Confiscated Memory

Yfaat Weiss is professor in the Department of the History of the Jewish People and head of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of various studies on German and Central European history, as well as on Jewish and Israeli history. Together with Daniel Levy, she is coeditor of Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration.

This beautifully written book tells the story of refugees and immigrants who lived during the twentieth century in a single neighborhood in Haifa (Wadi Salib), enduring victimization as a result of war and long ethnic, national, and social discrimination and transformation. Yfaat Weiss focuses on a pre-1948 Palestinian neighborhood in a predominantly Jewish City, laying out the way the displacement of Palestinians gave way to Jewish migrants, who were themselves refugees enduring social discrimination in Israel and were evicted as a result of Israel's most famous social upheaval (1959), a watershed moment in Israeli ethnic relations between Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jews. This captivating history of a mosaic of exclusion and inclusion of national and immigrant minorities-in addition to its other merits, it is an outstanding urban study--reveals the parallel and separate experiences of repeated displacement. This community of 'diachronic neighbors' illuminates the memory of a place and a sequence of displacements. Weiss brings to life and revives the memory of disappeared cultures displaced by war and the drive to modernization. -- Elazar Barkan, professor of international and public affairs and director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, and coauthor of No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation [T]his study adds to the broader discourse on identity and conflict in Israel. Choice [An] important contribution to the growing literature on collective memory and forgetting. -- Michael Feige, Ben-Gurion University American Historical Review

• Preface Acknowledgments Prologue: The Neighbors Who Get Rich on Our Account 1. War: Diachronic Neighbors 2. Commotion: "And I Wanted to Do Something Nice, Like They Have Up in Haddar" 3. Evacuation: City Lights 4. Khirbeh: Altneuland Epilogue: Iphrat Goshen and His Wife Miriam Move Into Said's House in Hallisa Notes Bibliography Index