This report examines the novel Outcast by Israeli author Shimon Ballas and its themes in respect to the prominent debates in the field of Mizrahi studies. It discusses the prominent scholars who deal with the history of Arab Jews in Israel and Mizrahi studies in general. It examines these issues both in the scholarship and literature and posits that each adds to and complicates the debate. The discussion also includes the treatments of Arab Jews in modern Zionist discourse and the history of Mizrahi political and scholarly activity in Israel. / text

In this paper, I consider the collection of short stories and photographs Neighborhood Album A by Yemeni Israeli author Simha Zaramati Asta. I argue that Asta contributes to a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity in Israel. While Asta could be considered a Mizrahi author, I claim that a study of Asta’s text as Mizrahi in fact erases the distinctive Yemeni elements of Asta’s writing. Instead, Asta is purposeful about her inclusion of Yemeni culture and her establishment of Yemeni identity in her text. This Yemeni culture is evident in Asta’s inclusion of the songs of Yemeni Jewish women which constitute an oral tradition of memory within Yemen and Israel. Asta further creates a distinctive Yemeni identity through a sense of place in the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv in both her stories and photographs. Through descriptions of the sights, smells, and traditions of the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv, Asta elevates the neighborhood, claiming it as a place where the divine spirit can be found. While Asta is purposeful in her creation of a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity, she demonstrates the hybridization of this Yemeni Jewish literature and identity with Israeli literature and identity. By noting the importance of Yemeni Jews to the creation of Israel and the influence of Israel on these Yemeni Jews, Asta claims Israeli identity for Yemeni Jews. She demonstrates the hybridization of the Yemeni Jewish identity and Israeli identity through intertextual references to canonical Israeli poets and authors. Yet while Asta values this hybridization, she uses the characters in her stories to question whether the hybridization of Yemeni Jews in Israel can in fact succeed. / text

Inspired by the contrapuntal and relational critiques of Edward Said and Ella Shohat, this thesis conducts a comparative analysis of the literature and film of Arab Jews in order to deconstruct discourses on Jewish identity that privilege the dichotomies of Israel-diaspora and Arab-Jew. Sami Michael’s novel Refuge, Naim Kattan’s memoir Farewell, Babylon, Karin Albou’s film Little Jerusalem and b.h. Yael’s video documentary Fresh Blood: a Consideration of Belonging reveal the complexities and interconnections of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Arab Jewish experiences across multiple geographies that are often silenced under dominant Eurocentric, Ashkenazi or Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. Drawing from these texts, Jewish identity is explored through four philosophical themes: Jewish beginnings vs. origins, boundaries between Arab and Jew, the construction of Jewish identities in place and space, and, the concept of diaspora and the importance Jewish difference. As a double-diaspora, with the two poles of their identities seen as enemies in the ongoing conflict between Israel-Palestine, Arab Jews challenge the conception of a single Jewish nation, ethnicity, identity or culture. Jewishness can better be understood as a rhizome, a system without a centre and made of heterogeneous component, that is able to create, recreate and move through multiple territories, rather than ever settling in, or being confined to a single form that seeks to dominate over others. This dissertation contributes a unique theoretical reading of Jewish cultures in the plural, and includes an examination of lesser known Arab Jewish writing and experimental documentary in Canada in relation to Iraq, France and Israel.

Inspired by the contrapuntal and relational critiques of Edward Said and Ella Shohat, this thesis conducts a comparative analysis of the literature and film of Arab Jews in order to deconstruct discourses on Jewish identity that privilege the dichotomies of Israel-diaspora and Arab-Jew. Sami Michael’s novel Refuge, Naim Kattan’s memoir Farewell, Babylon, Karin Albou’s film Little Jerusalem and b.h. Yael’s video documentary Fresh Blood: a Consideration of Belonging reveal the complexities and interconnections of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Arab Jewish experiences across multiple geographies that are often silenced under dominant Eurocentric, Ashkenazi or Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. Drawing from these texts, Jewish identity is explored through four philosophical themes: Jewish beginnings vs. origins, boundaries between Arab and Jew, the construction of Jewish identities in place and space, and, the concept of diaspora and the importance Jewish difference. As a double-diaspora, with the two poles of their identities seen as enemies in the ongoing conflict between Israel-Palestine, Arab Jews challenge the conception of a single Jewish nation, ethnicity, identity or culture. Jewishness can better be understood as a rhizome, a system without a centre and made of heterogeneous component, that is able to create, recreate and move through multiple territories, rather than ever settling in, or being confined to a single form that seeks to dominate over others. This dissertation contributes a unique theoretical reading of Jewish cultures in the plural, and includes an examination of lesser known Arab Jewish writing and experimental documentary in Canada in relation to Iraq, France and Israel.

Samir Naqqash (1938-2004) is best known as one of the last holdouts among Jewish Israeli authors from Iraq, continuing to write in his native Arabic in Israel despite immense social and market pressures to switch to Hebrew. This thesis reads Naqqash's last novel, Shlomo Al-Kurdi, Myself and Time in light of theories of trauma, specifically Cathy Caruth's structure of trauma, Dori Laub's notion of belatedness of trauma, and Dominick LaCapra's foundational trauma. It posits that the novel employs a poetics of the black hole, manipulating trauma, memory and language in order to narrate the forgotten fate of the protagonist's hometown of Ṣablākh, in Iranian Kurdistan, during World War I. Like a black hole, the texture of the novel's prose possesses an infinite density of traumatic affect as the characters are haunted by the ahwāl, or terrors. Also like a black hole, there is no way to measure the novel's mass, no way to authoritatively and thoroughly grasp the details of its plot since said details remained sequestered deep within. The structure of trauma in the text depends both on trauma's repeated returns in the first part of the novel, and a type of prophetic projection that speaks of the approaching moment of calamity in the second. Each of these two parts end where the other begins, creating an infinite loop where traumatic memory and prophecy alternate towards infinity, each awaiting the arrival of the other in a dizzying dance that contributes to the black hole's gravitational pull. The presence of three narrators allows the text to employ chronicle, affect, and artifice at one and the same time. Language, namely a rich allusive fabric, allows Shlomo to inscribe himself in the wandering minstrel position of the Islamicate tradition, casting himself as the most articulate Shahrazād of the Thousand and One Nights and the most adventurous and mobile Sindibād the sailor. In this way, Shlomo is able to recover the (non-Hebrew-) speaking subject position, and mobility in the Islamic(ate) world canceled by virtue of the restrictions placed upon holders of an Israeli passport. Similarly, by staging visitations by well-known apparitions -- a ghūl in Ṣablākh and the Prophet Nahum in Qosh, the text inscribes these sites of speechlessness within the larger cultural geography of the Islamicate literary tradition. At the same time, by selecting the unraveling of Ṣablākh as foundational trauma for all that follows, Shlomo confounds the genealogies of trauma of both Zionism and Arab Nationalism(s). And with Ṣablākh, Shlomo also mourns the collapse of the city's multi-confessional social fabric. What was once a testament to the possibility of a home that flies the banner of humanity is now nothing more than a haunting memory, lost but not forgotten within the depths of the black hole. / text

Inspired by the contrapuntal and relational critiques of Edward Said and Ella Shohat, this thesis conducts a comparative analysis of the literature and film of Arab Jews in order to deconstruct discourses on Jewish identity that privilege the dichotomies of Israel-diaspora and Arab-Jew. Sami Michael’s novel Refuge, Naim Kattan’s memoir Farewell, Babylon, Karin Albou’s film Little Jerusalem and b.h. Yael’s video documentary Fresh Blood: a Consideration of Belonging reveal the complexities and interconnections of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Arab Jewish experiences across multiple geographies that are often silenced under dominant Eurocentric, Ashkenazi or Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. Drawing from these texts, Jewish identity is explored through four philosophical themes: Jewish beginnings vs. origins, boundaries between Arab and Jew, the construction of Jewish identities in place and space, and, the concept of diaspora and the importance Jewish difference. As a double-diaspora, with the two poles of their identities seen as enemies in the ongoing conflict between Israel-Palestine, Arab Jews challenge the conception of a single Jewish nation, ethnicity, identity or culture. Jewishness can better be understood as a rhizome, a system without a centre and made of heterogeneous component, that is able to create, recreate and move through multiple territories, rather than ever settling in, or being confined to a single form that seeks to dominate over others. This dissertation contributes a unique theoretical reading of Jewish cultures in the plural, and includes an examination of lesser known Arab Jewish writing and experimental documentary in Canada in relation to Iraq, France and Israel.

Inspired by the contrapuntal and relational critiques of Edward Said and Ella Shohat, this thesis conducts a comparative analysis of the literature and film of Arab Jews in order to deconstruct discourses on Jewish identity that privilege the dichotomies of Israel-diaspora and Arab-Jew. Sami Michael’s novel Refuge, Naim Kattan’s memoir Farewell, Babylon, Karin Albou’s film Little Jerusalem and b.h. Yael’s video documentary Fresh Blood: a Consideration of Belonging reveal the complexities and interconnections of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Arab Jewish experiences across multiple geographies that are often silenced under dominant Eurocentric, Ashkenazi or Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. Drawing from these texts, Jewish identity is explored through four philosophical themes: Jewish beginnings vs. origins, boundaries between Arab and Jew, the construction of Jewish identities in place and space, and, the concept of diaspora and the importance Jewish difference. As a double-diaspora, with the two poles of their identities seen as enemies in the ongoing conflict between Israel-Palestine, Arab Jews challenge the conception of a single Jewish nation, ethnicity, identity or culture. Jewishness can better be understood as a rhizome, a system without a centre and made of heterogeneous component, that is able to create, recreate and move through multiple territories, rather than ever settling in, or being confined to a single form that seeks to dominate over others. This dissertation contributes a unique theoretical reading of Jewish cultures in the plural, and includes an examination of lesser known Arab Jewish writing and experimental documentary in Canada in relation to Iraq, France and Israel.

<p>This dissertation examines the history of Jews in Iraq from 1951 to 1973 and their associations in diaspora thereafter. Iraqi Jews trace their community back 2500 years to the Babylonian exile and Jews played prominent roles in modern Iraqi politics, society, and culture until 1950-1951, when most Iraqi Jews left following a period of anti-Jewish hostility. The history of the remaining Jewish community after 1951 is an important case study of Jews in the Middle East (sometimes referred to as Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews) during a period when many such communities faced violence and displacement amidst the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their history also provides unique insights into changes in Iraq’s political culture under the various revolutionary regimes that followed the 1958 revolution. This dissertation shows that Jews in Iraq after 1951 successfully re-established a communal and social presence until the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 prompted renewed anti-Jewish hostility. However, this dissertation argues that it was the Ba’th Party coup in July 1968 that led to the depopulation of the remaining Jewish community as the party manipulated anti-Israeli sentiment in its effort to consolidate power in Iraq, unleashing a deadly campaign of terror on innocent Jews.</p>