5: Extraordinary collection of essays--a fascinating book
I got the chance to hear author Khazzoom give a concert of Judeo-Arabic music and a lecture about the Judeo-Arabic experience while visiting Seattle recently. The author, raised in Palo Alto, California, is the daughter of an Iraqi-Jewish father. So she was raised, not with the more familiar Ashkenazi (European) Jewish traditions, customs and music, but with those of the Middle East. She explained about Sephardim ("Spanish" Jews who left the Mideast and returned later in history)and Mizrahim, Jews who never ever had left the Mideast. And there is strife among the groups, who engage in discrimination based on widely different cultural values and lifestyles, though all believe in the same G-d and follow the same scriptures.The essays go into much detail about individual lives of women who experienced this discrimination or outright, terrible oppression at the hands of local people in their homelands -- Iraq, Iran and other places. Some of the stories are frightening; in one essay, the writer describes a horrifying massacre in Iraq. Her parents were then left literally stateless, their passports invalid and no land accepting them for refugee status. It's hard not to cry while reading this story. Others talk about a shameful treatment of returnees to Israel, and the division in the communities there. Some of the writers tried to "pass" as French Jews rather than Moroccan, to avoid being treated as an underclass exactly as African-Americans experience in the United States. These stories made me so angry. The essays are also a unique view inside Jewish traditions that are probably as unfamiliar to most Jews as they would be to non-Jews. It was a revelation that some Hebrew is spoken with an Arabic accent, using Arabic words. I couldn't put this book down, and I think anyone interested in the struggles in the Mideast ought to read this, and definitely, if you are Jewish, you should not pass up this book. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
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