Frankel Ink

Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media

By: Mostafa Hussein

Professor Hussein's latest book was published by the Penn State University Press in 2024.  See below for the book's summary and a review.

This volume examines the cultural legacy of Jewish emigration from the Maghreb and the Middle East in the years following 1948. Drawing on the remarkable cinematic and literary output of the last twenty years, this collection posits loss as a new conceptual framework in which to understand Jewish-Muslim relations. Previous studies of Jewish emigration have followed the mass departure of Jews, but the contributors to this book choose to remain behind and trace the contours of Jewish absence in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern societies. Attuned to loss in this way, the cultural memories of Jewish-Muslim life transcend the narratives of turmoil, taboo, and nostalgia that have dominated Muslim and prevalent scholarly perspectives on Jewish emigration.

Read as a whole, the collection affords an uncommon opportunity to mourn and heal through a nuanced reckoning with the absence of Jews from communities in which they had lived for millennia. Its wide geographic reach and interdisciplinary nature will speak both to scholars and lay readers in Amazigh studies, Arabic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Jewish studies, memory studies, and a host of other disciplines.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Abdelkader Aoudjit, İlker Hepkaner, Sarah Irving, Stephanie Kraver, Lital Levy, Nadia Sabri, and Lior B. Sternfeld.

"For decades, the subject of indigenous Jews in Arab/Amazigh/Muslim countries has formed a taboo, entangled in the war zones of Palestine and Israel. Yet an increasingly visible body of work by artists and scholars whose background is largely Muslim has begun to unmute the public-sphere silence shrouding the absence of past Jewish neighbors. Brahim El Guabli and Mostafa Hussein’s coedited volume constitutes a landmark intervention within this growing field of inquiry. The book sheds light on the departure of Jews from their erstwhile homelands specifically in terms of its impact on their neighbors, emphasizing Muslim views of these ruptured relations. Rather than treat Jewish communities as a historically separate entity apart from Muslim societies, the editors’ compelling introduction and the refreshing essays gathered here bear witness to the depth and complexity of the relations between the two communities. Given the history of partition, the book is careful to not cast one narrative of loss, whether Palestinian or Arab-Jewish, at the expense of the other. Instead, the collection illuminates the mutual imbrication of losses, underscoring the ways in which the void left in the wake of Jewish departure can be creatively revisited, especially when the surfacing of past stories animates an intergenerational transmission of cultural memory. Envisioning a terrain of alternative possibilities, El Guabli and Hussein’s Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media transcends the academic boundaries separating the fields of Middle Eastern/Arab/Amazigh studies, on the one hand, and Jewish studies, on the other, providing a generative framework for a much-needed scholarly engagement.”  —Ella Habiba Shohat, author of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements