specifically, it aims to provoke a careful discussion of the racialization of traditionalist Jews in the particular context of growing and recently established residential enclaves in the suburbs of New York City, and suggests that legal or scholarly understanding of their difference as primarily "religious" is also mistaken.

Abstract: In the 1960s and 70s, several transnational Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Ozar Hatorah, and the Jewish Agency—expressed dire concern over the purported assimilation of Jews into Iranian society, claiming that it stemmed from their upward mobility and increasing enrollment in non-Jewish schools. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents, printed materials, and oral histories in Persian, French, Hebrew, and English, I argue that it was mainly foreign Jews, and not Iranian Jews themselves, who feared the specter of assimilation. In fact, Iranian Jewish parents viewed their children's attendance in non-Jewish schools as integral to their economic and social prosperity in a Muslim-majority country. Ultimately, because Iranian Jews were not as preoccupied with assimilation as their non-Iranian coreligionists, I suggest that an examination of assimilation in the Iranian context can help us complicate the importance of this concept in modern Jewish historical scholarship.

Abstract: This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article "Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication.

Abstract: Early twentieth-century Palestine was a noisy place. Urban streets echoed with the cries of hawkers, the songs of nationalists, and the whistles of trains announcing their arrival. Conversations in Arabic, Turkish, Yiddish, English, Ladino, French, Hebrew, and other languages reverberated in the soundscape. In this article, I explore how Palestine's residents made sense of what they heard, focusing on one type of sound in particular: Hebrew-language accents. Building on the work of sensory historians, and focusing on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, I investigate the following questions: How did Palestine's residents use accents to mark identity, belonging, and exclusion? What were the stakes of sounding different? And what did it mean to sound "native"?

Abstract: This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives—which need not imply any lessening of the import of such racialization. Second, and more specifically, it aims to provoke a careful discussion of the racialization of traditionalist Jews in the particular context of growing and recently established residential enclaves in the suburbs of New York City, and suggests that legal or scholarly understanding of their difference as primarily "religious" is also mistaken.

Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.

Abstract: For two decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israeli soccer players participated in Asian leagues and associations. During this period, they achieved much and celebrated significant athletic victories. But at the same time, they were met with hostility and boycotts and excluded from entire tournaments, until August 1976, when the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially expelled the Israeli Football Association (IFA) from its ranks. From the outset, the national team's activities in Asia elicited intense discussions about Israel's membership in the AFC that went far beyond the weighing of practical and athletic issues. By tracing these debates as they raged in the Israeli press, in this article I demonstrate that the question of the IFA's regional affiliation was a platform for deeper deliberations about the country's very place on the Asian continent. The highly ambivalent attitudes that emerged, I argue, reflected deep insecurities about the Jewish state's geo-cultural belonging and self-perception that are best understood against the backdrop of Israeli political realities of the 1960s and 70s and in the context of early twentieth-century debates about the orientation of the Zionist movement.

Abstract: In the 1960s and 70s, several transnational Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Ozar Hatorah, and the Jewish Agency—expressed dire concern over the purported assimilation of Jews into Iranian society, claiming that it stemmed from their upward mobility and increasing enrollment in non-Jewish schools. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents, printed materials, and oral histories in Persian, French, Hebrew, and English, I argue that it was mainly foreign Jews, and not Iranian Jews themselves, who feared the specter of assimilation. In fact, Iranian Jewish parents viewed their children's attendance in non-Jewish schools as integral to their economic and social prosperity in a Muslim-majority country. Ultimately, because Iranian Jews were not as preoccupied with assimilation as their non-Iranian coreligionists, I suggest that an examination of assimilation in the Iranian context can help us complicate the importance of this concept in modern Jewish historical scholarship.

Abstract: The Tunisian revolution of 2011 marked a partial reconfiguration of the political elite and the beginning of a protracted democratization process whose long-term success is far from secured. In this article, I discuss societal/political/cultural transformations toward democracy in Tunisia since 2011 through the prism of its tiny Jewish minority. The perceived homogeneity of Tunisian society has come under increasing scrutiny since the revolution, and this includes a heightened visibility of the country's Jewish community and a degree of public debate on related topics. I focus on three cases: the preservation of Jewish cultural heritage, the demise of an NGO designed to fight racism and antisemitism in Tunisia, and the commemoration of the German occupation of Tunisia during World War II. Addressing contemporary Tunisian history "from the margins" enables a more nuanced understanding of political struggles that accompany processes of de-/re-territorializing Tunisian collective identities.