"Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it.

As an Arab Jewish writer (my family hails from Morocco, India and Iraq), I couldn’t be happier about this flurry of cultural expression. I’m often dismayed by how “Ashkenazi” becomes a stand-in for “Jewish,” while Sephardic and Mizrachi voices fall by the wayside.

Imagine my excitement, then, when I discovered Eduardo Halfon’s new novel, “Monastery,” in which the conflicted, tragicomic protagonist denies his Arab identity when talking to certain Jews, and his Jewish identity when talking to certain Arabs."





Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/211507/lets-make--the-year-of-the-arab-jew/#ixzz3NrjqmFv7







Comment: "Only a moron believes that Jewish Ibero-Berbers, Turko-Mesopotamians, and S. Arabians were not of the same ethnicity as the people among whom they lived."

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/211507/lets-make--the-year-of-the-arab-jew/#ixzz3Nrx6FI2i



Comment: "The Israeli Jews who came from Arab countries do not identify themselves as Arab Jews. First they are Israeli Jews and then they will say Egyptian Jew, Syrian Jew, etc. Recently several extreme anti-Zionists started using the term "Arab Jew", but the vast majority of Mizrahi Jews reject that."

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/211507/lets-make--the-year-of-the-arab-jew/#ixzz3Nrw2dQOS




Comment: "Stupid, racist term that conflates all brown people for clueless leftist ashkenazis to feel enlightened instead of ignorant."

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/211507/lets-make--the-year-of-the-arab-jew/#ixzz3NrwK3gHz