Co-Option and Erasure: Mizrahi Culture in Israel

Much of the rhetoric around racialized discrimination in Israel centers on Israeli Jewish treatment of Palestinians. These divisions between Israeli Jews and Palestinians are often rooted in an imaginary homogenous Israeli Jewish population in opposition to a distinctly “other,” and equally homogenous, Palestinian population read as different racially (Arab), religiously (Muslim, despite a significant Christian population), and culturally (through an Orientalist lens). However, an examination of the experience of Mizrahi¹ Jews can be instructive as to the ways that racism and Zionist white supremacy function within Jewish Israeli society—through a hegemonic Israeli Jewish identity rooted in Ashkenazi² identification and experiences.³ As sociologist Ronit Lentin has demonstrated, Israel’s settler colonialism is implemented in a racialized fashion both with regard to the Palestinians and the non-Ashkenazi/white Jewish populations across Palestine and Israel.⁴ With this in mind, this article considers the video work Eye and Heart, by Israeli Jewish artist of Yemeni descent Leor Grady, as well as another series of works in his exhibition Natural Worker. These works address the marginalization, erasure, and exile of Yemeni Mizrahi Jews in Israel. In the video work, Grady highlights how, in its absorption into Israeli folk dance, traditional Yemeni dance has been uprooted from its site of origination and “whitewashed.” Considered alongside other works in the exhibition, Grady makes clear how this cultural appropriation fits into a broader Israeli erasure of the Yemeni Jewish history and presence in Israel. While Mizrahi society in Israel has been discussed by scholars such as Yehouda Shenhav, and Mizrahi confrontations with Ashkenazi hegemony in the arts have been discussed in the context of literature and film by scholars such as Ammiel Alcalay, Kfir Cohen, Hannan Hever, Yochai Oppenheimer, and Ella Shohat, this conversation is largely absent from English-language publications on the contemporary fine arts.⁵ In this article, I argue that Grady’s work demonstrates the contemporary legacy of historical discrimination against and erasure of Yemeni Jews in Israel, and specifically how this discrimination manifests in culture and the arts. Eye and Heart, which features dance, points to the continued impact of early Zionist dance instructors and choreographers who instrumentalized the position of Mizrahi Jews as both Middle Eastern and Jewish to make a connection between the new Israeli cultural identity they were forming, largely from Eastern European immigrants, and the land of historic Palestine. This new Israeli cultural identity whitewashed Middle Eastern cultural elements, from the arts to culinary influences, to help build the image of the new Israeli Jew—an image that always had a white face, even as Israeli demographics reflected a growing Mizrahi majority.⁶

Eye and Heart is a single-channel video projection about three and a half minutes long that displays two shots of a theater side-by-side (Figure 1).⁷ Each view includes dancers performing on a black stage in front of black curtains.⁸ On the left, there are two young men, each dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, all in black. One plays a metal “drum,” a large olive oil tin, creating the beat for the second man’s dance.⁹ While the percussionist remains standing as the other man dances, the dancer maintains a body positioning mostly turned toward the musician, engaging with him as a partner in the dance. This partnering of dancer and musician is emphasized further by their matching outfits. In contrast, on the right, two different dancers appear on the stage, shirtless, dressed in gold and silver leggings respectively. The two dance together—sometimes physically touching one another, joining hands, other times performing the same moves and steps in unison or complementary moves that respond to each other. The musician, who appears again in the same black clothing, is ignored by the two dancers. The dancers only engage with each other, not the source of their music.

While all three of the dancers are performing movements rooted in Yemeni folk dance, there are distinct differences in how the dances appear. In addition to the engagement, or lack thereof, with the musician, there is a connectedness between the dancer in black and his movements that articulates a genuine knowledge and understanding of the moves he makes, while still exuding an improvisational feel. While he does smile at times, there is a seriousness in his performance—the smile crawls across his face as he looks to the musician, connecting his moves with the percussion. The dancers in silver and gold however, move playfully, smiling, and in some moments almost appearing to laugh. There is a silliness to parts of the dance that portray a distinct lack of seriousness, or at least lack of training in or connection to the specific moves they are performing. They appear to be playing with/at the dance, rather than performing it. The dancers’ differing appearances, beyond just their outfits, hint at the reasons for the contrast in performances.

While the dancer in black has dark skin and black hair, the dancers in silver and gold are light skinned, with lighter brown hair—one of them sporting a “man bun.” The dancer in black, Evyatar Said, is Yemeni, and while not trained as a dancer, he, as Grady puts it, “simply holds his history in his body as a reflection of the [Yemeni] community he grew up in.”¹⁰ For the video, Grady asked Said to improvise his dance, and the result is the performance recorded on the left. The dancers on the right in gold and silver on the other hand are professionally trained modern dancers. While one, Matan Daskal, is Ashkenazi, the other, Adi Boutrous, is a Christian Arab, though he has noted that people do not visually “read” him as Arab.¹¹ As such, these dancers appear as visual representations of the hegemonic Ashkenazi culture, in contrast to the Mizrahi Yemeni one represented by Said. Additionally, as “modern” dancers, they embody an Ashkenazi/European notion of modernity, positioned in contrast to non-European “tradition,” such as the Yemeni dance performed by Said.

For Daskal and Boutrous’s performance, Grady had them watch YouTube and home videos of Yemeni dance  and asked them to “extract Yemeni movement phrases” in performing their “modern” dance.¹² When watching the two dances simultaneously, similar gestures and movements indicate that there is a common source material, but what is also made clear is what is lost from the movements in the “modern” dancers’ variation (Figure 2). In Said’s version, the movements appear intentional, purposeful despite their improvisational nature. Said performs them with conviction. In Daskal and Boutrous’s version, similar movements are loose, whimsical—the fact that the dancers are improvising, or “making it up as they go along,” is much more evident. This “watering down” effect that comes from the appropriation of Yemeni culture is also indicated in the choice of the gold and silver leggings worn by the modern dancers—a “‘nod’ to Yemeni embroidery and jewelry-making tradition, [worn] as a way to express [the dancers’] way of appropriating.”¹³ In the contrasts presented both in terms of appearance and performance, the effects of appropriation on Yemeni dance and culture are articulated.

The creation of a distinctly Israeli culture was imperative in the early formation of the Jewish state. As part of this cultural development, Israeli folk dance took shape. As anthropologist Marie-Pierre Gibert has noted, “Israeli Folk Dance was literally created in the 1940s as a tool for the cultural—and largely political—construction of a ‘new’ Israeli culture.”¹⁴ This new cultural identity was rooted in a rejection of European influences—connected with a place of Jewish persecution—and an embrace of “Middle Eastern” influences that legitimized their presence in Palestine.¹⁵ In terms of dance, this manifested in the appropriation of indigenous Palestinian dances, such as the dabkeh, which were seen as vestiges of biblical culture that had remained unchanged in the land of Palestine—ready for reclamation or “salvage” by Zionists and subsequently early Israelis.¹⁶

With a greater influx of Mizrahi Jews after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, in particular from Yemen, this cultural appropriation shifted towards Yemeni influences. Much like the claims that Palestinian culture was in fact an indigenous biblical culture frozen in time waiting for reclamation by Zionists in Palestine, the presence of Yemeni (and other Mizrahi) Jews in the region allowed for Jewish claims of presence and connection to the region of the Middle East.¹⁷ Ultimately, this Mizrahi Jewish influence was foregrounded over any Palestinian one. As dance scholar Nicholas Rowe remarks, by the early 1950s, prominent Israeli folk dance instructors and choreographers “discuss the ‘rich’ and ‘vibrant’ contributions of the Yemeni Jews and give only passing mention to a vague influence of the more ‘monotonous’ ‘Arab’ dabkehs.”¹⁸

This is not to say that this crediting of Yemeni influence was something that was a prominent feature of the Israeli folk dance that adopted it. Mizrahi cultural difference from hegemonic European Ashkenazi Jewry created a problem—while the Yemeni Jews were seen as “authentic,” they were also seen as “backwards” in contrast to European modernity.¹⁹ As such, elements of Yemeni culture were appropriated to serve the creation of an “indigenous” Israeli cultural identity, but these influences, and well as the histories of these Yemeni Jewish populations, were subsequently erased and elided to preserve an Ashkenazi dominance. This can be seen in statements by later generations of choreographers and dancers who asserted that Israeli folk dance was something that purely arose from Israeli makers. As one choreographer remarked in the 1970s: “We have the reality that we have created something from nothing.”²⁰ Grady’s video references this erasure of Yemeni influence in Israeli folk dance through the two “modern” dancers who perform without any recognition of the Yemeni musician who creates the music to which they move. Additionally, their performance of a “modern” version of the Yemeni step gestures to the hegemonic culture which places non-Ashkenazi influences and peoples as rooted in the past, and Ashkenazi appropriation of the culture and land as a modernizing project.

The exploitation of Yemeni Jews, when helpful to the Ashkenazi-dominant Zionist cause, and subsequent elision of them, was not limited to the cultural sphere. Yemeni Jewish immigration to Palestine occurred from the late nineteenth century. At various points, this immigration was even encouraged by the Zionist leadership, as they realized they could bring in Yemeni immigrants to take the place of Palestinian Arab agricultural laborers. Using Mizrahi labor was more ideal, they believed, because it promoted a Jewish dominance of the labor force, while still allowing for a profit, as these workers could be paid less than Ashkenazi laborers.²¹ The Yemeni Jews were in fact referred to as “natural workers”—individuals whose bodies and lifestyles suited the labor, had no other sources or talents for income, and required less to be satisfied.²² This description of Yemeni Jews serves as the title for Grady’s exhibition in which Eye and Heart was displayed. The perception that as natural workers Yemenis are without art, culture, poetry, and dance, serves as the framework his exhibition rejects.

While Eye and Heart demonstrates the appropriation and erasure of Yemeni culture from Israeli culture, another series of works in Natural Worker illustrates the erasure of Yemeni presence from certain parts of the land of Israel, as well as from its history. Among a number of canvases displayed leaning against the gallery walls are four large-scale linen canvases embroidered with Hebrew in gold (Figure 3). The text on these works are transcriptions of four letters, correspondence Grady selected from an assortment he discovered written by early Yemeni Jewish immigrants to the Kinneret (also known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Tiberias). Dated between 1912 and 1930, the letters consist of complaints to leaders and institutions in charge of the Jewish settlements in Palestine at the time.²³ While the letters document frustrations with the lack of support these Zionist institutions were providing, Grady notes in particular the polite, even poetic way that they were written.²⁴

This population of Yemeni Jews had arrived in Palestine in 1912. A year later, a group of new Ashkenazi settlers was given the land to form an agricultural cooperative.²⁵ While the two groups lived side-by-side amicably for a time, by the late 1920s, a scarcity of land and resources, in particular water, resulted in the Ashkenazi settlers petitioning Zionist institutions to resettle the Yemeni population.²⁶ Ultimately, and in spite of letters such as the ones included in Grady’s exhibition, the Yemeni Jews were moved to Rehovot (near Tel Aviv) in 1930 and made to bear witness to their erasure: as they departed, they watched the Ashkenazi settlers already begin to work their land.²⁷ Grady gives this erased history of the Yemeni presence in the Galilee, and the pre-Israeli state Zionist organizations’ disregard for the needs and desires of this population, a place of prominence, not only through increasing the scale of these letters by embroidering them on large stretched linen canvases roughly four-by-three feet in size, but also in using gold thread. The gold, a symbol of luxury, high-status, and a reference to Yemeni craftwork, elevates these letters and the history they tell to a place of honor they never received.²⁸

The letters, which tell the history of the Yemeni experience in, and expulsion from, the Kinneret, also make present voices that have been absented from the histories of early Zionist Palestine and the Israeli state. As Grady notes, in the history of writings about the Kinneret, it is Rachel the poet (Rachel Bluwstein) who is known and associated with the region. Rachel, an Ashkenazi immigrant, spent relatively little time in the Kinneret when compared with the Yemeni population; however, her history and writings are well-known today in Israel, and her association with the Kinneret is solidified through her poem of the same name. On the other hand, the legacy of the Yemeni Jewish population in the Kinneret is not recognized, in spite of the fact that they retain a deep connection to it.²⁹ As Grady has noted, in Yemeni neighborhoods in Rehovot to this day, there are palm trees that were brought from the Galilee, tombstones shaped like the sea, and sand brought from its shores to be placed on graves, even generations later.³⁰ Grady draws out the poetic nature of the Yemeni letters in order to place them in contrast to Rachel the poet. In so doing, he highlights whose history gets told, and whose does not. Rachel embodies the Ashkenazi Zionist ideal, in particular through her use of Ben Yehuda Hebrew. This new modern Hebrew was to become the national language of the new Israeli state, in contrast to the Biblical Hebrew that the Yemeni Jews used (in addition to Arabic). As such, and in spite of the Yemeni history in the area, Rachel and her poetry are centered in the history of the Galilee and early Zionist national formations.³¹

While Grady’s work highlights the erasure of Yemeni presence in the Galilee from Zionist Israeli history, this sort of erasure is one that is pervasive when it comes to the Mizrahi community, and which has been remarked upon in works by other Mizrahi artists.³² Meir Gal highlights the erasure of Mizrahi history in his work Nine Out Of Four Hundred (The West And The Rest) (Figure 4).³³ The work is comprised of an image and accompanying text. In the image, what the artist refers to as a “photo performance,” Gal holds up the official Israeli textbook on the history of the Jewish people used by high school students, including the artist, in the 1970s.³⁴ He clasps the book, holding it up between his fingers by a handful of pages, allowing the thick text to splay out on either side, the two halves appearing like drooped wings, weighted down by the heft of the remaining pages.³⁵ Gal is holding onto the book by the nine pages that make up the discussion of non-European contributions to Jewish history included in the text. As noted in the title, this is only nine out of the four hundred pages that make up the tome. The remaining pages, as indicated by the subtitle of the work, comprise the majority of this history—that of European/Ashkenazi Jews. As Gal notes in the text that accompanies the image, his “intention is to put an end to the speculative character of the argument whether or not Mizrahim have been discriminated in Israel.”³⁶ Grady’s exhibition too highlights that this is a history that continues to be erased.³⁷ The impact of the historical erasure that Grady’s letter canvases bring to the fore is evident in the resultant textbooks that are used in Israeli schools, featured in Gal’s work, and the continued influence on Israeli arts and culture, made evident in Grady’s Eye and Heart.

Despite the fact that Mizrahi Jews make up half of the population in Israel, Ashkenazi identity, history, and claims to culture continue to dominate.³⁸ From the start, the Zionist project was an Ashkenazi one, only utilizing Mizrahi labor and culture as best served it. As Middle Eastern studies scholar Joseph Massad has noted, “The Zionist movement’s European identity was asserted from the outset in its classic texts. Theodor Herzl declared that the Jewish state would serve as ‘the portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’ When discussing Jewish immigration, he spoke only of European Jews.”³⁹ Discrimination against Mizrahi Jews was also clear from the early stages of immigration to Mandate Palestine and later Israel. In addition to being relocated like the Kinneret Yemeni settlers, Mizrahi arrivals to Israel were placed in poor conditions upon arrival, many of them being directed to transit camps, a liminal site that often became a multi-year residence. At the same time, Ashkenazi immigrants were given former Palestinian homes.⁴⁰ Meanwhile, Mizrahi immigrants were also subjected to humiliating and dangerous “cleansing” procedures—such as the use of DDT to “disinfect” immigrants, and the practice of “kidnapping . . . hundreds of Yemeni children from transit camps in Israel and giving them to childless Ashkenazi couples for adoption.”⁴¹ Mizrahi immigrants were given poorer land, fewer social services, and lower wages; gaps in salary, employment, and education between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Israelis persist to this day.⁴² Likewise, governmental support has favored Ashkenazi lifestyles, as cultural studies scholar Ella Shohat has highlighted: “The government . . . subsidizes certain basic dietary staples, one of them being European-style bread; the pita favored as a staple by both Sephardim [here used interchangeably with Mizrahi] and Palestinians, meanwhile, is not subsidized.”⁴³ At all levels of Israeli society, government, and culture, an Ashkenazi dominance prevails at the expense of Mizrahi, as well as Palestinian, populations.

Leor Grady’s video work Eye and Heart and the letter canvases exhibited in Natural Worker make clear the cultural and historic influences of the Yemeni population on the Israeli state and formation of Israeli national identity. They also highlight how Yemeni culture and history has been appropriated and elided. In the relationship Grady sets up between the cultural appropriation of Yemeni dance into Israeli folk dance, embodied by his video, and the erasure of the historic Yemeni presence in the Kinneret, articulated in his embroidered linen letters, the artist demonstrates how Israel’s national identity and contemporary reality rest on a persistent erasure of its Yemeni (and more broadly, Mizrahi and Arab) influences.⁴⁴ As the works highlight, the formation of the new Jewish state and a national Israeli identity centered around a European (white) Jewish identity, despite this formation’s reliance on non-Ashkenazi labor and culture.

In considering the white European roots of Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel, and taking into account the white supremacy that dominates in the English-speaking world (the primary audience for this article), it is impossible to ignore that the white supremacy that exists in the these regions (Europe, the United States, and Canada) is also distinctly anti-Jewish. However, while this aspect of Euro-American white supremacy does not manifest in the context of Israel, the rhetoric from the founders and historical leaders of the Zionist movement and the history of Ashkenazi treatment of Mizrahi Jews in Israel makes clear the racialized nature of the Zionist project.⁴⁵ It is not incidental that, for example, American alt-right white nationalists cite Israel as an example of the “ethno-state” that they seek in the United States.

It must also be noted that the racist discrimination against Palestinians in Israel is not limited to the Ashkenazi Jewish population. In fact, as anthropologist Smadar Lavie has shown, while the Ashkenazi population tends to vote for the “Left” in Israel, the Mizrahi majority population overwhelmingly votes for right-wing politicians.⁴⁶ This tendency appears to be rooted in a desire to gain greater power within the Israeli context through affirming Jewish religious affiliations over racial Arab ones, something into which the right-wing parties feed. Right-wing government investment in the lower-class communities of the Mizrahi population, as well as support of its culture “as long as it [Mizrahi culture] avoided connecting its own Arabness with that of the Palestinians” has contributed to this support.⁴⁷ Anecdotally, Mizrahi Israelis have noted that those who have been able to integrate themselves into Ashkenazi culture, in sacrifice of any Arab identification, have most been able to benefit from improved status within Israel.⁴⁸

In a 2019 opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Tony Greenstein, a British anti-Zionist Jew and founder of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, compared the Mizrahi population to the poor white population in the United States—while they are oppressed by the dominant (white) population, they displace this frustration onto an alternative scapegoat, encouraged by the right wing—African Americans and Latinx individuals in the US, and Palestinians in Israel.⁴⁹ While Greenstein uses the comparison of Mizrahi Jews to the poor white population in the United States to argue that the Jewish nationalist project is Jewish-supremacist, rather than white supremacist, I contend that in the context of Israel, these go hand-in-hand. The Mizrahi population’s desire to distinguish themselves from the Palestinian population and improve their position is a desire for proximity to power in Israeli society—a position rooted in white Ashkenazi identification. Within the context of Israel, Ashkenazi hegemony references a distinctly ethnic/racial identification—it is rooted in white supremacy. The historic entrenchment of Israel’s national identity in Ashkenazi (white European) superiority and dominance is important to draw out, as Leor Grady’s work does, in order to understand the roots of the Zionist state, and the nuances in which racist practices manifest throughout Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In the face of more overt instances of racial discrimination in arenas like policy, the arts and cultural appropriation can appear to be less urgent sites of intervention. However, as Grady’s exhibition Natural Worker makes clear in the inclusion of Eye and Heart alongside the letter canvases, the arts and culture are spaces where the legacy of more overtly discriminatory policies can insidiously manifest. The erasure of these histories and cultural influences both serve to create and reaffirm a notion of Israeli identity that is rooted in Ashkenazi whiteness, perpetuating an Ashkenazi white supremacy in Israel that allows for racially discriminatory policies to persist.

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible through the support of research assistance provided by Jinan Abufarha through the UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program) at the University of Michigan, and generous conversations via Skype and email with Leor Grady. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, Anne Marie Butler, SJ Crasnow, and Forum Editor Rayya El Zein for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.