Who Needs Arab Jewish Identity

Author : Reuven Snir
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2015-02-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004289109

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Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? by Reuven Snir Pdf

In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?: Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities, Professor Reuven Snir, Dean of Humanities at Haifa University, presents a new approach to the study of Arab-Jewish identity and the subjectivities of Arabized Jews. Against the historical background of Arab-Jewish culture and in light of identity theory, Snir shows how the exclusion that the Arabized Jews had experienced, both in their mother countries and then in Israel, led to the fragmentation of their original identities and encouraged them to find refuge in inessential solidarities. Following double exclusion, intense globalization, and contemporary fluidity of identities, singularity, not identity, has become the major war cry among Arabized Jews during the last decade in our present liquid society. "In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Reuven Snir brings out an important contribution to studies of the history, literature and identity of Arabized Jews, showing the significant shifts these communities have undergone in the ways their identities have been defined and constructed in the modern period." - Lisa Bernasek, University of Southampton, in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18.2 (2019)

Author : Massoud Hayoun
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2019-06-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781620974582

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When We Were Arabs by Massoud Hayoun Pdf

WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.

Author : Reuven Snir
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004390683

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Arab-Jewish Literature by Reuven Snir Pdf

Arab-Jewish Literature: The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story offers an account of the development of the art of the Arabic short story among the Arabized Jews during the twentieth century. An anthology of sixteen translated stories are included as an appendix to the book.

Author : Ruth Shamir,Ruth Shamir Popkin
Publisher : Gefen Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9652296716

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Jewish Identity by Ruth Shamir,Ruth Shamir Popkin Pdf

Though the seemingly impossible dream of a sovereign Jewish state became a reality more than sixty years ago, the question of Jewish identity remains as much an enigma as ever. That enigma is at the heart of Dr. Ruth Shamir's book as it explores the history - at times tragic, at times triumphant - of the evolution of Jewish identity in the modern era. Dr. Shamir skillfully guides the reader through a myriad of issues that are today at the center of a passionate debate both in Israel itself as well as in the Diaspora, where half of the world's Jews still live. The debate - and hence the main themes of the book - revolves around such questions as: - Are we a nation or just a religious community? - How do Israelis and Jews around the world conceptualize their loyalties? - How acceptable is Jewish fundamentalism and how does Israel deal with the Arab population within its borders? - How do Diaspora Jews view Israeli identity and how do Israelis define the identity of Diaspora Jews? - Above all, who is a Jew? However difficult it may be to accomodate the many complex and continually changing Jewish identities under the single roof of Judaism, Dr. Shamir contends that we have no alternative - neither for Israelis nor for the Jews of the Diaspora. But if that overarching identity is to be preserved, Jews must internalize the core ideas of multiculturalism to create a multifaceted Jewish identity that positively reflects the freedoms of today's world.

Author : Judith Butler
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231146111

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Parting Ways by Judith Butler Pdf

Judith Butler follows Edward Said’s late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said’s late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler’s startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

Author : Yehouda A. Shenhav
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 0804752966

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The Arab Jews by Yehouda A. Shenhav Pdf

This book is about the social history of the Arab Jews—Jews living in Arab countries—against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissaries—prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.

Author : Yair Auron
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2012-03-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780857453068

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Israeli Identities by Yair Auron Pdf

The question of identity is one of present-day Israel's cardinal and most pressing issues. In a comprehensive examination of the identity issue, this study focuses on attitudes toward the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora; the Holocaust and its repercussions on identity; attitudes toward the state of Israel and Zionism; and attitudes toward Jewish religion. Israeli Arab students (Israeli Palestinians) and Jewish Israeli students were asked corresponding questions regarding their identity. It was found that, rather than lessening its impact over the years, the Holocaust has become a major factor, at times the paramount factor in Jewish identity. Similarly, among Palestinians the Naqba has become a major factor in Palestinian-Israeli identity. However, the overall results show that the identity of a Jewish citizen of Israel is not purely Israeli, nor is it purely Jewish. It is, to varying degrees, a synthesis of Jewish and Israeli components, depending on the particular sub-groups or sub-identities. The same holds for Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians who have neither a purely Israeli identity nor a purely Palestinian (or Arab) one.

Author : Bashir Bashir,Leila Farsakh
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0231199201

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The Arab and Jewish Questions - Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond by Bashir Bashir,Leila Farsakh Pdf

Author : Susan A Glenn,Naomi B Sokoloff
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2011-07-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780295800837

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Boundaries of Jewish Identity by Susan A Glenn,Naomi B Sokoloff Pdf

The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question �Who and what is Jewish?� These essays are focused especially on the issues of who creates the definitions, and how, and in what social and political contexts. The ten leading authorities writing here also look at the forces, ranging from new genetic and reproductive technologies to increasingly multicultural societies, that push against established boundaries. The authors examine how Jews have imagined themselves and how definitions of Jewishness have been established, enforced, challenged, and transformed. Does being a Jew require religious belief, practice, and formal institutional affiliation? Is there a biological or physical aspect of Jewish identity? What is the status of the convert to another religion? How do definitions play out in different geographic and historical settings? What makes Boundaries of Jewish Identity distinctive is its attention to the various Jewish �epistemologies� or ways of knowing who counts as a Jew. These essays reveal that possible answers reflect the different social, intellectual, and political locations of those who are asking. This book speaks to readers concerned with Jewish life and culture and to audiences interested in religious, cultural, and ethnic studies. It provides an excellent opportunity to examine how Jews fit into an increasingly diverse America and an increasingly complicated global society.

Author : Abigail Jacobson,Moshe Naor
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2016-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781512600070

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Oriental Neighbors by Abigail Jacobson,Moshe Naor Pdf

Focusing on Oriental Jews and their relations with their Arab neighbors in Mandatory Palestine, this book analyzes the meaning of the hybrid Arab-Jewish identity that existed among Oriental Jews, and discusses their unique role as political, social, and cultural mediators between Jews and Arabs. Integrating Mandatory Palestine and its inhabitants into the contemporary Semitic-Levantine surroundings, Oriental Neighbors illuminates broad areas of cooperation and coexistence, which coincided with conflict and friction, between Oriental and Sephardi Jews and their Arab neighbors. The book brings the Oriental Jewish community to the fore, examines its role in the Zionist nation-building process, and studies its diverse and complex links with the Arab community in Palestine.

Author : Moshe Behar,Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Publisher : UPNE
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781584658856

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Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought by Moshe Behar,Zvi Ben-Dor Benite Pdf

The first anthology of modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought

Author : Menachem Klein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190257187

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Lives in Common by Menachem Klein Pdf

Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years. Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years.

Author : Shlomo Sand
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 113 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2014-10-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781781686140

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How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand Pdf

Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.

Author : Sayed Kashua
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-04-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780802194640

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Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua Pdf

An award-winning novel of love, betrayal, and Arab Israeli identity by the author of Dancing Arabs—“one of the most important contemporary Hebrew writers” (Haaretz). A successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist find their lives intersecting under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in Jerusalem, a large house, and a Mercedes. He speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and lives with his wife and two young children. To maintain his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he makes frequent visits to a local bookstore and picks up popular novels. But on one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. Tucked in its pages, he finds a love letter, in Arabic . . . in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, he decides to hunt down the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan. But Yonatan’s identity is more complex than the attorney imagined. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer breaks the fragile threads that hold all of their lives together. Winner of the 2011 Bernstein Prize, Second Person Singular is “part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery” (The Boston Globe) that offers “sharp insights on the assumptions made about race, religion, ethnicity, and class that shape Israeli identity” (Publishers Weekly). “[Kashua’s] dry wit shines.” —Los Angeles Times “Kashua’s protagonists struggle, often comically . . . making his narratives more nuanced than some of the other Arabs writing about the conflict” —Newsweek “Sayed Kashua is a brilliant, funny, humane writer who effortlessly overturns any and all preconceptions about the Middle East. God, I love him.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

Author : Reuven Snir
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2017-06-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781474420532

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Modern Arabic Literature by Reuven Snir Pdf

The study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.