The premiere episode of a new limited narrative series from American Jewish Committee (AJC), The Forgotten Exodus, shares the inspiring story of Mizrahi Jewish cartoonist Carol Isaacs’ family. Feeling alienated growing up as the only Jew in school from an Arab-majority country, Carol turned her longing for Iraq and the life her family left behind into a gripping graphic memoir, The Wolf of Baghdad.
On the verge of closure, a magazine that served as the ideological home of Israel’s Mizrahi left lives another day. But what do its financial woes reveal about the movement’s struggle in Israeli society?
Get email notification for articles from Eness Elias
Follow
May. 24, 2021 1:52 PM
Similar to the Palestinians brain drain in academia and research, industry and trade, culture and art – many Mizrahim feel compelled to look beyond Israel’s borders for the chance to have a better future for themselves and their families. A new initiative showcasing Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origins) active in many fields, the Mizrahi Left Project features lectures, film screenings and discussions on what it means to be Mizrahi and on the history of the Mizrahi left in Israel.
The nine-part series, held on Zoom and conducted in English, is aimed at second-generation Mizrahi Israelis who are living in the United States. Participants in the project, the first of its kind, include Mizrahi artists, scholars and intellectuals from Israel as well as North America, including Dr. Yali Hashash, a queer feminist scholar; Dr. Ofir Abu, whose field is Israel studies; Prof. Hille
The original cover and title page of A Trip to the North Pole; or, Discovery of the Ten Tribes (1903)
On the first Sunday of December in 1903, a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune announced the startling news, NORTH POLE DISCOVERED six years before explorer Robert Peary’s famous, if disputed, expedition. According to the article, a Mr. O.J.S. Lindelof had, on a recent trip to Europe, been given a waterlogged manuscript that he brought back with him to Salt Lake City. When he finally got around to reading it, the manuscript turned out to be a record of the discovery of the North Pole by a San Francisco-based expedition some years earlier. Unlike Peary, who discovered an uninhabitable frozen wasteland, the explorers in Lindelof’s manuscript describe a verdant, densely populated region that has been hidden from the rest of the world for thousands of years.