Yuval Evri, From Neighboring to Bordering: Mizrahi Jews as Mediators, Spies, and Go-Betweens
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Pearl and Jack Mandel Lecture in Jewish Studies
Yuval Evri (Brandeis University)
“From Neighboring to Bordering: Mizrahi Jews as Mediators, Spies, and Go-Betweens”
This lecture traces the genealogy of Mizrahi Jews as cultural and political intermediaries positioned between the Jew and the Arab, Hebrew and Arabic. It explores how they were cast both as bridges between cultures and as agents for maintaining and creating boundaries, serving the Zionist project as translators, mediators, and spies, while often regarded with suspicion. Through two case studies - Mizrahi espionage and Kol Yisrael’s Arabic broadcasts - it examines mediation as a dynamic process encompassing translation, propaganda, and border-crossing, revealing it as a site of tension, creativity, and resistance within the borderlands of Arabness and Mizrahi identity.
Yuval Evri is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian who specializes in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture. He is particularly interested in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century.
His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His first book, titled: The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020. The English edition of Evri's book, titled The Return to Sepharad and the Erasure of al-Andalus, is scheduled for publication by Indiana University Press in 2027.