The relationship of Arabic and Hebrew has become an increasing part of the study of Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. Moving from an almost entirely Eurocentric grasp—with a few token examples—to studies of the marginalized, with some attempts to bring the marginalized to the center, this scholarship has now entered a new stage with research by Ammiel Alcalay, Dror Mishani, Lital Levy, Yehuda Shenhav, Deborah Starr, and others. These studies take it for granted that the Mizrachi and/or Arabs have a place in the republic of letters and no longer allow Orientalism—or even the struggle against Orientalism—to grab the center. Gil Hochberg's book expands the field with an exploration of the very “inseparability of Arabs and Jews” from a sophisticated literary perspective. Hochberg illustrates Edward Said's assertion, which is quoted in the introduction, that neither Jew nor Arab can ignore the other, or develop in the vacuum of the other, and investigates the complexity of identities formed—and forming—through the entwining of Arab and Jew.

Hochberg acknowledges the risks in abstracting the identities under discussion, and she fights them, largely avoiding the characteristic pitfalls. She shows herself to be a true comparativist, and, with an unusual approach, adds fluency in French, a significant language for Jews and Arabs writing in the Middle East, to the more typical trio of Hebrew, Arabic, and English.

The book is a collection of five case studies that together measure the extent and result of Arab–Jewish entanglement. The first chapter considers the case of Albert Memmi's canonical La statue de sel and El Maleh's lesser-known Mille ans, une jour. It engages theories of memory and forgetting, reading the novels as political explorations of ideology and identity. Because the close readings of selected passages are so compelling, one wishes for more. In the second chapter, which pairs Jacqueline Kahanoff and Ronit Matalon, Hochberg reads Matalon's novel The One Facing Us as a critique of Kahanoff's Levantinism, which is presented as an elitist ideology that removes the Arabness from Mediterraneanism. Hochberg suggests that the novel counters both A. B. Yehoshua's idea of normalization and Kahanoff's “dream of cultural pluralism.” The chapter about Arabesques by Anton Shammas, a novel that is often discussed more as a phenomenon—a Hebrew novel written by an Arab—predictably, albeit gracefully, considers the act as an attempt to “deterritorialize” the Hebrew language. Here, too, Yehoshua's extranovelistic writing—and in particular his famous statement effectively setting limits on Shammas's identity—is contested. While the Shammas–Yehoshua debate has already been covered by Shai Ginsburg, Baruch Kimmerling, Rachel Brenner, and Laurence Silberstein, as well as by sources included in the book, the discussion fits well here, and contributes to the larger argument.

In the penultimate chapter, Hochberg takes on Albert Suissa's difficult novel ‘Aqud and its various readings. Its macaronic multilingualism—including lexical items from Hebrew strata ranging from the rabbinic to the street, the biblical and the mystical, combined with Judeo-Berber and phrases from the Jewish Moroccan Arabic dialect—was criticized rather than celebrated as a “new and ‘foreign’ kind of Hebrew text or as a further development in the actualization of modern Hebrew.” Hochberg suggests that the failure of the immigration process depicted in the novel, like the language used, is a form of resistance. The final chapter, “Memory, Forgetting, Love,” introduces the issue of the Holocaust and the question of the hierarchy of suffering through an analysis of Amin Ma'alouf's Ports of Call and a reading of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry and essays. Darwish's text Memory for Forgetfulness offers a scene in which a Lebanese woman protests against a Palestinian's appreciation for Fairuz (the Lebanese national singer), asking him “by what right” does he love her song. The scene reverberates powerfully against Yehoshua's objections to Shammas's claim to Hebrew, and against the alienation of Memmi's character Benillouche.

In Spite of Partition is a slender, elegantly written volume that offers a great deal of material for thought. It complicates the questions of Arab and Jewish identities, and shows these identities to be entwined in complex ways, and in nearly constant flux. Memory plays a central role in the formation and reception of these identities. While the cultural implications of Hochberg's analysis are clear, there are disciplinary implications as well. We need to continue to break down the entrenched borders and walls between Arabic language programs and Jewish studies programs, between Hebrew and Arabic literature associations, and between identity and literary studies, and to encourage our students to study multiple languages and traditions. Hochberg's study is important both for its argument and as a model for future scholarship.