Talk by Dr. Raz Yosef: Fantasies of Loss

Fantasies of Loss: Melancholia and

Ethnicity in Israeli Cinema



THURSDAY, MARCH 29

4:00 P.M.

2022 THAYER BUILDING

202 S. Thayer Street



Dr. Raz Yosef

Tel Aviv University,

Film and Television Department





The migration experience of Mizrahim (Oriental/Arab Jews) is based on a structure of mourning and melancholia. When a person leaves his country of birth he has a wide range of things to grieve, such as family, language, identity, standing in the community, and assets. In the Zionist national narrative, Mizrahi mourning of the lost Arab-Jewish identity was forbidden
and invisible, and led to an ethnic melancholia. Mizrahi melancholia is double: the Mizrahi subject was required to negate and eradicate his Arab identity, but was also forced to reidentify with that loss, because he or she was prevented from fully participating in the Ashkenazi national ideal. These layers of loss were censored, forbidden and silenced in Israeli
culture. These losses have recently been afforded cultural visibility through feature films by second-generation Mizrahi directors. These films are fantasies of loss through which the Mizrahi second generation attempts to "solve" the enigma of the origin of the melancholic identification and identity of both their parents and themselves. Through the fantasy of cinema, the sons restage their parents' loss, with which they identify, in order to search for a lost desire, to talk of a repressed love, and thus to try and redefine their Mizrahi identity.



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Biographical Note:

Raz Yosef teaches in the Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University and in Sapir Collage, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers, 2004), and of numerous articles on issues of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in
Israeli visual culture.

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This event is sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Frankel
Center for Judaic Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.