{"id":177,"date":"2021-03-28T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-28T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/2021\/03\/being-jewish-and-muslim-together-remembering-our-legacy\/"},"modified":"2024-03-16T18:27:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-16T16:27:43","slug":"being-jewish-and-muslim-together-remembering-our-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/being-jewish-and-muslim-together-remembering-our-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Jewish and Muslim Together: Remembering Our Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France
\n<\/em>edited by Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince
\n Liverpool University Press<\/a> (Nov 2020)
\nISBN 9781789621334<\/p>\n

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Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema <\/em>by Deborah Starr
\nUniversity of California Press<\/a> (Sept 2020)
\nISBN 9780520366206<\/p>\n

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By Joyce Zonana<\/h4>\n

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\"Available<\/a>
Jewish Muslim Interactions is available from Liverpool University Press.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Throughout my childhood in our Egyptian-Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn, I was regularly disheartened by the sight of my grandmother Rose, slumped on our living room sofa, weeping loudly as she played and replayed scratched LPs of Farid al-Atrash and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. La musique arabe, <\/em>“Arabic music” as we called it, evoked for me our family’s broken past, the never-to-be-retrieved glory days of their lives in Egypt before the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolt. In my hunger to be American, I wanted nothing to do either with that past or with my shattered, grieving grandmother, who spoke mostly Arabic and whose only pleasure seemed to be retelling stories about Goha<\/a>, the ubiquitous wise fool of North African and Asian folklore.<\/p>\n

But just the other day, I happened on Safinez Bousbia’s stunning 2011 film, El Gusto<\/em><\/a>, showcasing Muslim and Jewish Algerian cha\u00e2bi <\/em>musicians reunited after fifty years of separation (most of the country’s 140,000 Jews, denied Algerian citizenship in 1963 after independence, had left for France, although under French colonialism, Jews were granted French citizenship by the Cr\u00e9mieux Decree of 1870, and Muslims were not). Watching the film, I was swept away by the music, ecstatically dancing and recalling my grandmother with a new sense of compassion. The sounds were so familiar, so deep, so infectious and joyful \u2014 cha\u00e2bi<\/em>, the music of the North African “folk,” an amalgam of Andalusian and Amazigh traditions, along with strains of Islamic and Jewish chants. The film’s closeups of those elderly yet still vital Jewish and Muslim men calling each other “brother” and unabashedly embracing, brought tears to my eyes.<\/p>\n

I’d been led to El Gusto <\/em>\u2014 how had I missed it all this time? \u2014 by my reading of Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince’s new edited collection, Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France<\/em>, a wide-ranging exploration of what one of its writers \u2014 speaking of the contemporary French comedy duo Younes and Bambi \u2014 calls “a jovial reimagining of what it means to be Jewish and<\/em> Muslim together<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

Everett and Vince \u2014 who met at Ella Shohat<\/a>‘s 2017 lecture on “The Question of the Arab-Jew and Judaeo-Arabic” at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London \u2014 have carefully compiled fourteen essays by a transnational network of emerging and established scholars in fields as varied as anthropology, philosophy, history, literature, cultural studies, and digital humanities. (Liverpool University Press has made four of the 14 essays available online here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Expanding the concept of the Arab Jew to also consider Jewish-Amazigh connections, the complex and multifaceted volume properly reflects the complex, multifaceted world that is its subject. The writers explore various “performing cultures”\u2014 film, theatre, music, street art, graphic novels, stand-up comedy \u2014 in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, France and Israel. Some of the essays glance back at the early decades of the 20th century; some study the crucial interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s; still others tackle the immediate present. All are informed by critical, probing perspectives as they consider “multilingual and transcultural spheres” that encompass “interreligious ambiances.” Eschewing the term “Francophone” as a “colonial hangover,” the volume deliberately takes the Maghrib (rather than “Maghreb”) as its starting point, refusing conventional narratives of “conflict, trauma, and nostalgia,” and any totalizing generalizations. Instead, the assembled writers focus on “creative interactions between Maghribi Jews and Muslims on both sides of the Mediterranean, highlighting their interconnectedness across time.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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