Orit Bashkin - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Orit Bashkin

Journal of Semitic Studies. A piece that I wrote about the 19th century Baghdadi press and the me... more Journal of Semitic Studies. A piece that I wrote about the 19th century Baghdadi press and the meeting of the nahda and the Haskala

This paper explores how readers can hear Arabic voices within Hebrew novels written by Jews who c... more This paper explores how readers can hear Arabic voices within Hebrew novels written by Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries or who were born in Israel to Arabic-speaking parents.1 I look at the ways in which the Arabic language itself, as well as Arabic literature and Islamic religious texts, are mediated in these novels. The inclusion of Arabic voices within the Hebrew texts, I argue, acts powerfully against national monolingualism and generates a new understanding of Arab-Jewish relations and of Mizrahi Diasporic identities.

article/255566 C o m p a r a t i v e S t u d i e s o f S o u t h A s i a , A f r i c a a n d t h ... more article/255566 C o m p a r a t i v e S t u d i e s o f S o u t h A s i a , A f r i c a a n d t h e M i d d l e E a s t V o l . 2 8 , N o . 3 , 2 0 0 8 d o i 1 0 .1 2 1 5 / 1 0 8 9 2 0 1 x -2 0 0 8 -0 2 2 © 2 0 0 8 b y D u k e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s 4 2 8

In this essay I explore the nationalization and secularization of the Iraqi educational system du... more In this essay I explore the nationalization and secularization of the Iraqi educational system during the period between the two world wars, while demonstrating how various intellectuals championed pluralist educational models. Iraqi social and intellectual history has focused on education as an important prism reﬂecting approaches to discipline and power and emphasized the role of educators as agents of socialization and Arab nationalism

Th is essay examines representations of Iraqi women in the works of poets, novelists, and public ... more Th is essay examines representations of Iraqi women in the works of poets, novelists, and public intellectuals during the Hashemite period. Deﬁ ning the functions of women in modern Muslim societies, Iraqi intellectuals sought inspiration in the writings of Egyptian and Turkish writers. I demonstrate, however, that the discourse about women grew more Iraqi-centric in the 1940s and 50s. I also argue that the changes in the representations of women mirrored the radicalization of the Iraqi intelligentsia. While during the interwar period, the conversation about gender roles was mostly conducted among men who debated education, seclusion, and domesticity, aft er World War II, social democrats, communists, and radical pan-Arabists utilized the mistreatment of women as a way to criticize the Hashemite state. Women aﬃ liated with these groups deﬁ ned themselves as citizens, rather than national subjects, with equal rights. Th e discourse also had global aspects, as Iraqi intellectuals appropriated and hybridized colonial perceptions of Muslim women.

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important histor... more Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives , and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed " the Middle Eastern turn. " For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ot-toman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives. This new historiography has adopted an innovative approach to the modern period. Both conservative Zionist historiography and postmodern critiques of this historiography have had very negative things to say about the modern period. Just as conservative Zionist historians identified modernity with the rise of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, 1 for some postcolonial critics, modernity was deeply bound up with negative phenomena that led to the destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish communities, as well as the Nakba of the Palestinian people, such as colonialism, antireligiosity, sectarianism, racism, and ethnic cleansing. For many postcolonial critics, the key moment in the meeting between European Jews and Middle Eastern Jews was when the latter encountered European

This paper analyzes Iraqi national narratives in the years from 1958 to 1961 to consider how inn... more This paper analyzes Iraqi national narratives in the years from 1958 to 1961 to consider how inno vative definitions of Arab nationalisms were affected by worldwide processes of decolonization. It demonstrates how Pan-Arabism was transformed in Qasimite Iraq because of its hybridization with Iraqi patriotism and, concurrently, how various elements of Arabist discourses were integrated into local and patriotic perceptions of Iraqi nationalism. Examining cultural idioms shared by Iraqi intellectuals belonging to different political groups, especially the communists and the Bacthists, destabilizes a typology that assumes each ideological camp subscribed to a rigidly defined set of well-known historical narratives. The Pan-Arabists in this period often cultivated the notion that Arab nationalism did not entail an ethnic origin but rather the ability to adopt the Arabic language, as well as Arab history and culture, as a marker of one's national and cultural identity. The attempts to adapt Pan-Arab discourses to the specificities of the Iraqi milieu and to build coalitions with as many of the nation's groups as possible meant that the sectarian, anti-Shi ci, and anti-Kurdish notions that colored Bacthist discourses in later years were not as prominent in this period.

This article looks at the changing significations of the word "fascist" within communist discour... more This article looks at the changing significations of the word "fascist" within communist discourses in Iraq and in Israel. I do so in order to illustrate how fascism, a concept signifying a political theory conceptualized and practiced in Italy, Germany, and Spain, became a boarder frame of reference to many leftist intellectuals in the Middle East. The articles shows that communist discourses formulated in Iraq during the years 1941-1945 evoked the word "fascist" not only in order to discredit Germany and Italy but also, and more importantly, as a way of critiquing Iraq's radical pan-Arab nationalists and Iraq's conservative elites who proclaimed their loyalty to pan-Arabism as well. In other words, the article studies the ways in which Iraqi communist intellectuals, most notably the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, Fahd, shifted the antifascist global battle to the Iraqi field and used the prodemocratic agenda of the Allies to criticize the absence of social justice and human rights in Iraq, and the Iraqi leadership's submissive posture toward Britain. As it became clear to Iraqi communists that World War II was nearing its end, and that Iraq would be an important part of the American-British front, criticism of the Iraqi Premier Nûrï al-Sa{ld and his policies grew sharper, and such policies were increasingly identified as "fascist". Within this context, Fahd equated chauvinist rightwing Iraqi nationalism in its anti-Jewish and anti Kurdish manifestations with fascism and Nazi racism. I then look at the ways in which Iraqi Jewish communists internalized the party's localized antifascist agenda. I argue that Iraqi Jewish communists identified rightwing Iraqi nationalism (especially the agenda espoused by a radical pan-Arab Party called al-Istiqlãl ) as symptomatic of a fascist ideology. Finally, I demonstrate how Iraqi Jewish communists who migrated to Israel in the years 1950-1951 continued using the word "fascist" in their campaigns against rightwing Jewish nationalism and how this antifascist discourse influenced prominent Palestinian intellectuals

Un intellectuel irakien de langue et de culture arabes, fondateur et animateur d'un certain nomb... more Un intellectuel irakien de langue et de culture arabes, fondateur et animateur d'un certain nombre de journaux publiés en arabe, défenseur de la nation arabe et de Parabisme utopique, traducteur de nom breux textes classiques en arabe, doit-il être considéré en premier lieu comme Juif en rai son de sa pratique religieuse et de sa généa logie ? Ce sujet éminemment complexe et polémique traverse un certain nombre de débats actuels autour de l'ouvrage de l'uni versitaire israélien Shlomo Sand, Comment le peuple juif fat inventé ?l ; il gagne sans aucun doute à être confronté à l'ambiguïté des trajectoires individuelles. Dans une perspective délibérément biographique et en se gardant de toute généralisation, Orit Bashkin vient nourrir cette réflexion en laissant la parole à Anwar Shä'ul, Arabe juif irakien, figure du milieu intellectuel bag dadi de l'entre-deux-guerres

When we think about a border, we often visualize it as a tangible line between two distinct space... more When we think about a border, we often visualize it as a tangible line between two distinct spaces. The national imagination underscored the boundaries between different nation-states, which, in theory, separated between different entities marked by linguistic, historical, and ethnic distinctiveness. In the Middle East, these political borders were often a matter of acute political and often military debate, since many an Arab nationalist had challenged the boundaries laid out at the end of the First World War as a colonial ploy intended to divide the Arab nation into smaller, artificial units. This article, however, examines the boundaries within the fragmented nation itself. It addresses the borders between regions and practices within the Iraqi nation