The Fraught Promise of Arab-Jewish Identity

Until 1948, around 800,000 Jews lived as an organic and inseparable part of the Arab Middle East and North Africa. But political shifts in the mid-20th century upended this reality. The violent creation of the State of Israel, and the rise of an increasingly exclusivist Arab nationalism, fueled anti-Jewish hostility that led to the exodus of all but a few thousand Jews from the region. The rich Arab-Jewish life that had characterized prior centuries was lost, and the vast majority of Arab Jews ended up in Israel, becoming active participants in the country’s regime of domination over Palestinians. But neither Mizrahi Jews’ enthusiastic embrace of Zionism nor the collapse of Jewish life in the broader Middle East were historical inevitabilities—and these processes did not go unchallenged. Instead, Arab-Jewish thinkers throughout the 20th century drew on their own experiences to offer alternatives to Zionism as well as other kinds of ethnonationalism.

In June, Jewish Currents fellow Jonathan Shamir attended a first-of-its-kind retreat for Arab Jews organized by activist Hadar Cohen and historian Avi Shlaim, where contemporary thinkers came together to figure out how to build on these past efforts. In the latest episode of On the Nose, Shamir speaks with three scholars from the retreat—Hana Morgenstern, a professor of Middle Eastern literature; Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, a co-founder of the diaspora anti-Zionist group Shoresh; and Moshe Behar, a senior lecturer in Israel/Palestine studies and co-founder of the Mizrahi Civic Collective—about the history of Arab-Jewish political thought and organizing, and its possibilities and limits for our time.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Texts Mentioned and Further Reading and Listening:

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings by Ella Shohat

The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity by Yehouda Shenhav

Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, & Culture, 1893-1958, edited by Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim

Iraqi Jewish Writers (Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature), Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael, Samir Naqqash, et al. 

"An Archive of Literary Reconstruction after the Palestinian Nakba," Hana Morgenstern, MERIP

“Were There—and Can There Be—Arab Jews? (With Afterthoughts on the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism and Palestinian Jews),” Moshe Behar

“Weeping for Babylon,” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Avi Shlaim, Jewish Currents

“Toward a Democratic State in Palestine,” Palestine National Liberation Movement

"The 'Friends of the IDF' Gala Was Like a Rich Kid’s Bar Mitzvah—Until the Protest Started," Sophie Hurwitz, The Nation

“A Democratic Mizrahi Vision,” the Mizrahi Civic Collective