Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Masculinities: Bodies of Knowledge across Generations and Geographies

Middle Eastern and North African (hereafter MENA) Jewish Masculinities: Bodies of Knowledge across Generations and Geographies explores how masculinities among Jews in and from the MENA region have been constructed, negotiated, and transformed across time, space, and language. Moving from the early twentieth-century postOttoman and colonial histories through Israel’s statehood and new Jewish diasporas in the Americas, the volume specifically traces how migration, displacement, and cultural translation reshape the meanings of MENA Jewish masculinities, including Mizrahi ones in Israel. Through close readings of fiction, poetry, song, and personal narrative, the essays uncover shifting figures of the father, the male labourer, the soldier, the queer subject, and the writer. Drawing from gender studies, Jewish history, migration studies, and literary criticism, the contributors approach masculinity as an embodied and mobile category – formed through movement across geographies as well as shifting power relations. Spanning multiple generations of MENA Jewish masculinities, the volume shows how Orientalist hierarchies, Zionist remasculinization, and diasporic reimaginings continually refashion Jewish male identities. From colonial rankings of ‘Eastern’ bodies to poetic reclamations of tenderness and vulnerability, Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Masculinities positions masculinity as a travelling concept – translated across empires and languages, shaped by memory and motion, and embodied in the lived experiences of men who carry, contest, and rewrite the meanings of being MENA Jews.