Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917-1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic.

Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.

Author: Deborah A. Starr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 05/17/2011
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780804769532

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2011 pg. 176

About the Author
Deborah A. Starr is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature and Film in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University and the Director of Cornell's Program of Jewish Studies. Sasson Somekh is Professor Emeritus of Arabic Literature at Tel Aviv University, where he was Halmos Chair of Arabic Literature.