Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media

Brahim El Guabli, Mostafa Hussein, Brahim El Guabli, Mostafa Hussein

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780271097558
• eBook ISBN: 9780271098630
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Literature

This volume examines the cultural legacy of Jewish emigration from the Maghreb and the Middle East in the years following 1948. Drawing on the remarkable cinematic and literary output of the last twenty years, this collection posits loss as a new conceptual framework in which to understand Jewish-Muslim relations. Previous studies of Jewish emigration have followed the mass departure of Jews, but the contributors to this book choose to remain behind and trace the contours of Jewish absence in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern societies. Attuned to loss in this way, the cultural memories of Jewish-Muslim life transcend the narratives of turmoil, taboo, and nostalgia that have dominated Muslim and prevalent scholarly perspectives on Jewish emigration.

Read as a whole, the collection affords an uncommon opportunity to mourn and heal through a nuanced reckoning with the absence of Jews from communities in which they had lived for millennia. Its wide geographic reach and interdisciplinary nature will speak both to scholars and lay readers in Amazigh studies, Arabic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Jewish studies, memory studies, and a host of other disciplines.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Abdelkader Aoudjit, ?lker Hepkaner, Sarah Irving, Stephanie Kraver, Lital Levy, Nadia Sabri, and Lior B. Sternfeld.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Generative Absence: Jewish Loss as a Catalyst for Literature, Film, and Thought
• 2. On the Wrong Side of History: The Jews in Algerian Literature
• 3. Literary Representations of Jews in Twenty-First-Century Arabic Literature in Egypt
• 4. Al-Zaman al-Gamīl Refigured: Jews and Re-Narration of the Nation on Egyptian TV
• 5. Death, Burial, and Loss in Ali al-Muqri’s Al-Yahūdī al-ḥalī (The Handsome Jew)
• 6. Bearing Witness and Resurrecting Kurdish-Arab-Jewish Memory in Mādhā ‘an al-sayyida al-yahūdiyya rāḥīl?
• 7. Documenting and Debating Turkey’s Loss
• 8. Exile in a Contemporary Artistic Project in Morocco: Jewish Memories in Form and Concrete Territories
• 9. Narrating the Homeland from Exile: Iranian Jewish Writers Writing on Their Departure, Identity, and Longing
• List of Contributors
• Index