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palestina libera · Beiträge: 1665

Israeli-Palestinian Musician’s Subversive Critique of Mizrahi Politics-Culture

The controversial Israeli-Palestinian performer, Jowan Safadi, produced a new song, It’s Hard to Be an Arab, which features a provocative YouTube video. When I first listened to it without knowing anything about Safadi, I thought he might be a Mizrahi Jew satirizing his own ethnic community’s prejudices. But after hearing the song’s lyrics, it became clearer that he was a Palestinian commenting on the ironies of being an Mizrahi “Arab” in an Ashkenazi dominated State.

The song is deeply subversive. It portrays a deep-seated form of self-loathing (or at least inferiority) that besets Mizrahim who seek, above all, to be accepted despite their alienness within a society and culture dominated by Ashkenazi-ness.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2015/08/20/israeli-palestinian-musicians-subversive-critique-of-mizrahi-politics-culture/