Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book... more Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book In Spite of Partition
The checkpoint is both the border and the passage; the pain and the relief; the closer and the es... more The checkpoint is both the border and the passage; the pain and the relief; the closer and the escape.. .. everything begins and ends with the checkpoint.-Azmi Bishara, Al-Hajiz: Shazaya riwaya Al-Kitab al-awwal-Wajd fi bilad al-hawajiz It was approximately 11:00 p.m. on 13 May 2006. The soldiers ordered us in Arabic through loudspeakers to take off our clothes. [They] ordered us to lift up our shirts and pull down our trousers. [We] pulled down the trousers a little but the soldiers asked [us] to remove the trousers and take them off.-Testimony from Al-Nu'men village, November 2006 Notions of apartheid, occupation, or colonialism are used to account for the oppressive relationship between the state of Israel and the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet it appears that the checkpoint-both as a specific mechanism of surveillance and as a metaphorical figure for a broader configuration of space, time, and (im)mobility-captures this oppressive reality in a manner that makes most concrete the particular power structure of the relationship, its means of execution, and its harmful effects. As a visible display of military force, checkpoints sharply divide Israelis from Palestinians, occupiers from the occupied, according to "those who give permission and those who need to ask for it." 1 Since the 1967 war, the Israeli army has set up checkpoints between Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as in numerous locations within these occupied territories. They significantly increased in number and technological GLQ 16:4
I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, y... more I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, yes, cultural differences aside) that is obsessed with, privileges, worships, and fears (losing) the penis. This isn't simply a "man's world," this is a world designed by and for the penis. Many brilliant feminists have made brave and poetic attempts to write their way out of phallocentrism. I love Hélène Cixous' plea to women to write their desire through their vaginas, her cry for the vulva to be heard ("je veux vulve!"). I shivered with joy when I first read Luce Irigaray's love ode for the multiplicity of the inner lips. Woman needs no other because she is already plural, her vaginal lips make love as she walks. I still teach these texts and they continue to make college students giggle with embarrassment, a clear sign of their success. (Hélène Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa" 1975. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977], 1986.) Speaking about vaginas continues to be something they find very difficult. They are much more at ease saying "penis" "dick" "cock." Anything just not vagina, let alone, lips, or clit. Cixous and Irigaray labored to create a discursive space from which one could speak of/from the plurality of the vagina. They called for us to speak of women's sexuality and pleasure. To voice our Jouissance. The painful truth is that like the subaltern, the vagina cannot speak, for when it does, it already speaks the phallus. Or it is accused of meddling into serious business, brining yeast infection and other abject interventions that interrupt the phallic order (Lacan said as much explicitly). Judith Butler made this very clear in their melancholic celebration of the lesbian phallus. (Judith Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary," Bodies that Matter 1993.) A thing that isn't a thing at all, but is a play on a play on words, always already within the (phallic) symbolic order. There is no way out. But even this powerful argument can only offer solace to the already convinced. Those for whom the fictionality of the phallus is painfully clear. Still, there is a big gap between knowing something is fiction, and being able to actually find freedom and playfulness in the limited libidinal space opened between the signifier and the signified, even in the hands (or on the hips) of a very capable lesbian. I tried.
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers,... more In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.
National allegories and the emergence of female voice in Moufida Tlatli'sLes silences du palais∗
Third text, Mar 1, 2000
... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les... more ... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les silences du palais * Gil Hochberg Nations are nothing eternal. They had a beginning, they will have an end. ...Moufida Tlatli, Les silences du palais, Tunisia, 1994 (French and Arabic). ...
All translations from the Hebrew and Arabic sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. I thank ... more All translations from the Hebrew and Arabic sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. I thank Samir Ben-Layashi and Nouri Gana for helping me locate some of the online Arabic reviews of Kashua's work. I also thank the two anonymous readers of this essay for their helpful recommendations. Arabic and Hebrew words and names have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet according to a simplifi ed system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies. All diacritical marks have been omitted except for the 'ayn and the hamza. All transliterations from Arabic and Hebrew, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will ... more The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will take place in Gaza. There's already a plan to evacuate the communities along the Gaza Strip border. Israel knows this war will break out, it also knows why-and it's galloping toward it blindfolded, as though it were a cyclic ritual, a periodical ceremony or a natural disaster that cannot be avoided.-Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz (February 26, 2015) linguistic reference, implying indirectly that the "operation" was the Israel Defense Forces' "gift" for the holidays.
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Nov 1, 2015
At the end of her pioneering study, Lital Levy makes the following assertion about the authors sh... more At the end of her pioneering study, Lital Levy makes the following assertion about the authors she has analyzed: "Their journeys are the charting of the Hebrew-Arabic no-man's-land, the zone of poetic trespass, where impossibility is the essential condition of creation" (p. 297). Levy's book itself charts this no-man's-land, a discursive and ideological gulf that separates Hebrew and Arabic in the recent history of Israel/Palestine. While acknowledging power imbalances and the immense burden of language politics, policy, and ideology in the Israeli State and the larger postcolonial Middle East, Poetic Trespass refuses to abide by their logic. Levy's scholarship actively imagines connections between disparate communities, especially ties between Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Poetic Trespass covers immense ground and reconsiders many of the crucial linguistic, cultural, and sociological debates in the history of Zionism, Israeli and Palestinian society, and Mizrahi Studies. The latter, a rapidly expanding field in and outside of Israel/Palestine, focuses on Jews who trace their roots primarily to the Middle East and North Africa, but also other non-Ashkenazi communities from Europe, Central Asia, and India, among other places. Following in the footsteps of the work of Ammiel Alcalay, Ella Shohat, Gil Hochberg, and others, Poetic Trespass takes the scope of scholarship on language in Israel/Palestine considerably further, coupling the relationship to Arabic in Hebrew Orientalists of the pre-state waves of Zionist settlement with Arab-Jewish readings of the "Hebrew national poet" Bialik, Arabic-language literature written within Israel by Palestinian Emile Habiby and Iraqi Jew Samir Naqqash, and Palestinian poetry in Hebrew. The book also offers perhaps the most thorough overview in English of contemporary Mizrahi literature. While each chapter is strong, the chapter on Palestinian Hebrew poetry and the two chapters on Mizrahi literature are the most striking in their rigor and originality. Considerable research has been done on Hebrew Orientalism and Bialik, for example, though not focused on the Sephardic and Mizrahi perspectives that Levy highlights. The readings of Habiby and Naqqash are solid in their appraisal of mistranslation and misunderstanding, but what may be most suggestive is their framing within a book with striking new insights concerning the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in both "Palestinian midrash"-Levy's term for the use of Biblical allusion and Jewish textuality by Palestinians-and the history of Mizrahi literature and multilingualism in relationship to standard Hebrew (ivrit tiknit). The chapter on "Palestinian midrash" foregrounds the particular social position of Palestinian Hebrew poets using Jewish textual sources. Their verses intrude upon and "transform Jewish associations of Hebrew language" (p. 185) through, among other examples, allusions to the Passover haggadah in a prison poem and the dense use of Biblical allusion to express Palestinian alienation within Israeli society. As Lital Levy observes, "if the identity of Palestinians in Israellet alone those writing in Hebrew-is rife with fragmentation and internal contradiction, then it should come as no surprise to find. .. demons haunting the space of the text" (p. 149).
The following roundtable conversation took place via telephone, Internet chat, and e-mail exchang... more The following roundtable conversation took place via telephone, Internet chat, and e-mail exchange. While each conversation occurred separately, I have passed information back and forth among the three participants so they could remark on each other's comments and have edited lightly for the sake of continuity. I have also translated into English Samira Saraya's contributions, which were originally in Hebrew. The three participants are actively involved in local Palestinian queer activism in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Haneen Maikey is the founder and director of Al-Qaws (Rainbow), an independent Palestinian LGBTQ organization established in 2007. The organization is located in Jerusalem, with activists operating in both Israel and the West Bank. Rima is the information and publication project coordinator at Aswat (Voices), an LBTQI organization for Palestinian women in Israel and the occupied territories established in 2003. Saraya helped found Aswat and was the group's general director between 2007 and 2008. She is a registered nurse, a rapper, and a drag performance artist.-Gil Hochberg Gil Hochberg: There are several LGBTQ Israeli organizations, some of which explicitly target both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, like the Jerusalem Open House (JOH). Is there really a need for independent and exclusively Palestinian organizations? Haneen Maikey: Absolutely. I actually began my activist work at the JOH. After the second Intifada, people at JOH noticed that Palestinians stopped coming to the center, so they were looking for someone who speaks Arabic to run a new outreach program for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. At the beginning, I too thought that it was only a matter of language. But, after working with the LGBTQ Palestin-GLQ 16:4
The Mediterranean is another way of writing history.-Michel Eckhard Elial 1 Following the first w... more The Mediterranean is another way of writing history.-Michel Eckhard Elial 1 Following the first wave of Moroccan immigrants to Israel in 1949, a French diplomat, who has chosen to remain anonymous, was quoted in the leading Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz as warning the new state that ''the immigration of certain human material is liable to bring the Jewish nation down, and make it into a Levantine nightmare.'' 2 A decade later, the British daily the Manchester Guardian had accused Israel's then prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, of ''plunging the new nation into Levantinism,'' and Ben-Gurion himself was quoted as saying that he would surely ''prevent Levantinism from creeping into [Israel's] national life!'' 3
Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book... more Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book In Spite of Partition
The checkpoint is both the border and the passage; the pain and the relief; the closer and the es... more The checkpoint is both the border and the passage; the pain and the relief; the closer and the escape.. .. everything begins and ends with the checkpoint.-Azmi Bishara, Al-Hajiz: Shazaya riwaya Al-Kitab al-awwal-Wajd fi bilad al-hawajiz It was approximately 11:00 p.m. on 13 May 2006. The soldiers ordered us in Arabic through loudspeakers to take off our clothes. [They] ordered us to lift up our shirts and pull down our trousers. [We] pulled down the trousers a little but the soldiers asked [us] to remove the trousers and take them off.-Testimony from Al-Nu'men village, November 2006 Notions of apartheid, occupation, or colonialism are used to account for the oppressive relationship between the state of Israel and the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet it appears that the checkpoint-both as a specific mechanism of surveillance and as a metaphorical figure for a broader configuration of space, time, and (im)mobility-captures this oppressive reality in a manner that makes most concrete the particular power structure of the relationship, its means of execution, and its harmful effects. As a visible display of military force, checkpoints sharply divide Israelis from Palestinians, occupiers from the occupied, according to "those who give permission and those who need to ask for it." 1 Since the 1967 war, the Israeli army has set up checkpoints between Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as in numerous locations within these occupied territories. They significantly increased in number and technological GLQ 16:4
I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, y... more I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, yes, cultural differences aside) that is obsessed with, privileges, worships, and fears (losing) the penis. This isn't simply a "man's world," this is a world designed by and for the penis. Many brilliant feminists have made brave and poetic attempts to write their way out of phallocentrism. I love Hélène Cixous' plea to women to write their desire through their vaginas, her cry for the vulva to be heard ("je veux vulve!"). I shivered with joy when I first read Luce Irigaray's love ode for the multiplicity of the inner lips. Woman needs no other because she is already plural, her vaginal lips make love as she walks. I still teach these texts and they continue to make college students giggle with embarrassment, a clear sign of their success. (Hélène Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa" 1975. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977], 1986.) Speaking about vaginas continues to be something they find very difficult. They are much more at ease saying "penis" "dick" "cock." Anything just not vagina, let alone, lips, or clit. Cixous and Irigaray labored to create a discursive space from which one could speak of/from the plurality of the vagina. They called for us to speak of women's sexuality and pleasure. To voice our Jouissance. The painful truth is that like the subaltern, the vagina cannot speak, for when it does, it already speaks the phallus. Or it is accused of meddling into serious business, brining yeast infection and other abject interventions that interrupt the phallic order (Lacan said as much explicitly). Judith Butler made this very clear in their melancholic celebration of the lesbian phallus. (Judith Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary," Bodies that Matter 1993.) A thing that isn't a thing at all, but is a play on a play on words, always already within the (phallic) symbolic order. There is no way out. But even this powerful argument can only offer solace to the already convinced. Those for whom the fictionality of the phallus is painfully clear. Still, there is a big gap between knowing something is fiction, and being able to actually find freedom and playfulness in the limited libidinal space opened between the signifier and the signified, even in the hands (or on the hips) of a very capable lesbian. I tried.
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers,... more In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.
National allegories and the emergence of female voice in Moufida Tlatli'sLes silences du palais∗
Third text, Mar 1, 2000
... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les... more ... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les silences du palais * Gil Hochberg Nations are nothing eternal. They had a beginning, they will have an end. ...Moufida Tlatli, Les silences du palais, Tunisia, 1994 (French and Arabic). ...
All translations from the Hebrew and Arabic sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. I thank ... more All translations from the Hebrew and Arabic sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. I thank Samir Ben-Layashi and Nouri Gana for helping me locate some of the online Arabic reviews of Kashua's work. I also thank the two anonymous readers of this essay for their helpful recommendations. Arabic and Hebrew words and names have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet according to a simplifi ed system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies. All diacritical marks have been omitted except for the 'ayn and the hamza. All transliterations from Arabic and Hebrew, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will ... more The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will take place in Gaza. There's already a plan to evacuate the communities along the Gaza Strip border. Israel knows this war will break out, it also knows why-and it's galloping toward it blindfolded, as though it were a cyclic ritual, a periodical ceremony or a natural disaster that cannot be avoided.-Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz (February 26, 2015) linguistic reference, implying indirectly that the "operation" was the Israel Defense Forces' "gift" for the holidays.
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Nov 1, 2015
At the end of her pioneering study, Lital Levy makes the following assertion about the authors sh... more At the end of her pioneering study, Lital Levy makes the following assertion about the authors she has analyzed: "Their journeys are the charting of the Hebrew-Arabic no-man's-land, the zone of poetic trespass, where impossibility is the essential condition of creation" (p. 297). Levy's book itself charts this no-man's-land, a discursive and ideological gulf that separates Hebrew and Arabic in the recent history of Israel/Palestine. While acknowledging power imbalances and the immense burden of language politics, policy, and ideology in the Israeli State and the larger postcolonial Middle East, Poetic Trespass refuses to abide by their logic. Levy's scholarship actively imagines connections between disparate communities, especially ties between Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Poetic Trespass covers immense ground and reconsiders many of the crucial linguistic, cultural, and sociological debates in the history of Zionism, Israeli and Palestinian society, and Mizrahi Studies. The latter, a rapidly expanding field in and outside of Israel/Palestine, focuses on Jews who trace their roots primarily to the Middle East and North Africa, but also other non-Ashkenazi communities from Europe, Central Asia, and India, among other places. Following in the footsteps of the work of Ammiel Alcalay, Ella Shohat, Gil Hochberg, and others, Poetic Trespass takes the scope of scholarship on language in Israel/Palestine considerably further, coupling the relationship to Arabic in Hebrew Orientalists of the pre-state waves of Zionist settlement with Arab-Jewish readings of the "Hebrew national poet" Bialik, Arabic-language literature written within Israel by Palestinian Emile Habiby and Iraqi Jew Samir Naqqash, and Palestinian poetry in Hebrew. The book also offers perhaps the most thorough overview in English of contemporary Mizrahi literature. While each chapter is strong, the chapter on Palestinian Hebrew poetry and the two chapters on Mizrahi literature are the most striking in their rigor and originality. Considerable research has been done on Hebrew Orientalism and Bialik, for example, though not focused on the Sephardic and Mizrahi perspectives that Levy highlights. The readings of Habiby and Naqqash are solid in their appraisal of mistranslation and misunderstanding, but what may be most suggestive is their framing within a book with striking new insights concerning the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in both "Palestinian midrash"-Levy's term for the use of Biblical allusion and Jewish textuality by Palestinians-and the history of Mizrahi literature and multilingualism in relationship to standard Hebrew (ivrit tiknit). The chapter on "Palestinian midrash" foregrounds the particular social position of Palestinian Hebrew poets using Jewish textual sources. Their verses intrude upon and "transform Jewish associations of Hebrew language" (p. 185) through, among other examples, allusions to the Passover haggadah in a prison poem and the dense use of Biblical allusion to express Palestinian alienation within Israeli society. As Lital Levy observes, "if the identity of Palestinians in Israellet alone those writing in Hebrew-is rife with fragmentation and internal contradiction, then it should come as no surprise to find. .. demons haunting the space of the text" (p. 149).
The following roundtable conversation took place via telephone, Internet chat, and e-mail exchang... more The following roundtable conversation took place via telephone, Internet chat, and e-mail exchange. While each conversation occurred separately, I have passed information back and forth among the three participants so they could remark on each other's comments and have edited lightly for the sake of continuity. I have also translated into English Samira Saraya's contributions, which were originally in Hebrew. The three participants are actively involved in local Palestinian queer activism in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Haneen Maikey is the founder and director of Al-Qaws (Rainbow), an independent Palestinian LGBTQ organization established in 2007. The organization is located in Jerusalem, with activists operating in both Israel and the West Bank. Rima is the information and publication project coordinator at Aswat (Voices), an LBTQI organization for Palestinian women in Israel and the occupied territories established in 2003. Saraya helped found Aswat and was the group's general director between 2007 and 2008. She is a registered nurse, a rapper, and a drag performance artist.-Gil Hochberg Gil Hochberg: There are several LGBTQ Israeli organizations, some of which explicitly target both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, like the Jerusalem Open House (JOH). Is there really a need for independent and exclusively Palestinian organizations? Haneen Maikey: Absolutely. I actually began my activist work at the JOH. After the second Intifada, people at JOH noticed that Palestinians stopped coming to the center, so they were looking for someone who speaks Arabic to run a new outreach program for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. At the beginning, I too thought that it was only a matter of language. But, after working with the LGBTQ Palestin-GLQ 16:4
The Mediterranean is another way of writing history.-Michel Eckhard Elial 1 Following the first w... more The Mediterranean is another way of writing history.-Michel Eckhard Elial 1 Following the first wave of Moroccan immigrants to Israel in 1949, a French diplomat, who has chosen to remain anonymous, was quoted in the leading Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz as warning the new state that ''the immigration of certain human material is liable to bring the Jewish nation down, and make it into a Levantine nightmare.'' 2 A decade later, the British daily the Manchester Guardian had accused Israel's then prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, of ''plunging the new nation into Levantinism,'' and Ben-Gurion himself was quoted as saying that he would surely ''prevent Levantinism from creeping into [Israel's] national life!'' 3
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by ... more In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
Published at the height of the process of physical and political separation between Israel and Pa... more Published at the height of the process of physical and political separation between Israel and Palestine, Gil Hochberg's In Spite of Partition joins a large and growing group of publications that address the 1947 partition of Palestine by UN Res. 181 and the resulting permanent conflict that ensued. After six decades of armed conflict and four decades of the illegal occupation of diverse Arab territories (including the whole of Palestine), many are beginning to recognize the improbability of the two-state solution and are turning to other older and more enlightened spaces of desire to search for the potential for a lasting, just solution in Palestine. The number and variety of titles dealing with the one-state solution is dazzling, evidence of the bankruptcy of not just Israel's political elite, but also of the West's. Hochberg's book is an especially welcome addition: it does not so much discuss the solution as it addresses the contours of the imaginative space in which a solution may grow. Further, it traces the history of a different discourse from the one that has dominated the politics of the Middle East for the last few decades. Taking his lead (and his title for the book) from Edward Said, Hochberg is trying to replace " the economy of identity (I versus You, Arab versus Jew) with an economy of relation (I as You, Arab as Jew) " (p. 16). Rather than going back to historical points, such as the Brit Shalom period in the 1920s, Hochberg maps the terrain of the relationships between the disputed identities of Jew and Arab through the close analysis of a number of key literary works written by Jews and Arabs since the Nakba. This is done through chapters discussing each a different stage and aspect of the separation, as well as the relationship between Arab and Jew through the examination of a number of iconic novels by such writers as Albert Memmi and Edmond El Maleh (both North African Jews writing in French), Jacqueline Kahanoff and Ronit Matalon (Egyptian and Israeli Jews respectively), Anton Shammas (a Palestinian writing in Hebrew), and Albert Swissa (an Israeli Jew writing in Hebrew). The range of positions is broad but conceptually well-organized, referencing the important work of Daniel Boyarin, Elie Kedourie, Ella Shohat, Amnon Raz-Krakozkin, Gil Anidjar, Sami Chetrit, Judith Butler, and many others while adding significantly to the debate each of them has addressed. The main issues addressed in the book emerge from each writer's positioning of the central tension between the Arab and Jew as fluid containers of identity. Memmi and El Maleh both express a historical potentiality that they present as " missed " —the ability to exist as an Arab Jew in the Mahgrib. Hochberg notes the difference between Memmi's Haim Bresheeth, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of East London, is co-editor (with Hammami) of
Little of nothing in the intellectual history of African Americans […] suggest the effectiveness ... more Little of nothing in the intellectual history of African Americans […] suggest the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic discourse, revised or classical, in illuminating the problematics of 'race' on an inter-subjective field of play, nor do we yet know how to historicize the psychoanalytic object and objective, invade its heredity premises and insulations, and open its insights, subsequently, to cultural and social forms that are disjunctive to its originary imperatives.
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