Rachel Wahba - Biography

Rachel Wahba is a psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and in Marin County. She is also a published author of several anthologies relating to being a Mizrahi/Sephardi Jew of Egyptian and Iraqi 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. Born in Bombay, Wahba grew up Stateless in Japan where her family waited 20 years for immigration to the United States. She has written about her mother's traumatic experience during the Farhud, the Arabic version of pogrom in Baghdad in 1941.

Upon arriving in the U.S. Wahba was thrilled to find her brown skin color (unappreciated in Japan as "curombo" /darky) a plus—in 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 that represented Jews from all over the world to realize that most American Jews at that time in the 70's did not understand that a Jew could be Middle Eastern/ African and be a Jew. 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 food" 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, Egypt until he left Egypt in 1939.

Rachel Wahba is also co-founder with her former partner Judy Dlugacz of Olivia (company) Travel, a lesbian travel and resort company.

Rachel currently lives in Marin county with her daughter Tiffany Wagner and granddaughter Rebecca.

Bibliography

• Nice Jewish Girls
• Twice Blessed
• The Flying Camel

• Coming Out of the Frame in Lesbians in Psychoanalyis
• A Twinship Disruption in Progress in Psychoanalytic Self Psychology