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On A Contemporary Notion of Arab Jewish Identity: Reading Haviva Pedaya Intersectionally
Abstract
Having piqued the interest of Middle East studies academia, scholarship on the social history of Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine has gone a long way toward dismantling what the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict has positioned as bifurcated, i.e. Arab and Jewish identities. There remains though, a difficulty in fully extracting the Arab Jewish identity lying between these positions. Rather, Arab Jewish identity is situated as something of a relic of the past, existing in theory, but not in contemporary lived experience. After exemplifying such a reality, what I hope to do in this paper, is render Arab Jewish identity more contemporary through a specific example and theoretical underpinning. Given her potential as an Arab Jewish archetype, it is worthwhile to explore the intellectual output of scholar, poet and author of Iraqi descent, Haviva Pedaya. It is possible that the reflexive myopicism and capitulation to political Zionism's clout, that obscures Arab Jewish identity in the present, is due to a lack of theoretical basis that can accommodate an identity so historically rich, but seemingly contemporarily numerously fraught as the Arab Jewish. Thus, due to the measurable good it has done for other marginalized identities, intersectionality theory, in consort with examples of Pedaya's poetry, prose, and public statements in both English and Hebrew, will be used, to demonstrate that beyond existing so measurably in the past, the Arab Jew is something contemporary. What allows intersectionality to be so capable of extracting the Arab Jew from becoming an historical artifact and why this fact matters so much in the present, is how intersectionality makes possible identity as a coalition. This means that while identities are engendered by acknowledging multiple and intersecting sameness and differences, which can be exclusionary, coalitional identification renders this never exclusive. What this could mean is the visibility of an Arab Jewish identity that is contemporary and numerously constituted, rather than the partial language and racial constitutions of the past. Pedaya embodies at least three notions of sameness and difference vis-à-vis Israeli society, that make her an intersectional subject: her religiosity, her existence as part of Israel's 'Eastern' cultural minority given her ethnicity as well as mystical and Andalusian proclivities and the fact that her gender performance is female.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries