Yfaat Weiss – författare

Yfaat Weiss tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national Israeli authorities of European origin. The protests of Wadi Salib generated for the first time a kind of political awareness of an existing ethnic discrimination among Israeli Jews. However, before that, Wadi Salib existed as an impoverished Arab neighborhood. The war of 1948 displaced its residents, even though the presence of the absentees and the Arab name still linger.Weiss investigates the erasure of Wadi Salib''s Arab heritage and its emergence as an Israeli site of memory. At the core of her quest lies the concept of property, as she merges the constraints of former Arab ownership with requirements and restrictions pertaining to urban development and the emergence of its entangled memory. Establishing an association between Wadi Salib''s Arab refugees and subsequent Moroccan evacuees, Weiss allegorizes the Israeli amnesia about both eventual stories—that of the former Arab inhabitants and that of the riots of 1959, occurring at different times but in one place. Describing each in detail, Weiss uncovers a complex, multilayered, and hidden history. Through her sensitive reading of events, she offers uncommon perspective on the personal and political making of Israeli belonging.

In contrast to most other countries, both Germany and Israel have descent-based concepts of nationhood and have granted members of their nation (ethnic Germans and Jews) who wish to immigrate automatic access to their respective citizenship privileges. Therefore these two countries lend themselves well to comparative analysis of the integration process of immigrant groups, who are formally part of the collective "self" but increasingly transformed into "others." The book examines the integration of these ''privileged'' immigrants in relation to the experiences of other minority groups (e.g. labor migrants, Palestinians).

This volume offers rich empirical and theoretical material involving historical developments, demographic changes, sociological problems, anthropological insights, and political implications. Focusing on the three dimensions of citizenship: sovereignty and control, the allocation of social and political rights, and questions of national self-understanding, the essays bring to light the elements that are distinctive for either society but also point to similarities that owe as much to nation-specific characteristics as to evolving patterns of global migration.