After Jews And Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture

by Ammiel Alcalay

ALCALAY, AFTER JEWS AND ARABS. REMAKING LEVANTINE CULTURE. MINNEAPOLIS, MN, 1993, xi 336 p. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

Genres: History, Politics, Religion, Jewish, Theory

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Ammiel Alcalay (b. 1956) is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); the cairo notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); from the warring factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007); and a little history (2012). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He has recently launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.

Reviews

[Jordan Elgrably · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first came across this book, in the mid-'90s, not long after it had first appeared, I felt that I had discovered a treasure chest of names, of books, people and places that I had always known I needed to know, but just hadn't encountered, yet—poets and writers and historical figures from across the ages, working in a plethora of languages, many in countries around the Mediterranean, each of whom had something enriching to say to me, a young writer in search of his (true) identity. As someone of both Arab and Jewish heritage, and as a person who deeply connects, or seeks to connect with other people, regardless of their religious or cultural background, Ammiel Alcalay's "After Jews and Arabs" was a poetic invitation that validated my better selves, affirmed my own multifaceted history, and gave me permission to pursue community, connecting others together through the arts, as a counter-measure to war, to the conflict that seems always to burn inside us, or beside us. You needn't be Arab nor Jewish, or for that matter, Muslim, Christian or a Zen Buddhist, to benefit from this book. You just have to love poetry, and ideas.

[Baklavahalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding work! Alcalay covers a lot of ground: from 10th century to late 1980's of Sephardic or "Oriental Jewish" life, from the first Hebrew secular lyric to Iraqi Jewish Communist activists. I wish I knew about this book when a few years ago a friend who should've known better (a graduate student in Jewish history) claimed that other than Maimonides the Levantine Jews had not produced anyone intellectually notable. Alcalay shows that suppressing and ignoring a gigantic portion of Jews, within the Promised Land no less, does not help anyone involved. He ends with a hopeful note; I wonder if there's an afterword 17 years later.