Frankely Judaic: Explorations In Jewish Studies

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for treatment, and when their families inquired after them, were told that they’d died; and the Ringworm Affair, which subjected thousands of Mizrahi immigrants to multiple radiation doses as a treatment for the fungal skin infection ringworm–a treatment that raised the risk for cancer and other diseases. In this episode, legal scholar Inbal Blau, a legal scholar and assistant professor at the Ono Academic College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, examines how tort law has enabl