Orit Bashkin is a historian and a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History.
Bashkin received her her B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1995 and 1999 from Tel Aviv University, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004. As of 2023 she is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History. [1] Bashkin began her research on Iraq in the mid-1990s. [2]
Farhud was the pogrom or the "violent dispossession" that was carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on 1–2 June 1941, immediately following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War. The riots occurred in a power vacuum that followed the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali while the city was in a state of instability. The violence came immediately after the rapid defeat of Rashid Ali by British forces, whose earlier coup had generated a short period of national euphoria, and was fueled by allegations that Iraqi Jews had aided the British. More than 180 Jews were killed and 1,000 injured, although some non-Jewish rioters were also killed in the attempt to quell the violence. Looting of Jewish property took place and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.
The history of the Jews in Iraq is documented from the time of the Babylonian captivity c. 586 BCE. Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world's oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities.
From 1951 to 1952, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted between 120,000 and 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel via Iran and Cyprus. The massive emigration of Iraqi Jews was among the most climactic events of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim World.
The Hashemite Arab Federation was a short-lived confederation that lasted from 14 February to 2 August 1958, between the Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan. Although the name implies a federal structure, it was de facto a confederation.
Ya'qub Bilbul was an Iraqi Jewish writer. His literary works were published in Arabic, and he achieved recognition as early as 1936 after publishing an article in the Iraqi journal, Al-Hatif. Known for his naturalistic stories, he is considered one of the first writers of social realist fiction in Iraq, and a pioneer of the Iraqi novel and short story.
The Kurdish or Kurdish chronology is based on the solar Hijri calendar, and since its origin is usually the establishment of the Medes' rule in Iran or in some regions, the conquest of Nineveh by the Medes, it is also known as the 'mad ماد' calendar.
The United Religious Front was a political alliance of the four major religious parties in Israel, as well as the Union of Religious Independents, formed to contest the 1949 elections.
Shafiq Ades was a Syrian-born Iraqi-Jewish businessman. He was widely known as the wealthiest and best-connected Jew in the country. Based in Basra, he had all of his assets confiscated by the Iraqi government and was subsequently sentenced to death during a rushed show trial, which alleged that he was a Zionist and a communist; it had become a criminal offense in Iraq and the other Arab countries for both Jews and non-Jews to be affiliated with Israel in any way following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. More specifically, Ades was tried on charges of supplying weapons to Israel and of supporting the Iraqi Communist Party, though neither of these claims was backed up with any evidence in court and Ades was not given the right to a proper defense. Four months after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, he was executed by hanging at his residence in front of a crowd of over 12,000 people. His execution was among the events that contributed to the Jewish exodus from Iraq.
Iraqi nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts the belief that Iraqis form a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Iraqis of different ethnoreligious groups such as Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Mandeans, Shabaks and Yarsans.
Relations between Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and the Arab world ranged from indifference, resistance, collaboration and emulation. Nazi Germany used collaborators throughout the Arab world to support their political goals. The cooperative political and military relationships were based on shared hostilities towards common enemies, such as the United Kingdom, the French Third Republic, along with communism, and Zionism. Another foundation of such collaborations was the antisemitism of the Nazis and their hostility towards the United Kingdom and France, which was admired by some Arab and Muslim leaders, most notably the exiled Palestinian leader, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini.
'Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani (1903–1997) was an Iraqi historian and politician. Al-Hasani was a prominent proponent of Iraqi nationalism. He was also a proponent of Arab nationalism.
Dar al-Hikma was an underground publishing house, set up by the Iraqi Communist Party in September 1945. It published literature on politics, science, economy and culture. It issued Arabic translations on Friedrich Engels' Origin of the Family, Maxim Gorky's Mother and texts of Stalin on dialectics and historical materialism. The main source for the literature published was English-language books brought from the Soviet Union. Party members working with bookstores in Baghdad and Amarah enabled the sales of the books. Dar al-Hikma was financed by contributions from party members, the party managed to gather 6,000 Iraqi dinars for the purpose. Dar al-Hikma had a short life-span.
Iraqi Jews in Israel, also known as the Bavlim, are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Iraqi Jewish communities, who now reside within the state of Israel. They number around 450,000.
Lev Hakak is an Israeli-born American lawyer, academic, novelist and poet. He is a Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the author of several books on Hebrew literature. He has written four poetry collections and two novels.
The Senate of Iraq was the unelected upper house of the bicameral parliament established by the Mandatory Iraq's 1925 constitution. There were around twenty Senators, appointed for eight years by the King of Iraq. The Senate remained in existence until the 1958 revolution.
The Arabic-language journal al-Ḥurrīya was published in Baghdad in 1924 and 1925. The Christian Rafa'il Butti (1901-1956), an Iraqi intellectual and well-known journalist, edited one volume with a total of ten issues. The content focused on political and literary topics of the Arab world at that time.
MirS.Baṣrī was an Iraqi Jewish writer, economist, journalist, and poet. Among many public positions he held, Basri served as the head and central leader of Baghdad's Jewish community.
In 1956, riots took place in Iraq in support of Gamal Abdel Nasser during the Suez Crisis, and in opposition to political prisoners held by the regime of King Faisal II of Iraq. Communists and Nationalists took to the streets in Najaf, and soon after the protests spread to Mosul and Sulaymaniyah. In November, 2 demonstrators were killed and another wounded. In December, the riots spread to Hayy. The riots ended after they were dispersed by the police.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn is currently the Visiting assistant professor of Israel Studies at Northwestern University. She was formerly the University Research Lecturer and Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel and Hebrew Studies at the University of Oxford, historian and author. In May 2017, Harvard University Press published her first book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement. She began fieldwork for the book in 2008.
The Chamber of Deputies of Iraq was the elected lower house of the bicameral parliament established by the Mandatory Iraq's 1925 constitution. There were initially 87 deputies, who were elected The Chamber of Deputies remained in existence until the 1958 revolution. The number of deputies was later increased to 141.