Summary
Historian of Egypt and the modern Middle East at Stanford University, and author of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998), whose Introduction includes an autobiographical account of the formation — a childhood Zionism abandoned in Israel, work in Detroit’s Arab community, and a doctorate on the Egyptian labor movement — that the book presents as constitutive of its method (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 248-293).
Details
- The book was conceived and brought to fruition during his association with Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature; research was funded by a Fulbright Research Grant in 1992–93 (hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Department of Middle Eastern and African History) and a Social Science Research Council Advanced Research Grant in 1994 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 41-77).
- In the summer of 1969, after three years of Arabic study at Princeton, he went to Cairo to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo; he wrote “Jewish” as his religion on the visa application. He befriended “Ahmad” (the one name in the book altered to protect an interlocutor, per the Introduction’s note 40), told him he was a Zionist and a member of ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir planning to move to Israel, and after Ahmad stopped appearing was summoned to the Mugamma’ and made to write his departure date and flight and add the words “for good” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 248-293).
- Palestinian students at AUC took him to the Cairo office of the PLO; he left convinced Israel would have to accommodate Palestinian national aspirations. In 1970 he emigrated with about sixty other ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir graduates to Kibutz Lahav; activity in the Hebrew University’s student new left, with several jailings for demonstrating, brought him to conclude “that I was no longer a Zionist and that I could not serve in the Israeli army and enforce the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 248-293).
- He returned to the United States in 1973, worked in Detroit auto plants and on the Arabic section of a workers’ newspaper for the greater Detroit Arab community, then took a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan; his mentor Richard P. Mitchell agreed to a dissertation on the Arab working class in mandate Palestine but warned it would cost him a teaching job — “Why not write about Egypt instead?” — and his dissertation was on the Egyptian labor movement, through which he first met Egyptian Jewish communists of the 1940s organizations (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 248-293).
- Of his position he writes: “Although I am not an Egyptian Jew, I cannot claim to be a disinterested party with respect to the many contentious issues addressed in this book”; he did not write the book in order to “speak for” Egyptian Jews, but assumes “full responsibility for my role as the interpreter of the memories of my interlocutors” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 124-176, 248-293).
- Zachary Lockman and Nancy Reynolds read a late draft of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry in full; of Lockman the Acknowledgments say, “Much of my thinking and development as a scholar is inextricably bound up with my long friendship and collaboration with Zachary Lockman” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 41-77).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Hashomer Hatza’ir