{"id":38625,"date":"2022-04-08T01:31:30","date_gmt":"2022-04-08T08:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=38625"},"modified":"2022-04-07T17:34:46","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T00:34:46","slug":"trying-to-fix-broken-wings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2022\/04\/08\/trying-to-fix-broken-wings\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying to fix broken wings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not fitting in. Being misunderstood and miscategorized. These are recurring themes in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage<\/em>, edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, a Seattle writer, musician, activist and occasional contributor to the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>The book was first released in the 1990s and was recently re-released.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I could say that this book is no longer as revolutionary, cutting-edge, or as needed as it was when I began compiling it in 1992, but, unfortunately, that is not the case,\u201d writes Khazzoom, the daughter of an Iraqi Jew, in the new introduction. \u201cEven though there have been changes \u2013 shifts in consciousness, language, and even representation \u2013 Mizrahi and Sephardi women remain overall excluded, in theory and practice, from spaces for women, Jews, Middle Easterners, people of colour, LGBTQI folk, and even Mizrahim and Sephardim. In addition, so many of the presumably inclusive conversations about us seem basic and superficial, with an undertone of it being a really big deal that these conversations exist at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khazzoom\u2019s struggle to fit in led her to Seattle, in large part because it is home to one of the largest Sephardi communities in the United States. But even in that milieu she found herself an outsider.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn June 2014, however, on the first sh\u2019bath<\/em> [Sabbath] after driving my U-Haul up the coast from Northern California, I was appalled by a sermon so sexist \u2013 where women were equated with \u2018meat\u2019 \u2013 that I walked out of the Sephardi synagogue, just 15 minutes after arriving,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been a hybrid all my life, forever caught between two or more worlds,\u201d writes Caroline Smadja in her contribution to the collection. It is a state of being that is shared by many of the writers.<\/p>\n

Yael Arami, born in Petah Tikvah to parents from Yemen, speaks of others\u2019 perceptions of her.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Germany, I have had to avoid certain areas, fearing local skinheads\u2019 reaction to my skin colour. In France, I have been verbally ridiculed and insulted for being yet another ignorant North African who does not know French,\u201d she writes. \u201cIn California, people\u2019s best intentions have resulted in a number of social blunders: When I left a tip in a San Francisco caf\u00e9, I got a courteous \u2018gracias\u2019 from the politically correct Anglo waiter. After a predominantly African-American gospel group sang at a Marin County synagogue, several members of the congregation approached me, to express their admiration for our wonderful gospel performance! It seems that wherever I go in white-majority countries, I am, in accordance with local stereotypes, seen as the generic woman of colour \u2013 Algerian in France, African-American or Puerto Rican in California.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel Wahba, an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew, calls out politically correct hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes, when I bring up the oppression of Jews in Arab countries, progressive Jews get strangely uncomfortable \u2013 as if recognizing the Jewish experience under Islam would make someone racist and anti-Arab,\u201d she writes. \u201cDuring my mother\u2019s cancer support group intake, I listened as my mother told her story of living in Baghdad and surviving the Farhud. She ended with an ironic \u2018I survived the Arabs to get cancer?\u2019 The Jewish oncology nurse was shocked that my mother was so \u2018blunt.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cShould we revise our history? Leave out the details of our oppression under Islam? Pretend my mother never saw the Shiite merchants in Karballah wash their hands after doing business with her father, because he was a \u2018dirty Jew?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s title comes from an essay by Lital Levy, \u201cHow the Camel Found Its Wings\u201d and an Israeli film of the same name.<\/p>\n

The metaphor involves the repair of a broken statue of a flying camel, which actually stood at the entrance to the international fairgrounds in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. In the film, the two wings of the camel become stand-ins for a dichotomy that mostly excludes Mizrahi\/Sephardi Jews and yet still casts them in a negative light.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of the screening, the camel had found two new wings, and I got to thinking,\u201d writes Levy. \u201cI started putting my own pieces together \u2013 making my own flying camel out of the remnants of the past, borrowing missing pieces from the present, and using my imagination and willpower to try to make it all stick together. The pieces of my own American childhood, the histories that preceded it in Israel and in Iraq, and the challenges I see before me in my work are the various fragments I have been remembering and re-membering into an integral whole. I do not yet know its shape \u2013 camel, dromedary, llama, yak \u2013 but I do not care, as long as it will fly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not fitting in. Being misunderstood and miscategorized. These are recurring themes in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, a Seattle writer, musician, activist and occasional contributor to the Independent. The book was first released in the 1990s and was recently re-released. \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[3672,21412,21411,5914,21413,9726,5440,2427,3462,3021],"class_list":["post-38625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-equality","tag-essays","tag-flying-camel","tag-identity","tag-jewish-heritage","tag-loolwa-khazzoom","tag-mizrahi","tag-racism","tag-sephardi","tag-women"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}