Negotiating New Territory: Indian Jewish Women and Families in Toronto
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40064Abstract
This article explores the obstacles that Indian Jewish women faced in the immigration and settlement process in Toronto between 1964 and 1980. I argue that the feminization of domestic labour created new and unforeseen challenges for Indian Jewish women in family life in the aftermath of arriving in Toronto. These challenges reflect not simply that they became solely responsible for the mundane performance of domestic labour and childcare, but also the importance of these tasks in maintaining Indian Jewish culture and identity within the family.References
Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasilius (eds.), Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 29-52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442677944
Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasilius, “Foreign Domestic Worker Policy in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship,” in
Amber Gazso, “Mothers’ Maintenance of Families Through Market and Family Care Relations,” in Nancy Mandell (ed.), Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (Toronto, ON: Pearson Canada, 2010), pp. 219-246.6
Audrey Macklin, “On the Inside Looking In: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada,” in Wenona Giles and Sedef Arat-Koc (eds.), Maid in the Market: Women’s Paid Domestic Labour (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing), pp. 13-39.
Audrey Nasar, “Negotiating New Terrain: Egyptian women at Home in America,” in Hasia R. Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (eds.), A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America (New Brunswick- London: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 127-128.
Charles Shahar, “The Jewish Population of Canada – The 2011 National Household Survey,” Berman Jewish Databank, A Project of the Jewish Federations of North America, Jewish Federations of Canada – UIA, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/details.cfm?Study-ID=743>.
Enakshi Dua, “Beyond Diversity: Exploring Ways in Which the Discourse of Race Has Shaped the Institution of the Nuclear Family,” in Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson (eds.), Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Thought (Toronto, ON: Women’s Press, 1999), pp. 237-260.
Helen Ralston, “Race, Class, Gender and Work Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, 23, 2 (1991), p. 134.
Himani Bannerji, “The Paradox of Diversity: The Construction of Multicultural Canada and “Women of Colour,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (2000): 537-560. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-5395(00)00130-8
Joan G. Roland, The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era (New Brunswick-London: Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 252.
Joan G. Roland, “Adaptation and Identity Among Second-Generation Indian Jews in Israel,” the Jewish Journal of Sociology, 37, 1 (1995), pp. 5-37.
Kate Bezanson, Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2006) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442675209
Kelly Amanda Train, “Authenticity, Identity and the Politics of Belonging: Sephardic Jews from North Africa and India Within the Toronto Jewish Community” (PhD diss., York University, 2008), p. 318.
Kelly Amanda Train, “East Meets West: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in Canada and the United States,” in Barry L. Stiefel and Hernan Tesler-Mabé (eds.), Neither in Dark Speeches Nor in Similtudes: Reflections and Refractions Between Canadian and American Jews (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), pp. 195-198.
Kelly Amanda Train, “Well, How Can You be Jewish and European? Indian Jewish Experiences in the Toronto Jewish Community and the Creation of Congregation BINA,” American Jewish History, 100, 1(2016), pp. 5-6.
Lisa Jakubowski, Immigration and the Legalization of Racism (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 1997), 10-22.
Meg Luxton, More than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home (Toronto, ON: Women’s Press, 2009).
Memorandum by Joseph Kage to Louis Poch and A.J. Arnold, October 2, 1967, Canadian Immigration File, JIAS papers, Ontario Jewish Archives.
Morton Weinfeld, Randal F. Schnoor, and David S. Koffman, “Overview of Canadian Jewry,” in Arnold Dashefsky and Ira Sheskin (eds.), American Jewish Year Book 2012 (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer, 2013), p. 61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5204-7_2
Nathan Katz, Who are the Jews of India? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 88-89, 124-125, 158-159.
Pat and Hugh Armstrong, The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Pramila Aggarwal and Tania Das Gupta, “Grandmothering at Work: Conversations with Sikh Punjabi Grandmothers in Toronto,” South Asian Diaspora, 5, 1 (2013), pp. 77-90.
Ralston, “Race, Class, Gender and Work Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada,” (above, note 6), pp. 135-136.
Ratna Ghosh, “Multicultural Policy and Social Integration: South Asian Canadian Women,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 1, 1(1994), pp. 49-68; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/097152159400100104
Roland, The Jewish Communities of India (above, n 11), p. 252.
Roland, The Jewish Communities of India (above, n 11), pp. 261-265.
Roland, “Adaptation and Identity Among Second- Generation Indian Jews in Israel,” (above, n 11), pp. 5-37.
Roland, “Adaptation and Identity Among Second-Generation Indian Jews in Israel,” (above, n 11), pp. 5-37.
Ruby Daniel and Barbara C. Johnson, Ruby of Cochin: An Indian ewish Woman Remembers (Philadelphia: The Jewish PublicationSociety, 1995), pp. 69-77.
Sandi Pelly, Charles Shahar, Robin Gofine, and Randal Schnoor, “The Jewish Community of Toronto, 2011,” Berman Jewish Databank, A Project of the Jewish Federations of North America, Jewish Federations of Canada – UIA, and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/details.cfm?StudyID=733>.
Sarah Taieb-Carlen, “Monocultural Education in a Pluralist Environment: Ashkenazi Curricula in Toronto Jewish Educational Institutions,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, 24, 3 (1992), pp. 75-86.
Sarah Taieb-Carlen, “The North African Jews in Toronto Today: Assimilation or Survival,” in Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman (eds.), From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 151-154
Saul Joel, “Bene Israel Immigration and Its Social- Cultural Background,” (Unpublished MSW Research Report, Montreal: McGill University, School of Social Work), pp. 100-117.
Sedef Arat-Koc, “From “Mothers of the Nation” to Migrant Workers,” in Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasilius (eds.), Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 53-80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442677944-005
Sheldon Kirshner, “Minority Within a Minority: India’s Jews Face Racial Prejudice,” Canadian Jewish News, April 11, 1978, p. 15.
Tania Das Gupta, “Political Economy of Gender, Race, and Class: Looking at South Asian Immigrant Women in Canada,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, 26, 1(1994), p. 64;
Yolande Cohen and Martin Messika, “Sharing and Unsharing Memories of Jews of Moroccan Origin in Montréal and Paris Compared,” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC, 4(2012).
Yolande Cohen, Martin Messika and Sara Cohen Fournier, “Memories of Departures: Stories of Jews from Muslim Lands in Montreal,” in Steven High (ed.), Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the A!ermath of Mass Violence (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), pp. 311-331.
Yolande Cohen, “The Migrations of Moroccan Jews to Montreal: Memory, (Oral) History and Historical Narrative,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 10, 2(2011), pp. 245-262.
Downloads
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Canadian Jewish Studies/ Études juives canadiennes is a journal dedicated to the open exchange of information; therefore the author agrees that the work published in the journal be made available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerrcial-No Derivative Woks 4.0 Unported License. The publisher (Association for Canadian Jewish Studies / Association des études juives canadiennes) recognizes the author's intellectual property rights. The author grants the publisher first serial publication rights and the non-exclusive right to mount, preserve and distribute the intellectual property. The journal is digitized and published on the open access website http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/cjs/index.
