Reflections of an Arab Jew »
Posted By hyperbola 1 year, 9 months ago in NewsZionism is destroying much of judaism. For Sephardic (oriental) jews, Israel does not represent aliya (ascent), but rather a yerida (descent). Oriental-Sephardic peace movements not only call for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for the cultural, political, and economic integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle East.
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hyperbola
Military brat (14th generation American) with unassuaged wanderlust. By age 11, schools in four states and three foreign countries (in 3 languages). Left home at ...
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hyperbola1 year, 9 months ago
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from the article:
I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the United States.
When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the `50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently -- the European Jews -- were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness.
My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of "us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been "Muslim," "Jew" and "Christian," not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that "Arabness" referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.
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hyperbola1 year, 9 months ago
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we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to "make it" into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland.
Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you'll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque.
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