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The Political Syntax of the Absentees: A Translator’s Reflection on Stella Maris
Stella Maris, by Elias Khoury, is the follow-up novel to My Name Is Adam: Children of the Ghetto, Volume I, but the two novels can be read out of sequence, since they do not follow a linear narrative. Each is made up of multiple layers of space and time, entwined with the history and biography of Adam Danoun, as they move in a time machine-like fashion between past and future, and parallel worlds.
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This Is al-Lydd/This Is Palestine
I delivered this talk at a meeting organized by youth groups in the city of al-Lydd and held at the Communist Party’s club on Friday night, July 13, 2018, on the seventieth anniversary of the occupation of al-Lydd, and one of the biggest massacres of the 1948 Nakba War, and the expulsion of the overwhelming majority of its residents, and the internment of those who remained in a ghetto enclosed by a barbed wire fence.
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In This Ghetto for Which We Have Gathered
Al-Lydd, in the ruins of a Mandate-era structure whose glory days have passed, now called “the Club,” the launch of Elias Khoury’s novel My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto, translated into Hebrew by Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani. Ustadh Ali, sitting in the audience, feels the earth cracking on the brink of the abyss along which he walks.
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Maktoob in Action
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The Khawaja
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The Prophet Nahum’s Prophecy of Doom to His Manservant Mordekhai-Hai in the Year 1941
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Samir Naqqash and His Polyglotic Literature in the Age of National Partition
Against the backdrop of the national and colonial era and the rise of the monolingual national literature, this article explores Samir Naqqash’s literary work as a case study of multilingual writing in a monolingual literary reality, where there is a sharp gap between the language of the text and the expectations of the readership and its language. Through an exploration of Naqqash’s literary work, the article focuses on questions of multilingualism, translation, and literature along the borderlands of the modern Hebrew and Arabic languages and literatures. It examines the ways in which Naqqash’s work defies and resists the dominant nationalistic and monolingual trend in both Arabic and Hebrew literature and represents a unique and subversive poetic and linguistic model that blends spoken and literary languages, transcending the religious and national divide while simultaneously intersecting the different literary traditions from a wide geographical and cultural context, facing both East and West.
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Arabic Language among Jews in Israel and the New Mizrahi Zionism: Between Active Knowledge and Performance
According to Command of Arabic among Israeli Jews, a report by Shenhav et al. (2015), the vast majority of the Jews in Israel neither speak nor understand the Arabic language. Proficiency in Arabic has declined dramatically with succeeding generations. While slightly more than half of the participants in the study believe that knowledge of Arabic is important, the majority of the participants also stated that its importance is security related. This bleak picture of Arabic as a vanishing language among Israeli Jews is related to the protracted ethnonational conflict, which has divided “Jews” from “Arabs.” This is in contrast to the recently expanding number of Jewish Israeli musicians, mostly of the third generation (the grandchildren) of migrants from Arab countries, who sing in Arabic and receive wide local and international exposure. In this article I examine the discrepancy between the low rates of proficiency and interest in the Arabic language and the growing number of singers and audiences in Israel who appreciate music sung in Arabic. I first summarize the findings of the report. I then examine Jewish Israeli musicians who perform in Arabic, focusing on Neta Elkayam and Ziv Yehezkel, to consider the possibilities of a cultural dialogue between Israeli musicians and local Palestinian, as well as regional, Arab audiences. I discuss the political significance of these performances, both in the context of Mizrahi identity among the third generation and in relation to local and regional Arab audiences. In the last section, I tie these musical performances to the policy of the right-wing government in Israel and the rise of a new Mizrahi Zionist discourse in relation to the Arabic language and culture. Finally, I point to the possible negative consequences of this cultural shift for Palestinians.
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