Ella Shohat's On the Arab Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacement, a selected collection of Shohat's writings, is a significant book. It includes seminal articles which have since become cornerstones in Mizrahi, Israeli, Palestinian, and Middle Eastern Studies; it features forgotten gems, reconstructing Mizrahi activism in Israel and in the Diaspora; and it represents, through a series of conversations, translations, and reflections, an academic biography of an extremely important feminist and postcolonial theorist.

The opening part of the collection includes Shohat's foundational articles “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims”; “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab Jew”; and “The Invention of the Mizrahim.” These articles frame Shohat's larger project, which explores the connections between Zionism, Eurocentrism, and colonialism, on the one hand, and Palestinian and Middle Eastern Jewish cultures and identities, on the other. Shohat's studies explain how Jews from Middle Eastern states found themselves caught between Zionism and other forms of nationalism, how they became third and fourth class citizens in the state of Israel, shedding light on locations such as transit camps and development towns, and on broader mechanisms of minoritization and marginalization, and how they resisted this status. Shohat pays close heed to the creation of the category of the Mizrahim, meaning “the Jews of the East,” as a construct that enabled the state to accept Middle Eastern Jews as Jewish citizens and at the same time preserve their marginality because of their Arab and Middle Eastern cultures. Bravely, however, she suggested that Jews embrace the category of Mizrahim as a way of challenging state narratives and politicizing this identity.

One of Shohat's major contributions is her use of the term “Arab Jew,” namely, a Jew who belongs to indigenous Middle Eastern communities and fully immersed in their Arab cultures. Several essays demonstrate the ways she conceptualized the politics and potentials of this historical category, especially in order to mark the difference between these Jewish communities and Ashkenazi Zionists. Her famous statement “I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi-Israeli woman living, writing, and teaching in the U.S.” encompasses important politics (p. 77). This statement reveals her refusal to accept that Arabs and Jews are enemies; it underscores Shohat's celebration of the Arab cultures of Middle Eastern Jews; and it emphasizes the power of various diasporas to maintain Arab Jewish identities. In other articles, Shohat contemplates how diasporic and transregional forms of identity can subvert and challenge national mythologies and racist discourses.

The book sheds invaluable light on the historiography of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. It contains important insights on Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi and especially on Edward Said's Orientalism, which shapes, in many ways, Shohat's approach to representation, stereotypes and imagery, in both Israel and the United States, and in various medias. Postcolonial thought informs her endeavor to undo Eurocentric approaches to history and culture and Eurocentric historical narratives and periodizations, such as her refusal to celebrate 1492 as the year of the “discovery” of America by reminding us that this year also marks the end of Andalusi society and culture. Writing on more recent terminology, Shohat unmasks the perils embodied in such terms as “clash of civilizations” or “the war against terrorism;” this is evident particularly in Shohat's conversation with Rashid Khalidi in 2003.

Within a Jewish context, Shohat underscores a multiplicity of Jewish histories , noting the different trajectories typical of Middle Eastern Jewish histories, and rejecting Zionism's claim to represent all Jews. Her critique of Zionism also emerges from a postcolonial notion that sees nationalism not as a remedy to colonialism but rather an ideology in its service. Thus, she devotes much space to studying the anomaly of Zionism as a movement seeking liberation from Europe through carrying the banner of its civilizing mission. Shohat's body of work, moreover, often localizes global critiques of white liberalism and colonialism within the context Israel/Palestine. A case in point is her critique of the liberal Israeli left whose members demonized Mizrahim as right-wingers, while ignoring both their own rightist project and the suffering of the very same communities they demonized. Another example is Shohat's evocation of critiques of white feminism to comment on Ashkenazi feminism, reminding fellow Israeli feminists, following Puerto Rican and Native American thinkers, that race matters.

The book also includes Shohat's important essays on cinema and media, elaborating on her argument that Zionism invented Israel through cinema and literature. Long before the critiques of such films as Waltz with Basheer (2008), Shohat criticized the ways in which so-called liberal films equated victim and victimizers by presenting both as casualties of the conflict. The pieces on Israel are intertwined into Shohat's project of exposing the Orientalism embedded in Western cinema, as her insights on gender in Hollywood, images of the Orient in media, and the representations of Baghdad during the first Gulf War indicate. Shohat also identifies interesting trends in Palestinian and Arab cinema, like the works of directors Michel Khleifi and Elia Sulieman, and the early career of Palestinian actor Muhammad Bakri in Beyond the Walls (1984) (commenting on the in famous incident in which Bakri forced an Israeli director to change his script). The collection also features key readings of films that are now part of the Arab cinematic canon, such as Iskanderia Lih? (1979) and Jamila, the Algerian (1958). The collection pays tribute to Shohat's collaborations and interviews with many artists, including Michael Rakowitz and Rasha Salti, with whom she considers issues of home and homelessness in Iraq, Lebanon, New York, and Israel. Her sensitivity to visual culture led to the inclusion of some amazing photographs which tell the heartbreaking and courageous story of Mizrahi Jewry, from family photos of the Shohat family, to images capturing the harsh living conditions of Mizrahim in Israel, to photos of the Mizrahi Black Panthers and Palestinian activists.

The book is also a biography of Shohat. We learn about Shohat's family, their leaving Baghdad, and their lives in Israel, whose ideology forced them to choose between being Jews and being Arabs as part of a painful civilizational process. The most heartbreaking piece, I think, is Shohat's essay on a photo of her mother who appears wearing a suit. “Elegantly she projects authority, as she stands there, her long, thick and curly black hair flowering gently. She lost much of that hair after they became refugees, in an epoch of food rationing in the transit camps in Israel. She fell seriously ill, as the cold wind and rainy winter … inflicted her with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. I often remember how I tried to reconcile these two mothers, the one in the photos in Baghdad, and the other one that I knew, the one courageously fighting economic and social degradation in a weakened, broken, body” (p. 352).

The book illuminates Shohat's activism and theorizing in Israel, featuring translations of her key speeches and essays, from the 1980s in particular. In one such public speech, Shohat speaks proudly in Arabic, as a Jew, using her middle name Habiba (p. 83), in a state which forced Jews to abandon their Arabic names and adopt Hebrew names. In a part of the speech, reminiscent of many Palestinian literary works in which sons rebel against their parents’ silence and silencing by the state, Shohat implores a Mizrahi feminist audience to disobey their mothers’ orders “to be quiet and not speak Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Hindi.” Shohat, in contrast, celebrates the accented Hebrew of Moroccan, Iraqi, and Yemeni women and the activism of fellow Mizrahi feminists Yael Zadock, Mira Eliezer, Tikva Levy, and Ronit Dagan (p. 84). One of the most original pieces in this book is a coauthored essay with Yeach Gover titled “In Defense of Mordechai Vanunu.” In the midst of a seething campaign against Vanunu, a Mizrahi Jew and the most visible whistleblower regarding Israel's nuclear policies, Shohat penned this essay in which Vanunu is depicted as a victim. She does not describe him as a man motivated by greed or madness, but rather as “a concerned Israeli citizen expressing dissent.” In other pieces, Shohat considers the influence her own work has had in Israel and cherishes hopeful moments, like the activities of the Mizrahi Black Panthers. Commemorating Mizrahi activisim, Shohat dedicated this collection to two Iraqi Jews: Naeim Giladi (born Khalaschi, 1926), whose writings critiqued the Zionist project and its influence on Iraqi Jews; and Tikva Amal Levy, a Mizrahi feminist, whose scholarship and activism shaped many of the directions of Mizrahi feminism today.

In the Diaspora, Shohat worked, created, and connected with other Iraqis, Palestinians, and like-minded intellectuals, especially exiles. For Shohat, academic and political activities were inseparable, and she recognizes her many comrades, who worked with her at times when it was incredibly difficult to speak about these issues in the American and even Arab academic circles, where some nationalists refused to consider the pains of Mizrahi Jews. Her essay in memory of Edward Said captures her long friendship with the critic, even when it was illegal for her, as an Israeli citizen, to meet with him, let alone to collaborate with him on political issues, and it similarly celebrates their joint activism during the first intifada.

An important gem in this collection (to me, perhaps the most important piece) is her detailed accounts of the Toledo conference between Palestinian and Mizrahi intellectuals, writers, and activists. The piece, originally published in the Jadaliyya (and Jadaliyya’s editors deserve much credit for this initiative), discusses meetings held between Mizrahim and PLO and other Arab activists in Spain in 1989. The essay provides a vital perspective which enriches our understanding of Mizrahi–Arab relations, as well as the cultural politics of the PLO itself prior to Oslo, and will consequently be of much value to many historians of Arab intellectual history and Palestinian activism. Her insightful commentary brings to the fore other participants like Mahmud Darwish, as well as the Iraqi delegation, comprised of novelists Sami Michael and Shimʾon Ballas, Arabic literature professor David Semah, and actor Yosef Shiloah.

My minor criticisms of the book have to do with things not included in its introduction. It would have been fascinating to read how Shohat views the publications of many new histories of Middle Eastern Jews, the English translations of texts written by Mizrahi authors, poets, and feminists, and the rise of current Mizrahi right-wing Zionism, as well as to learn how she engages with a new generation of Mizrahi scholars who challenge some of her arguments. But, as I have said, this is a very important moment in the historiography of our field. Mizrahi poet Almog Behar famously described his Arabic thusly: “My Arabic is Mute/ Strangled in the throat/ Cursing itself/ Without uttering a word/ …/ Hiding from family members/ Behind the shutters of the Hebrew.” In a way, Shohat's project aimed at capturing the voice of this silenced Arabic, and the cultures of its many Jewish speakers. And she was successful.