Ella Shohat (Hebrew: אלה חביבה שוחט; Arabic: إيلا حبيبة شوحيط), is an American professor of cultural studies at New York University, where she teaches in the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies. She has written and lectured on the topics of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Diasporic cultures.
Background and Writings
Arab-Jewish identity
Ella Shohat's parents were Iraqi Jews who were dislocated to Israel in the 1950s. Shohat describes herself as an "Arab-Jew" and "Iraqi-Jew". Some of Shohat's writing deals with Arab-Jewish identity within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. She described her childhood in Israel in the 1960s as a time when children were "recruited for the making of a new identity that was to clash with our parents' Iraqiness, Arabness and Middle Easterness". Shohat's grandparents never learned Hebrew and her parents lamented how "in Iraq [...] we were Jews. In Israel, we are Arabs". Her father and his friends were told to stop speaking Arabic in the workplace and Shohat herself recalls similar messages being communicated to children at school. She described herself and other schoolchildren as "unknowing targets of mental colonization [...] [who] were expected to delete [...] the past across the border [and] also the transplanted Baghdads, Cairos or Rabats of our homes and neighbourhoods". Shohat felt that this process was part of "disciplining, corrective, normalizing machine" designed to make them "proud Israelis".
Media
Shohat has also written extensively on Israeli and Western media.
Reception
In a review for the academic journal Biography, Egyptian Jewish professor Joyce Zonana described Shohat's book On the Arab Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements as a "profound work" and a "visionary contribution to (multi)cultural studies" which provides "helpful new ways of thinking about identity, politics, and culture in the Middle East and beyond". Zonana compared Shohat to Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, who she named as the only other writers whose "cultural/political analyses are so explicitly and productively rooted in their lives" in the way Shohat's work also is. Zonana further argued that Shohat had "honoured" Said and Fanon with this collection of writings. The essays "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims" and "Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab Jew" were described as "canonical" and "groundbreaking".
The journal Mashriq & Mahjar also praised On the Arab Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements. In the review, Professor Jennifer L. Kelly described the book as "required reading for scholars working at the intersection of critical refugee studies, comparative colonial studies, and feminist studies". Kelly noted that Shohat "constructs meaningful parallels between dislocated Arab-Jews and displaced Palestinians with the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948" in order to "point to the multiple violences that animate life in the wake of occupation and exile".
Israeli historian and activist Ilan Pappe named Shohat as one of a group of notable scholars, along with Sami Shalom Chetrit and Yehuda Shenhav, who have "done much to expose" the "invidious process of de-Arabisation" that the Mizrahim were put through when arriving in the new state of Israel.
On the Arab Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements was the winner of the Middle East Monitor Palestine Book Award 2017 for Memoir.
Ella Shohat's work has been translated into many languages including Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Turkish and Italian.