The road to ‘Yerussalem’ – Asterai and the Hebrew literature of Beta Israel

The immigration of the Beta Israel community from Ethiopia to Israel during the 1980s and the 1990s posed a challenge to Israeli society in relation to its ability to know, understand, and absorb a Jewish community with differing religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. For the Beta Israel, immigrating to Israel created a rift between their dream of returning to Jerusalem, a dream that would only be fulfilled after a journey of suffering, and its realization – in which they became an inferior and excluded minority within Israel. This article discusses Hebrew Ethiopian-Israeli literature, focusing on the major narrative of homecoming – the Journey to Yerussalem. This literature, which is relatively new and small, brings the voice of two generations – those who immigrated to Israel as adults, and the younger generation who were small children during the journey. Presenting various texts, and focusing on Asterai by Omri Tegamlak Avera (2008a Avera, O. T. (2008a). Asterai. Tel Aviv: Yediot. [Google Scholar]) I shall show how Ethiopian-Israeli literature constituted itself as a journey literature, contrasting the old generation with the younger generation's identity formation as it appears in the representation of this journey narrative, constructing a more complex, ambivalent approach to the concepts of immigration and absorption, homeland and diaspora.     

Genealogies and Gene-ideologies: The Legitimacy of the Beta Israel (Falasha)

The migration of the vast majority of Beta Israel (Falasha) to Israel has been accompanied by major shifts in the discourse regarding their ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Ethiopian-ness’. This article discusses the adoption of traditions of Danite descent in place of traditions of Solomonic descent and the emergence of genetics as the most important identity marker, replacing reckonings of lineage. The first shift is connected to the migration of the Beta Israel from Ethiopia to Israel; the second to changing concepts of what represents ‘proof’ of identity in the modern and post-modern world.     

National Rebirth as a Movie: Otto Preminger's Exodus

Although Exodus is not an Israeli film, it has become an inspiring model text for the heroic-nationalist genre in Israeli cinema. The promotion of Zionism as a liberation movement by Exodus was an imperative. When the film was released in 1960, the propagation of the myth of Palestine as 'a land without the people' prior to Zionist settlement was no longer tenable, thus creating a need to rewrite the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the international community and the American audience in particular. Following a long colonialist tradition, the film presents Zionism as fulfilling a 'civilising mission' with regard to the indigenous Arab population (the 'Canaanites' of the biblical narrative). To further strengthen this reading, the film shows that the native Arabs actually welcomed the Jews and even gave them the land of Palestine voluntarily as an act of gratitude for the progress they brought to this undeveloped corner of the world.     

Of Mongrels and Jews: The Deconstruction of Racialised Identities in White Supremacist Discourse

ABSTRACT

This research explores the construction of race and mixed race identities in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. In white supremacist discourse, interracial sexuality is defined as the ultimate abomination, and mixed race people pose a particularly strong threat. This paper explores the ways in which mixed race people, and Jews in particular, threaten the construction of a supposedly pure white racial identity. Drawing upon the insights of poststructuralism, this analysis will explore the role of boundary maintenance and the threat of border crossings in the process of constructing racial identities.     

Circumcising the body: negotiating difference and belonging in Germany

ABSTRACT

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.     

Physicians,Humour and Therapeutic Laughter in the Ancient World

This paper examines the ways 'mixed race' women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of 'mixed race' contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of 'mixed race' develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identified 'mixed race' bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically 'multicultural'. The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some 'mixed race' women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.     

Strict versus flexible categorizations of mixedness: classifying mixed race in Singapore and New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Classifying and recording population data along racial and ethnic lines is common in many multiethnic societies. Singapore and New Zealand both use racial and ethnic categories in their population records and national censuses, although on different scales, using different methodologies and to different ends. Mixed race identities are particularly difficult to classify within traditionally singular racial categories, and each country has dealt with this in various ways. This paper explores the effects of different forms of classification on mixed racial and ethnic identities. Narratives from 40 men and women of mixed descent highlight the tangible and intangible impacts of categorization along racial lines, and the ways in which mixedness can be tied with belonging. The contrasting examples of Singapore and New Zealand illustrate the ways in which individuals of mixed heritage navigate both strict and fluid forms of classification, and how stories of identity are closely intertwined with institutional classificatory structures.     

Homeland holidays as anchors of immigrant identity: New Year (Novy God) celebration among young Russian Israelis

ABSTRACT

The article presents the emerging forms of ethno-cultural activism among the so-called Generation 1.5 of Russian-speakers, who immigrated as older children or adolescents and came of age in Israel. It describes and interprets two episodes of the New Year’s Eve (Novy God) celebrations organized by these 1.5ers in Israel in 2015 and 2016 through the constructionist lens applied to ethnic identity in migration. The article explores the process of reinvention of homeland rituals by the children of immigrants by focusing on the emerging hybrid forms of New Year celebration in the Israeli context where, until recently, this holiday was deemed illegitimate. It examines the hybrid components of this invented (or renovated) ritual, which combines Russian-Soviet traditions with the local repertoire of Eastern Jews and other components borrowed from Orthodox and Secular Judaism. The main argument is that ritual celebrations are expressions of immigrant evolving ethnic identity, the need for empowerment, a claim for public visibility, belonging and social inclusion.     

Hybridity,ethnicity and nationhood: legacies of interethnic war,wartime rape and the potential for bridging the ethnic divide in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Relying on the biographical narrative Leila, a girl from Bosnia and the recorded narratives by adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina we illustrate the difficulties and symbolic implications associated with negotiating hybrid identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina against the dominant post-conflict discourse based on ‘pure’ ethnicities. We argue that in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, hybrid identities are marginalized by official politics and societal structures as a legacy of the war. However, they simultaneously embody the symbolic tools through which ethnic divisions could be overcome, envisioning and recalling a multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina as a supra-national designation.     

Witnessing an Islamic Rite of Passage and a Local/Non-Local Articulation

This paper examines power relations predicated on the recourse to a Muslim identity by the Luri inhabitants of a remote, inaccessible place in south-western Iran known for their tenuous observance of the Islamic rules propagated by the faith's gate-keepers at the centre. The Muslimhood is asserted by the Lurs as an articulation of localness within the wider national context through a ritual practice characterised by spatial paucity that facilitates the deployment of an image of a 'historical' precedent, an abstract narrative of the Muslim community (ummat) in diverse contexts. Thus, the specific spatial and temporal limits that condition their differentiated access to sources of power based on class, gender and race are superseded by the Lurs in an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' with others creating an anti-structural domain and a 'plebeian public sphere' in which ordinary people appear as the agents as well as beneficiaries of the expanding domain of politics through a forged brother/sisterhood. Effective in this universalisation of politics is the use of slogan as a genre devised to overcome the structural inequalities that characterise the encompassing national system. The greater the structural gap, the paper argues, the more appealing the ritualistic use of slogan as an accessible anti-structural device susceptible to articulate the sacred with the profane. The 'plebeian' use of slogan, therefore, increasingly exposes the contradictory practice of becoming a Muslim in a peripheral location.     

Complexity of identity and tactics of resistance among religious leaders of immigrants

This article discusses a unique groups of young ‘1.5 generation’ Jewish immigrant religious priests (kessoch) who were born in Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel, who cope with marginality and absence of legitimization by the religious establishment and by society. The article demonstrates that a complex cultural identity and behaviour pattern of syncretism is created among the religious priests, through selectively choosing aspects of identity which are meaningful for them. Their educated use of ‘fragments of identity’ and different tactics of resistance expresses a way for leaders of a minority group to cope with the reality they experience, and to find their place in the absorbing society.     

National Identity Formation in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire: The Skerst Family in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The modern history of the Baltic provinces of the former Russian Empire has essentially been written from an ethnic/national perspective. It is basically the story of the formation of the Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and German 'communities', of their 'specific' national identities and eventually of nation states. With those who acquired a German identity, the focus has essentially been upon the landed nobility, the so-called 'Baltic Barons', the traditional elite that formed a minority even of the ethnically German population. The existence of other German groups has been recognised, such as the 'literary estate' (Literatenstand), which in the nineteenth century 'brought into Baltic higher culture, rationalist viewpoints and represented a potential threat to noble control of local politics.' However, such groups have received comparatively little attention from historians, especially among those publishing in English. Even then there is limited acknowledgement of their possessing distinctive cultural and other forms of self-identification. A recent study by a Canadian scholar of the Germans of Riga before 1914 tends to impose the values of the landed elite upon them. In works published in post-1945 (West) Germany by emigres from the region, there is an inclination to present a distinctive 'Baltic German' identity that is largely derived from the experience of the landed elite.     

Ethnic origin and identity in the Jewish population of Israel*

The paper addresses the multifaceted quality of ethnicity in the Jewish population of Israel by probing into the ethnic categories and their subjective meaning. The analyses utilise data collected during 2015–2016 on a representative sample of Israelis age 15 and older, as part of the seventh and eighth rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). Hypotheses are developed concerning the relationship between demographically based ethnic origin and national identity, as well as the effect of ethnically mixed marriages on ethnic and national identities. The analyses reveal a strong preference among Jews in Israel to portray their ancestry in inclusive national categories – Israeli and Jewish – rather than more particularistic, ethno-cultural, categories (e.g. Mizrahim, Moroccan, Ashkenazim, Polish, etc). Yet, whether Israeli or Jewish receives primacy differs by migration generation, socioeconomic standing, religion, and political dispositions. While the findings clearly add to our understanding of Israeli society, they are also telling with regard to immigrant societies more generally. First, they reveal a multi-layered structure of ethnic identification. Second, they suggest that ethnic identities are quite resistant to change. Third, ethnically mixed marriages appear to erode ethnic identities and are likely to replace them with national identities.     

Playing Away from Home: Identity in Northern Ireland and the Experience of Derry City Football Club

This article explores aspects of the history of Derry City Football Club in the period 1968-1985, and the effect that the Northern Irish troubles had on the soccer club. The whole question of identity within Northern Ireland has always been contested between those pursuing an Irish nationalist agenda, and those wishing to remain within the Union. This article locates Derry City within this struggle, and demonstrates how far reaching the effects of the contest between identities have been, even on something so 'normal' as a soccer club. Soccer clubs, it is argued, are an important location for the creation and sustaining of identities that are reflective of wider issues within society.     

Religion as nationalism: the religious nationalism of American Christian Zionists

The term ‘religious nationalism’ is often theorized, at worst as antithetically conjunctive where religion is defined as the allegiance to God and nationalism is the allegiance to the nation, and at best as instrumental. I argue here that this fusion of religion and nationalism takes place most convincingly if we understand religion as adherent performance rather than solely as a theological container of tenants. I illustrate this through American Christian Zionist performances and discourses regarding their self-imagined identity as being in a national diaspora for Israel. I argue this religious nationalism is possible because Christian Zionist performances of a national allegiance to Israeli Jews are grounded in an apocalyptic narrative of the future.     

Shas and the resignification of the intersection between ethnicity and religion

Current analyses of ethnicity and religion emphasise the subordination of the one to the other in the construction of collective identities. One line of research perceives religion as a resource of political mobilisation, while another conceptualises religion as the essence of ethnicity. As opposed to these analyses, this article explores how these two markers intersect and constitute each other in the process of identity formation. I centre on the ways Shas, an ethno-religious movement in Israel, mobilises hegemonic ethnic and religious markers of Middle East and North African (MENA) Jews in order to construct its collective identity. The analysis of Shas’s newspapers shows how, by suffusing religious traditions with ethnic meaning and marking an ethno-class collective as religious, Shas interweaves ethnicity and religion and resignifies their relation. This identity project is intended to redefine the symbolic boundaries of the Jewish nation and to redeem MENA Jews from their marginality. Intersectional analysis as applied in this article explains why different ethno-class and religious collectives imagine themselves as sharing a common identity, illumines why particular identity markers are chosen out of the numerous existing categories, and provides an explanation for the flexibility of social movements.     

Israel's immigration policies: the twofold face of the ‘demographic threat’

This article deals with the discursive practices employed in various public sites of Israeli society to support and legitimise the immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1989 to 1990. During those years Israeli society witnessed one of the country's biggest immigration waves. However, like many state policies, Israel's immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the FSU has not been carried out uncontested. There were vibrant and often heated public disputes concerning this policy. The purpose of the article is to reveal the racist attitudes of Israeli society expressed in the discursive practices that have been employed to support immigration from the FSU in these public disputes. Assuming an inextricable combination of old and new racism, these practices — involving processes of adverse racialisation of Arabs and Mizrahi Jews — have portrayed them as a demographic threat to Israeli society, a threat that can be forestalled by the admission of prospective immigrants from the FSU. However, the fact that these processes are not directed only against Arabs but also against Mizrahi Jews discloses some of Zionism's inner tensions and ambivalence. It challenges the thesis advanced by Lustick, for instance, that the exclusive goal of Israel's immigration policies is to marginalise and to contain the Palestinian minority by allowing the entrance of non‐Jews to Israel as long as they are not Arabs. Not disputing the immensely significant role that the goal of Palestinian containment plays in Israel's immigration policies, I intend to show that this goal exists alongside a perception of Mizrahim as a ‘demographic threat’ to Israel's ‘European character’.     

We have not arrived from the sea: a Mizrahi literary geography

This article examines how writers of Middle Eastern background, such as Iraqi‐born Yitzhak Bar‐Moshe, who writes in Arabic and has been translated into Hebrew, Iraqi‐born Sammy Michael, Egyptian‐born Yitzhak Gormezano and Iraqi‐born Shimon Balas, challenge the processes of adverse essentialisation and racialisation of Mizrahi Jews by the European Jewish hegemony in Israel. These writers identify themselves as portrayers of a Mizrahi self‐representation and their works were published during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The paper examines how writers who represent themselves as Mizrahi — a self‐representation which has been engendered in the course of their interpositions in the domain of Israeli literature — point to possible courses of intervention in the field of Israeli literature dominated by the Ashkenazi or Eurocentric hegemony. These courses of literary intervention become possible not just because Mizrahi Jews are depicted as a third‐world group; but also because they occupy another position — a ‘third space’ or ‘in‐between’ position. While they belong to the ‘Jewish nation’, Mizrahi Jews were part of the Arab/Third world. Thus, it is their ‘in‐between’ position that locates them at a privileged site to challenge European Jewish hegemony in Israel by attempting to entrench within it an antagonistic and defiant Mizrahi presence.