Zionist orientalism replicated earlier European discourse that had feminized the Jew

Evidence

Twentieth-century Zionist discourse about the meliorability and malleability of the Mizrahi Jew has paralleled the previous century’s debates in Europe about the improvement of the civil status of the Jews. Hegemonic Zionist sensibility feminized the oriental Jew as irrational, sensual, inconstant, and weak, just as European discourse had feminized the Jew (and the oriental in general) for centuries before. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the book’s own theme in the Complaints About Immodesty article — the same feminization and orientalizing rhetoric recycled across contexts, here applied by Jews to their co-religionists.
• SEED: Angle: how an oppressed group replicates the oppressor’s discourse against an internal ‘other’ — Mizrahi Jews absorbing and redeploying European orientalism.