CHS public lecture - SADIA AGSOUS BIENSTEIN (Paris): "Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Arab Thought and Writing (1894-Present Day)"

This guest lecture is part of the research colloquium of the Centre for Historical Studies.

Abstract

Research in the field of the Middle Eastern studies [1] in recent years has focused on complex and intertwined Jewish-Arab relations at a time when Arab countries in Middle East and North Africa were the home of important Jewish communities. What is significantly lacking in these works is a depth reflection on these relationships in the context of the engagement of Arab authors against anti-Semitism since the Dreyfus Affair and their fight against the fascist and Nazi regimes. “Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Arab Thought and Writing (1894-Present Day)” will map out these works. The objective is to establish a different paradigm redefining Jewish-Arab relations within three dimensions 1) connection in the wide and diverse Arab space, 2) disconnection from the Arab space since 1948 that brought the correspondence of the Holocaust with the Palestinian trauma, Nakba, and 3) reconnection, for new spaces of encounter.

This research is embedded in the field of cultural studies and involves a multidisciplinary approach that includes cultural history, literary anthropology and cultural sociology.

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[1] Hamzah, Dyala. The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood. Routledge, 2012, Levy, Lital. Poetic Trespass – Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton University Press, 2014, El-Ariss, Tarek. The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. Bilingual édition, Modern Language Association of America, 2018, Snir, Reuven. Arab-Jewish Literature: The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story. Brill, 2019, Klein, Menachem. Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron. Oxford University Press, 2014.