Mongrels or Marvels

Mongrels or Marvels
Author: Deborah A. Starr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2011-05-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804769532

This collection of essays and fiction offers critical insights into Egypt's cosmopolitan past, Jewish-Levantine identities, and the possibilities for cultural integration within Israel and beyond.

Mongrels or Marvels

Mongrels or Marvels
Author: Deborah A. Starr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2011-05-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804777888

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
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253025788

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.

Jacqueline Kahanoff

Jacqueline Kahanoff
Author: David Ohana
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0253066905

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 Other Middle East

The Other Middle East
Author: Franck Salameh
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300231814

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.”

Theological Stains

Theological Stains
Author: Assaf Shelleg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2020-11-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197504663

Theological Stains offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand and the histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.' Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka
Author: Matt Reingold
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2024-02-20
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN:

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.

Histories of the Jews of Egypt

Histories of the Jews of Egypt
Author: Dario Miccoli
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 131762422X

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
Total Pages: 912
Release: 2014-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191662550

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.
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-01-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1472423143

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.