Virtually Mapping "home" for Jews of the Middle East

• In Event: Mapping Digital Jews

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, second and third-generation Jews of Middle Eastern Jewish background living in Israel, the US, and Europe have sought to lay claim to their Eastern heritages. Such assertions of identity were often evidenced through artistic works (music, literature, theater) and via Jewish "heritage" trips to Morocco and Egypt, which were popular in the nineties. Still, many physical spaces with recent Jewish histories in the Middle East have remained largely inaccessible over the past several decades.
In recent years, however, social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Mizrahim in Israel and Jews of Eastern lineage throughout the world have launched web forums over the past decade where visitors post videos, photographs, and memories from towns throughout the Islamic world that many still identify as "home." Diarna--literally, “our homes" in Judeo-Arabic--is a US-based initiative which began in 2008 and self-describes as "the geo-museum of Jewish life in the Middle East and North Africa." In addition to utilizing archival photos, interviews, and architectural reconstructions, the site uses Google Earth technology (with 360-degree rotation) to access locations in the Middle East and North Africa previously inhabited by Jews (e.g., schools, cemeteries, synagogues, shrines).
Diarna, like several other virtual museums on the Internet, strives to remain apolitical "by focusing on collecting factual information and allowing varied audiences to draw their own conclusions." Are museum exhibits--even virtual ones--ever neutral? This paper will attempt to situate and theorize the some of the uses of these new technologies. In what ways are they constructing a different relationship to the past? What are the possibilities for virtual cultural heritage for Jews with roots in the Islamic world and how are the politics of such endeavors different and similar to other virtual space historical memory projects?

author

• Galeet Dardashti, Rutgers University