Creator Bio

Ella Shohat

b. 1959

Ella Shohat is a professor of cultural studies at New York University. Shohat was born into a Baghdadi-Jewish family that emigrated to Israel and then to the United States, and her memories of the stigma that she and her parents faced as Mizrahim in Israel profoundly influenced her writings, which deal with the erasure of Mizrahi identity in Israeli society and in Zionist narratives. Shohat identifies as an Arab Jew and has criticized the notion of a Jewish/Arab binary. She is the author of numerous articles and books dealing with Eurocentrism, orientalism, colonialism, and Iraqi-Jewish culture, including “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims” (1988), Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006), and “Remembering a Baghdad Elsewhere: An Emotional Cartography” (2014).

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

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Mizrahi Identity and the Myth of “Return”

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From a Baghdadi-Jewish family, Ella Shohat critiques the Zionist narrative of return as a form of erasure of the history of the rupture and of Arab-Jewish identity and culture.