Mongrels or Marvels
Mongrels or Marvels

Author: Deborah A. Starr

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2011-05-17

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0804777888

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.

On the Mediterranean and the Nile
On the Mediterranean and the Nile

Author: Aimée Israel-Pelletier

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0253025788

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Aimée Israel-Pelletier examines the lives of Middle Eastern Jews living in Islamic societies in this political and cultural history of the Jews of Egypt. By looking at the work of five Egyptian Jewish writers, Israel-Pelletier confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust. She illustrates that the Jews of Egypt were a fluid community connected by deep roots to the Mediterranean and the Nile. They had an unshakable sense of being Egyptian until the country turned toward the Arab East. With Israel-Pelletier's deft handling, Jewish Egyptian writing offers an insider's view in the unique character of Egyptian Jewry and the Jewish presence across the Mediterranean region and North Africa.

The Other Middle East
The Other Middle East

Author: Franck Salameh

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0300231814

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This unique literary collection offers a window on the contemporary Levant, a region comprising most of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, parts of southern Turkey and northwestern Iraq, and the Sinai Peninsula. Originally written in Arabic, French, Aramaic, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Hebrew, and reflecting an extraordinary diversity of cultures, faiths, traditions, and languages, the selections in this book also convey a wide range of ideas and perspectives, to offer readers a nuanced understanding of the mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. Franck Salameh, who compiled this anthology over the course of more than two decades, introduces and annotates each selection for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, offering background on the various peoples and politics of the Levant. In these pages, we discover a Middle East in which, as one writer puts it, “an Armenian and a Turk can still hold hands in the midst of massacres.”

Jacqueline Kahanoff
Jacqueline Kahanoff

Author: David Ohana

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0253066905

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jacqueline Kahanoff: A Levantine Woman is the first intellectual biography of this remarkable Egyptian-Jewish intellectual, whose work has secured her place in literary pantheon as a herald of Levantine, Mediterranean, and transnational culture. Growing up Jewish in cosmopolitan Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s, Jacqueline Kahanoff experienced a bustling Middle East enriched by diverse languages, religions, and peoples who nonetheless were deeply connected to each other through history, business, daily practices, and shared landscape. At the age of twenty-four, Kahanoff immigrated to the United States. Her stories, essays, and short autobiographical novel attest to her penchant to cross boundaries, generations, social classes, sexes, and Western and Eastern constructs. After immigrating to Israel in the early 1950s, she critically addressed the country's "provinciality" and "ethnic nationalism" as seen through her conception of a transnational Levantine culture. Through many writings, Kahanoff set forth her distinctive vision of Israel as a Mediterranean country with a broad, multicultural Levantine identity. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, ranging from interviews with Jacqueline Kahanoff's acquaintances and contemporaries to unpublished writings, David Ohana explores her fascinating life and intellectual journey from Cairo to Tel Aviv. The encompassing vision of a Levantine Israel made Kahanoff the initiator of a different cultural possibility, more extensive than that offered in her time, and also, perhaps, than is offered today.

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka
The Comics of Asaf Hanuka

Author: Matt Reingold

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2024-02-20

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka: Telling Particular and Universal Stories tells the story of how cartoonist Asaf Hanuka illustrates both universal and particular narratives. Through close readings of Hanuka’s entire catalogue of comics and graphic narratives, Hanuka’s work is situated within the broader story of his own experiences of being an insider (as a Jew and Israeli) and an outsider (as a Mizrahi, or Judeo-Arab) in Israeli society. By moving chronologically through Hanuka’s works, the book traces how Hanuka navigates these disparate particular identities alongside more universal concerns about how to be a present partner to his spouse and to his children.

The Middle East and North Africa
The Middle East and North Africa

Author: Florian Zemmin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-11-04

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 3111254062

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume collects reflections on secularity from the Middle East and North Africa. To highlight proximate connections as well as resonances with debates elsewhere, it includes premodern contributions from the region as well as Jewish thought from Europe that have provided significant references for modern appropriations of secularity. The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its great diversity. Thus, while Islam is a common reference for most of our authors, the selections point to its varied invocations in the interest of differing political ends. Others write from a Christian or Jewish perspective, or subscribe to non-religious intellectual traditions. They range from premodern Muslim jurisprudents and philosophers to Ottoman statesmen, Arab socialist and nationalist intellectuals of the interwar period, Iranian revolutionaries, Israeli novelists, and finally, post-secular intellectuals, lay and religious, predominantly from the former Islamic heartland: modern Arab states and Iran. Several introductions weave together the swathe of topics raised in the discussions, beginning with a schematic presentation of the concerns that undergird the volume's organization.

Histories of the Jews of Egypt
Histories of the Jews of Egypt

Author: Dario Miccoli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-03-24

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 131762422X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Up until the advent of Nasser and the 1956 War, a thriving and diverse Jewry lived in Egypt – mainly in the two cities of Alexandria and Cairo, heavily influencing the social and cultural history of the country. Histories of the Jews of Egypt argues that this Jewish diaspora should be viewed as "an imagined bourgeoisie". It demonstrates how, from the late nineteenth century up to the 1950s, a resilient bourgeois imaginary developed and influenced the lives of Egyptian Jews both in the public arena, in institutions such as the school, and in the home. From the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Cairo lycée français to Alexandrian marriage contracts and interwar Zionist newspapers – this book explains how this imaginary was characterised by a great capacity to adapt to the evolutions of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt, but later deteriorated alongside increasingly strong Arab nationalism and the political upheavals that the country experienced from the 1940s onwards. Offering a novel perspective on the history of modern Egypt and its Jews, and unravelling too often forgotten episodes and personalities which contributed to the making of an incredibly diverse and lively Jewish diaspora at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, this book is of interest to scholars of Modern Egypt, Jewish History and of Mediterranean History.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant

Author: Margreet L. Steiner

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-01-16

Total Pages: 912

ISBN-13: 0191662550

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Handbook aims to serve as a research guide to the archaeology of the Levant, an area situated at the crossroads of the ancient world that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The Levant as used here is a historical geographical term referring to a large area which today comprises the modern states of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, western Syria, and Cyprus, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Unique in its treatment of the entire region, it offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the current state of the archaeology of the Levant within its larger cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. The Handbook also attempts to bridge the modern scholarly and political divide between archaeologists working in this highly contested region. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it focuses chronologically on the Neolithic through Persian periods - a time span during which the Levant was often in close contact with the imperial powers of Egypt, Anatolia, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. This volume will serve as an invaluable reference work for those interested in a contextualised archaeological account of this region, beginning with the 'agricultural revolution' until the conquest of Alexander the Great that marked the end of the Persian period.

The Making of a Postsecular Society
The Making of a Postsecular Society

Author: Prof Dr Massimo Rosati

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2015-01-28

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1472423143

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Based on a rigorous construction of theoretical categories and on a close scrutiny of the common challenges confronting Europe and its Turkish neighbour long considered ‘other’ with regard to the accommodation of religious difference, this book sheds light on the possibilities for Europe to find new ways of arranging the relationship between the secular and the religious. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social theory, the sociology of religion, secularisation and religious difference, and social change.

Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema
Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema

Author: Prof. Deborah A. Starr

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0520976126

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.