Lecture today, organized by Sasha Goldstein (PhD candidate Religious Studies) Title: We Too Shall Overcome: Mizrahi Political Thought and the Ethnic Struggle in Israel 1948 – 1966 Speaker: Bryan Roby, NYU Date: March 17th, 2014 at 15.00 Where: Matthias de Vrieshof Room 1-1 The talk will examine the political thought of left-leaning Middle Eastern Jewish (or Mizrahi) intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s. Underlying the examination is the contention that there is a serious need to revisit and perhaps reconstruct the historical understanding of early Mizrahi political thought in Israel. Seeking to rectify what Palestine-born Eliyahu Eliachar termed as the ‘original sin of Zionism’, Iraqi-born intellectuals like Latif Dori and Gideon Giladi posited that the State of Israel needed to unequivocally identify and engage with its neighboring countries, both in cultural and socio-political terms. While most of the native Arabic-speaking intellectuals discussed believed in the necessity of a Jewish State, they struggled with its expansionist and Westernization projects; which they viewed as, by definition, exclusionary against Palestinian citizens and Mizrahi immigrants. This talk begins with the contention that the marginalization of Mizrahim in Israel fostered a shared sense of Oriental identity opposed to the Eurocentric traditional Zionist thought. In turn, Mizrahi intellectuals promoted an alternative form of Zionism. Unlike European Zionism, this alternative was culturally and politically rooted in the Middle East and sought a non-exploitative relationship with the indigenous peoples of Israel/Palestine and the Arab World. The Middle Eastern Zionism promoted by the figures discussed held an anti-colonial stance and encouraged the equal participation of the Palestinian and Mizrahi communities within the political, labor, and social sectors of Israeli society. The paper concludes with a reflection on how this alternative Middle Eastern Zionism formed the ideological basis for a Mizrahi Civil Rights Struggle in Israel.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 10:33:39 +0000