New Book: Snir, Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?

Snir, Reuven. Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

 

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.

Table of contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Identity: Between Creation and Recycling
Chapter Two: Arabized Jews: Historical Background
Chapter Three: Arabized Jews in Modern Times between Interpellation and Exclusion
Chapter Four: Globalization and the Search for Inessential Solidarities
Chapter Five: White Jews, Black Jews
Conclusion
Appendices
I. Iraqi-Jewish Intellectuals, Writers, and Artists
II. Sami Michael, “The Artist and the Falafel” (short story)
References
Index

Reuven Snir is a Professor of Arabic Literature and Dean of Humanities at Haifa University. He has published many books, articles, translations, and encyclopedia entries. His latest book is Baghdad – The City in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Calendar of Events: SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies Evening Lectures Series, Term 1, 2014 (London)

SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies Evening Lectures Series, Term 1, 2014

Please find below the programme for the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies Evening Lectures Series which will run on the following Wednesdays at 17:30-19:00, in the Brunei Gallery room B104 (unless otherwise stated): 
October 8 Dr. Hila Zaban (SOAS)

“Gentrification and High-Status Immigration in a Jerusalem Neighbourhood”
October 22 Leonie Fleischmann (City University London)

“Beyond Paralysis: The Transformation of Israeli Peace Activism”
November 12 Dr. Lior Libman (UCL)

“Utopia, Trauma, Icon: Representation of the Kibbutz in 1950s’ Israel”

 

November 20 

“Shadow of Baghdad”: Film Screening and Panel Discussion, will be held at KLT
November 26 Dr. Yonatan Sagiv (SOAS)

“The Gift of Debt: Agnon’s Economics of Money, God and the Real Other”

 

December 10 Yael Levy-Ariel (UCL)

“Judicial Diversity in Israel: An Empirical Analysis of Judges, Lawyers and Law Students”
Programme is attached also as pdf (click here).

Please see our website for further details about these and other events.

 

All are warmly welcomed and entrance is free of charge.