Arabic Traces In The Hebrew Writing Of Arab Authors In Israel

This book provides pioneering research on the Hebrew writings of Arab authors in Israel. It shows how authors in their Hebrew writings try to give their characters an authentic air and to create an atmosphere of authentic culture, and highlights archaic Hebrew syntactic structures that are similar to their Arabic counterparts in order to transmit Arab cultural elements. Language, after all, also serves to mediate between cultures, in addition to its function as a means of medium of communication. The text shows how Arab writers, through their translations point, to Arab culture as a possible model of imitation, as a bridge over what they perceive as a gap between the source and the target cultures. The authors thus see themselves not merely as composers of Hebrew literature, or as translators of Arabic literature into Hebrew, but also as messengers who serve as a bridge between Arabic and Hebrew cultures, and possibly as potential contributors to resolving the Jewish-Arab conflict.

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, "Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. In Poetic Trespass, Lital Levy brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, she presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, Poetic Trespass traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, Levy finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their "other," as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, Levy introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, Poetic Trespass will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

Arab-Jewish Literature: The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story offers an account of the development of the art of the Arabic short story among the Arabized Jews during the twentieth century. An anthology of sixteen translated stories are included as an appendix to the book.

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Finding it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel, many Iraqi Jewish novelists faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. Focusing on the literary works of the writers Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael and Eli Amir, this book examines their use of their native Iraqi Arabic in their Hebrew works. It examines the influence of Arabic language and culture and explores questions of language, place and belonging from the perspective of sociolinguistics and multilingualism.In addition Ahmed applies stylistics as a framework to investigate the range of linguistic phenomena that can be found in these exophonic texts, such as code-switching, borrowing, language and translation strategies. This new stylistic framework for analysing exophonic texts offers a future model for the study of other languages.The social and political implications of this dilemma, as it finds expression in creative writing, are also manifold. In an age of mass migration and population displacement, the conflicted loyalties explored in this book through the prism of Arabic and Hebrew are relevant in a range of linguistic contexts.

Arabic became a minority language overnight in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalize Arabic on the one hand and securitize it on the other. Camelia Suleiman delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. She explores the historic context of Arabic in Israel, the attempts at minoritising, Orientalising and securitising the language, the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Arabic in Israel, the effect of globalization, modernization and citizenship status on the status of Arabic, Hebrew as a language choice of (semi) autobiographic production of three Israeli authors who are native speakers of Arabic, and lastly, a comparison with the status of Arabic in both Jordan and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza Strip) where Arabic is the official language.

"Dance and Authenticity" is an ethnography of dance performance and cultural form. It describes how "dabkeh," a type of dance performed at Palestinian weddings, became a model for the Israeli Jewish "debkah" as a means of affirming Israeli Jewish belonging and common society. The Palestinian "dabkeh," in turn, acquired nationalist meanings, especially after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank. The book traces the history of these competing, and conflicting, dance forms, basing the argument principally on the ethnographic study of two Palestinian and one Israeli Jewish dance group conducted between 1998 and 1999. The result is a fascinating parallel ethnography, showing how the ethnography of dance forms contributes to evolving notions of collective national and political identity in a context of unequal power.