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During the postwar period of 1948–56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as Oriental Jewry, represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite their large numbers, Mizrahim were considered outsiders because of their non-European origins. Viewed as foreigners who came from culturally backward and distant lands, they suffered decades of socioeconomic, political, and educational injustices. In this pioneering work, Roby traces the Mizrahi population’s struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Although the daily “bread and work” demonstrations are...
Demands for freedom, justice, and dignity have animated protests and revolutions across the Middle East in recent years, from the Iranian Green Movement and the Arab Spring uprisings to Turkey’s March for Justice and the ongoing struggle in Palestine. Although expectations raised by the Arab Spring were largely disappointed and protests that toppled entrenched rulers unleashed vicious counterrevolutionary forces, there is no doubt that the landscape of the Middle East has changed. Drawing from diverse disciplines, this volume offers critical perspectives on these changes, covering politics, religion, gender dynamics, human rights, media, literature, and music. What ultimately has changed in "the new Middle East"? Who are the actors pushing the direction of change? How are aspirations for change being expressed through media and the arts? With extensive analysis and thoughtful reflection, this book gives readers an in-depth portrayal of a modernizing Middle East.
Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clásicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.
Evaluates the prevalence of what the author terms ethnic bias against Middle Eastern Jewish residents in Israel as well as the implications of such prejudice, specifically the tension between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi.
Over the last three decades, Hezbollah has developed from a small radical organization into a major player in the Lebanese, regional, and even international political arenas. Its influence in military issues is well known, but its role in shaping cultural and political activities has not received enough attention. Kanaaneh sheds new light on the organization’s successful evolution as a counterhegemonic force in the region’s resistance movement, known as “Muqawama.” Founded on the idea that Islam is a resisting religion, whose real heroes are the poor populations who have finally decided to take action, Hezbollah has shifted its focus to advocate for social justice issues and to attract ordinary activists to its cause. From the mid-1990s on, Hezbollah has built alliances that allow it to pursue soft power in Lebanon, fighting against both the dominant Shi‘ite elites and the Maronite-Sunni, as well as Israeli and US influence in the region. Kanaaneh argues that this perpetual resistance—military as well as cultural and political—is fundamental to Hezbollah’s continued success.
The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, devastated Palestinian lives and shattered Palestinian society, culture, and economy. It also nipped in the bud a nascent grassroots, binational alliance between Arab and Jewish citrus growers. This significant and unprecedented partnership was virtually erased from the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians when the Nakba decimated villages and populations in a matter of months. In The Lost Orchard, Kabha and Karlinsky tell the story of the Palestinian citrus industry from its inception until 1950, tracing the shifting relationship between Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Using rich archival and primary sources, as well as on a variety of theoretical approaches, Kabha and Karlinsky portray the industry’s social fabric and stratification, detail its economic history, and analyze the conditions that enabled the formation of the unique binational organization that managed the country’s industry from late 1940 until April 1948.
Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors’ research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume’s core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors “finally” broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010–11. Firat and Taleghani’s volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.
A gripping first-person account of how one Israeli grandfather helped rescue two generations of his family on October 7, 2023—a saga that reveals the deep tensions and systemic failures behind Hamas's attacks that day. On the morning of October 7, Amir Tibon and his wife were awakened by mortar rounds exploding near their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a progressive Israeli community less than a mile from Gaza City. Soon, they were holding their two young daughters in the family’s reinforced safe room, urging them not to cry as gunfire echoed just outside the door. With his cell phone battery running low, Amir texted his father: “The girls are behaving really well, but I’m worried they’...
The Sultan's Communists uncovers the history of Jewish radical involvement in Morocco's national liberation project and examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly-independent Morocco. Closely following the lives of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Assidon), Alma Rachel Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and '60s, and how they survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy to ultimately become heroic emblems of state-sponsored Muslim-Jewish tol...
Leaving Other People Alone reads contemporary North American Jewish fiction about Israel/Palestine through an anti-Zionist lens. Aaron Kreuter argues that since Jewish diasporic fiction played a major role in establishing the centroperipheral relationship between Israel and the diaspora, it therefore also has the potential to challenge, trouble, and ultimately rework this relationship. Kreuter suggests that any fictional work that concerns itself with Israel/Palestine and Zionism comes with heightened responsibilities, primarily to make narrative space for the Palestinian worldview, the dispossessed Other of the Zionist project. In engaging prose, the book features a wide range of scholarship and new, compelling readings of texts by Theodor Herzl, Leon Uris, Philip Roth, Ayelet Tsabari, and David Bezmozgis. Throughout, Kreuter develops his concept of diasporic heteroglossia, which is fiction's unique ability to contain multiple voices that resist and write back against national centres. This work makes an important and original contribution to Jewish studies, diaspora studies, and world literature.