Mizrahi Identity and the Myth of “Return”

Ella Shohat

2003

Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the “ingathering of the exiles.” Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably “outside of history,” Jews could once again “enter history” as subjects, as “normal” actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. [ . . . ] The idea of…

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Between the late 1940s and early 1970s, most Jews from Arab and Muslim countries left their birthplaces, most settling in the new State of Israel. This mass displacement of North African and Middle Eastern Jews (“Mizrahim”) stemmed from intertwined push and pull factors, including the clash between Arab and Jewish nationalisms, political upheaval, antisemitism, Zionist recruitment, and socioeconomic pressures. Yet, as the cultural theorist Ella Shohat—  from a Baghdadi-Jewish family who moved to Israel and later to the US—analyzed in the early 2000s, Zionist discourse flattened the diversity of Mizrahi experiences and belongings into a single tale of an inevitable “return.” Writing as an “Arab Jew” of Iraqi descent, Shohat argued that this national narrative racialized and erased Mizrahi culture, producing a new form of exile.

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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).