Mizrahi Maps of Meaning and Rearticulations in Israel

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The melting pot ideology prevalent in the early decades of Israel’s history, coupled with various forms of discrimination, demanded a de-Arabization of Middle Eastern Jewish religious and cultural practices.  Following the global rise of multiculturalism in the 1970s, Mizrahim contested their subordination to Ashkenazi Israel, reasserted “traditional” practices and constructed new praxes. Our panel examines the networks of ethnic, national, and religious identities reconfigured by Middle Eastern Jews (Arab-Jews, Mizrahim, Sephardim) in Israel. The transnational reach of some of these forms (for example, music featuring Yemeni Arabic or Andalusian and Greek combinations) highlights the nuanced relationships between Mizrahi communities and their ancestral countries of origin, and evinces dislocation and nostalgia which cut across political boundaries.

In line with recent work in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, history and food studies that considers the relationship between culture production and identity formation, we view these changes as significant markers of historical and social processes.  Music and foodways constitute arenas in which culture is constructed, and negotiated.  Each of our papers demonstrate the ways in which discourse surrounding Mizrahi identity and cultural practice has shifted strategically from pan-ethnicity to ethnic specificity or vice versa.  Dardashti theorizes changes to a “traditional” practice, the singing of piyutim, as it interacts with modern forms of popular music and engages in inter-communal relations. Horowitz considers the construction of sonic memories in the negotiation of identity, even as these are constantly re-contextualized in emerging communal loyalties and understandings of history. Finally, Ariel examines the transformation of foodways as related to migration and the assertion and re-imagination of ethnic identity. We consider all these transformations and re-articulations as constituting Mizrahi "maps of meaning" (Hall 1989). Reading these maps as always porous and re-negotiated points us toward conceptions of Israeli identity today.

Sub Unit

• Sephardi/Mizrahi Studies

Chair

• Mark Loren Kligman, University of California, Los Angeles

Individual Presentations

• Piyut and Mizrahiyut: Reconfiguring Cultural Practice in a Global Era - Galeet Dardashti, New York University

• Sonic Roots: Position and Composition in Avihu Medina’s Andalusian Return - Amy Horowitz, Indiana University

• Yemeni Jewish Food, Movement and Memory - Ari Ariel, University of Iowa

Respondent

• Mark Loren Kligman, University of California, Los Angeles