Background
Born in Bombay, Wahba grew up stateless in Japan where her family waited 20 years to immigrate to the United States.
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Rachel Wahba
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Career
She is also a published author of several anthologies relating to being a Mizrahi/Sephardi Jew of Egyptian and Iraqi-born parents and the indignities suffered by Jews who were forced into second-class (dhimmi) status in their homelands. She has also published essays in psychonalytic approaches to work with women and lesbians. She has written about her mother"s traumatic experience during the Farhud, the Arabic version of a pogrom, in Baghdad in 1941.
Upon arriving in the United States., Wahba was thrilled to find her brown skin color (unappreciated in Japan as "curombo" /darky) a plus in Los Los Angeles
"Where did you get your tan?" replaced hostile taunts in postwar Japan. However it was a revelation to Wahba, who grew up in a multicultural community with a synagogue composed of Jews from all over the world, to realize that most American Jews at that time in the 1970s did not understand that a Jew could be of Middle Eastern/African heritage.
Everything Jewish was defined by the Ashkenazi experience. The Eastern Jew did not exist except in the Torah.
Wahba remains an activist, teaching that Jews are a multicultural people, that Yiddish was only one of many Jewish languages and dialects, including Judeo-Arabic and Ladino, and Jewish cuisine is equally international.
Wahba serves on the Advisory Board of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). Rachel"s father, Maurice Wahba, was born in Egypt and lived in Mansoura and Cairo until he left in 1939.
