Deborah Starr, Revisiting the Origins of Levantinism: Jaqueline Shohet Kahanoff in America (1940-1950)
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Speakers
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Joseph and Gertie Schwartz Memorial Lecture
Deborah Starr (Cornell University)
Revisiting the Origins of Levantinism: Jaqueline Shohet Kahanoff in America (1940-1950)
Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917-1979) is best known for her personal narrative essays and her “sociologically honest” fiction about growing up in a Jewish family in inter-war Cairo. In the in the 1950s and 60s, Shohet Kahanoff espoused Levantinism as a social model of respectful cultural integration in Israel. Although she frequently wrote about her family and life experiences, Shohet Kahanoff seldom wrote about her decade spent in the United States where she earned a BA and MA in journalism from Columbia University, won a literary prize, and published her first fiction. Drawing upon a documentary archive, and reading the silences in Shohet Kahanoff’s writings, this talk excavates intellectual foundations of her notion of Levantinism that emerged from her engagement with exiled European intellectuals affiliated with the New School during World War II.
Deborah Starr is a professor of Near Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Cornell University. She writes and teaches about issues of identity and inter-communal exchange in Middle Eastern literature and film, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Togo Mizrahi and The Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press 2020) and Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge 2009). She is the co-editor, with Sasson Somekh, of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford UP 2011). Starr has also published articles in a variety of journals on cosmopolitanism and levantinism in modern Arabic and Hebrew literatures and in Egyptian cinema. She is currently working on a new project, Body Languages: Performing Race and Gender in Early Egyptian Cinema.