Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities

Leiden: Brill, 2015. First edition. Hardcover. Fine. Octavo. x, 302pp. Index and 40 page reference section. Decorative brown boards, lettered in white, with purple headband. A fine, as new copy.

"In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Reuven Snir brings out an important contribution to studies of the history, literature and identity of Arabized Jews, showing the significant shifts these communities have undergone in the ways their identities have been defined and constructed in the modern period." - Lisa Bernasek, University of Southampton, in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?: Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities, Professor Reuven Snir, Dean of Humanities at Haifa University, presents a new approach to the study of Arab-Jewish identity and the subjectivities of Arabized Jews. Against the historical background of Arab-Jewish culture and in light of identity theory, Snir shows how the exclusion that the Arabized Jews had experienced, both in their mother countries and then in Israel, led to the fragmentation of their original identities and encouraged them to find refuge in inessential solidarities. Following double exclusion, intense globalization, and contemporary fluidity of identities, singularity, not identity, has become the major war cry among Arabized Jews during the last decade in our present liquid society. (Publisher)

Contents: 1. Identity: between creation and recycling -- 2. Arabized Jews: historical background -- 3. Arabized Jews in modern times between interpellation and exclusion -- A. The first process: Jews in Arab lands are Arab -- B. The second process: Jews in Arab lands are "Zionist" (= first exclusion) -- C. The third process: Arabized Jews are "Arabs" (= second exclusion) -- D. The fourth process: the Arabized Jews are . [a monolithic category] -- 4. Globalization and the search for inessential solidarities -- 5. White Jews, black Jews -- Conclusion -- Appendices: Iraqi-Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists -- The artist and the falafel. (OCLC)

Volume 53 in the "Brill Series in Jewish Studies