Abstract
How does the study of Mizrahi notions of home and practices of language challenges the presumption that all Jews feel a sense of belonging within conventional, hegemonic understandings of “Jewish identity” and confining binaries of “Jewishness versus Arabness” prevalent in Israel and the US? Born in Yemen and immigrating to Israel with her family at 10, and launching her career as a poet in Berkeley, CA, feminist poet, educator, and activist Bracha Seri brought back the Arabic in and through her poetic work in Hebrew, weaving Arabic words and sounds to expose the silencing force of the Hebrew. Bracha Seri and poet and songwriter Naomi Amrani, both appearing in Israela Shaer-Meoded's Queen Khantarisha, are Yemenite Mizrahi women who speak about and perform their ongoing relationships to the Arabic language despite Israel’s silencing of the Arabic language in the public sphere and the undermining of traditions of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries previously practiced in Arabic. Utilizing feminist, anti-racist, and film scholarship, this presentation takes a close look at how the documentary performances of Mizrahi women deliver their trauma and pain resulting from Israel’s oppression and silencing of them, and their multifaceted contested connections to their homes. For Seri and Amrani, home is the physical location where exploitative labor takes place and where the Arabic language is supposed to serve a very limited utility, and also where their connection to Yemenite traditions and to the Arabic lives on. Queen Khantarisha foreground speech performances of the women in or by their homes, where the national and patriarchal measures of silencing were placed on their voices and their mother tongues of the Arabic, and where their access to the Arabic nevertheless remained intact.
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