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SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY

Forget Baghdad: Roundtrip to the Promised Land Ruth TsoffarUniversity of Michigan

Memory is an empty plate, scarred by scratches from the knife on its skin. —Ronny Someck, “Baghdad,” in The Milk Underground1

In his film Forget Baghdad (2003), Samir aims to compensate for the histor-ical “abyss of abandonment” (Hess 1993:7) that looms between the Zionist

official story of Israel and its Iraqi chapter through the intimate and poignantreminiscences of five individuals of Baghdadi origin.2 He does this in part byclosing in on the faces of the five “actors”—Shimon Ballas, Moshe MoussaHouri, Sami Michael, Samir Naqqash and Ella Shohat –for whom the filmoffers permission and a vehicle to travel to their ancestral homeland and, toa certain extent, to the self. What have been, in the Israeli rhetorical climate,spurned fragments in a linear journey—a one-way-ticket to the PromisedLand—is transformed into a roundtrip journey, characterized by endlessloops and coils. Significantly, the film opens with a top-down view of a man’ssuited legs walking through an airport; in the background is heard anannouncement of the imminent departure of an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Airportsounds merge and then give way to Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil’smulticultural jazz instrumental, “Got to Go Home,” which is somewhat remi-

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niscent of the “Pink Panther” theme song. Both the music and the audible dis-play of the film’s title and credits, by way of typewritten font, clinch the detec-tive story-like documentary nature of Samir’s nearly two-hour film.3

This essay attempts to contribute to increasing the visibility of Baghdad asan originary site of Israeli and US Jewish minorities. In “Forget Baghdad,” thehybrid, hyphenated identity of Iraqi-Jews or Arab-Jews is presented within thecontext of European colonialism and modernity, and situated on the extendedcultural map of the Jewish diaspora in the “East” from Baghdad to Teheran andMumbai. I aim to expand the visual archive of ethnography and its represen-tation beyond “writing culture” or “reading culture” to include viewing as animportant aspect of the discursive practices of cultures. Ever since SaddamHussein’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the media representation ofIraq and Baghdad has been ideologically veneered by US foreign policy, con-tributing to an essentialized, Orientalist portrait of what is in reality a finelytextured “culturescape.” As a visual ethnography that takes memory as its sub-ject, “Forget Baghdad” redresses the tendency to represent Iraq and its Jewishminority culture as abstractions, as a chapter in Jewish history that lacks his-torical context and legitimacy.

It is one thing to return to a place that is associated with violence, collec-tive or personal, and another to return to the place that was forsaken for thehope of a better one. The viewer quickly discovers that Baghdad is a place thatinvokes both trauma and solace. The trauma of Baghdad inheres in the factof its exile from Israeli memory, but, as the film underscores, it is only throughmemory that Baghdad can be recuperated and reclaimed as part of Israeli cul-tural history. Baghdad appears in the film as a place of origin, a cultural ref-erence, and a genealogy.4 But, as I highlight in this essay, the film is not somuch about Baghdad and everyday life there prior to emigration, but aboutthe memory of the city as it is informed by the experience of being Israelitoday, fifty-two years or so later. The idea of “going back,” therefore, is part ofa wider discussion of discursive legitimacy and recently invented strategies toeffectively participate in the public debates on ethnicities and cultures of ori-gin.5 The key questions are what kinds of narratives are produced from thiscinematic site, and what is the nature of this memory? The main issues atstake are not only the permission to go back, in conjunction with the nostal-gic and sentimental value inherent in going back, but more critically, thebroader matter of how the film engages its participants—and viewers—in acontinual negotiation of Iraqi-Jewish and Arab-Jewish identities beyond per-mitted gendered, ethnic, and national discursive limits.6

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Returning to Baghdad might well be an easy act, but for the troubling natureof the departure of Jews from Baghdad, which is recounted in two conflictingscenarios. “Ezra and Nehemia” was the Bible-derived name given to the Zionistorchestrated immigration (or expulsion) of Iraqi Jews to Israel, between thesummer of 1950 and 1951. The official story of this operation was about anoth-er successful Zionist mission of rescuing a Jewish community, in this case,120,000 strong. Later in the 1960s, the muckraking journalists ventured the the-ory that Zionists and not Arabs/anti-Zionists were responsible for planting thebombs targeting Iraqi Jews and their religious institutions, which convincedthem of the wisdom of settling in the new promised land of Israel. If one sub-scribes to the logic of this theory, then if not for the Farhud of 1941, the violentattack on Jews and their property of young, pro-Nazi Iraqis, Iraqi Jews couldreflect on their life in the old country with much less ambivalent pleasure.Consequently, these contested scenarios have generated impressions ofBaghdad as, on the one hand, a site of violence and betrayal, and a site of wist-ful longing, on the other. Samir does not use the film to support one or theother thesis; he, like his interlocutors, was partial to the latter theory. For theJews who left Iraq in the fifties, Baghdad appears in the film as a resurrectedplace of affective attachment. Forget Baghdad itself offers to the five interlocu-tors an opportunity to reclaim Baghdad as an integral part of their personal andcollective biography through mind-travel back to the point of departure.

The film is a montage crafted in part from vignettes of the four male andone female interlocutors who neither appear together nor interact with eachother. They converse exclusively with Samir or speak to the camera. The malesare Iraqi-born and of the same generation as Samir’s father; the one excep-tion is Ella Shohat, who was born in Israel and is a generation younger. Eachin their own way is deeply committed to their Iraqi identity and to its expres-sion through their personal, political, pedagogical, literary, and scholarlyengagements. Prominent in their professional work and evident in the film istheir struggle with the subject of representation and especially the relation-ship of Hebrew to their Arab-Jewish identity. As Ballas has expressed else-where, “Even though I am a Hebrew writer and I write in Hebrew, I am notaffiliated with Hebrew literature.” His writing, as he claims, strives toapproach Hebrew without mystification and “without the Judeocentrism thathas characterized Hebrew literature” (Ballas in Alcalay 1996:67). The lateSamir Naqqash chose to eschew Hebrew all together.

The choice of interlocutors, whom I introduce briefly below, was influ-enced by Samir’s desire to meet his father’s old Communist-Party comrades.

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The four men were all active members in the Iraqi Community Party and wereregular contributor to its press. They also participated in major demonstra-tions and strikes, and several sentenced to time in prison. Although avowed-ly not Zionists, they nevertheless opted to immigrate to Israel and continuedtheir commitment to the Israeli Communist Party and to leftist parties in gen-eral. Shohat is present in the film as a theorist and scholar who creates linksbetween Samir’s personal past, the Iraqi Jewish ancestry, and the ethnic poli-tics of culture in Israel today.

Shimon Ballas (1930– ), a major novelist, translator, and scholar of Arabiclanguage and literature, is a graduate of the Alliance school in Baghdad,where he immersed himself in Arabic, French, and English literatures. Ballaswas exposed to Hebrew and to normative Jewish education only after hisarrival in Israel in 1951. He is currently active in the pro-Palestinian peace andcivil rights movement and devotes much of his recent writing to the subject.

Moshe (Moussa) Houri is an affluent building contractor who began hisvocational career as a kiosk owner. He likes to think about himself as a “sim-ple man” and a peace seeker and still votes for the Communist Party. He grewup in Bacham-bar-Ali in the Western part of Baghdad and today lives in RamatGan, a city east of Tel Aviv with a relatively large population of Iraqi Jews.

Sami Michael (1926– ) is one of Israel’s most renowned authors and a visi-ble public intellectual who broke with the Israeli Communist Party in the mid-1950s. Michael’s political activism forced him underground and even, in 1948,to self-imposed exile to Iran. He subsequently immigrated to Israel where fora long time he “felt like an outsider” as he neither spoke Hebrew nor sharedthe Zionist ideology.

Samir Naqqash (1938–2004) was one of the most important writers and intel-lectuals of his generation. Born in Baghdad, Naqqash lived in Teheran andBombay prior to his arrival in Israel, where he spent most of life in Petach Tikva.As noted earlier, he chose to write in Arabic exclusively as an act of politicalresistance to the totalizing assimilation practices of the Israeli state. Naqqashinhabited the tense space, and as a Jew who wrote in Arabic felt discriminatedagainst. Although his work is well-known in the Arab states, and doctoral theseshave been written about his books in Italy, the United States, England, and Arabcountries, his literary achievements remain, for the most part, ignored by theIsraeli (Hebrew-speaking) readership (Naqqash in Alcalay 1996:100).

Ella Habiba Shohat (1957– ) is a professor at New York University and a pro-lific writer, whose work on film, literature, third world feminisms, and post-colonial theory has been translated into several languages, including Arabic.

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Her first book, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation(1989; Hebrew edition, 1991), to which she alludes in the film, established heras an astute analyst of ethnic identity politics in Israeli popular culture. Asnoted earlier, Shohat was born in Israel and, with her natal family, immigrat-ed to New York in her early adulthood where they have lived ever since. Sheidentifies herself as a leading Mizrahi activist, a political commitment thatinforms her scholarship.

The five actors collectively reaffirm the historical and cultural integrity oftheir Iraqi ancestry and expose the unnaturalness of the exclusionary Zionistcategory of “Oriental Jews.” Their individual voices converge to tell the story ofa community and the vanished vibrant world of Baghdadi Jews. The vivid col-lage of their voices contrasts starkly with the monochrome footage compositedfrom archival photographs, historical newsreels, and Orientalist feature filmsproduced in studios from Hollywood to Cairo to Herzelia (Israel). This techniqueof montage enables Samir to graphically demonstrate the disparaging ways inwhich Iraqi Jews were (and are) represented in Zionist intertexts.

The film has a personal emotional value for me as it provides a vivid por-trait of my father’s generation. I grew up in Ramat Gan, where my maternalgrandfather, Gorgi Kor, like Mussa, would spend many hours sitting on one ofthe benches in the local park, socializing with his fellow Baghdadis. My auto-biography also has some points of overlap with that of Ella Shohat. Our par-ents came to Israel from Baghdad in the same big wave of immigration in1950/51. We were both born in Israel in the ma’abarah (the transit or refugeecamps of the early 1950s) which represents an important moment in the his-tory of Israel characterized by post-war austerity and newly constructed hier-archies of ethnicity, ancestry, and class. In the ironically Eurocentric7 Zionistsocial scheme, Iraqi Jews as a category, simply by virtue of their “Oriental”Middle Eastern ancestry, were locked into a subordinate position relative tothe Ashkenazi elite. For Iraqi Jews, the ma’abarah was the place where theopen sky of the Promised Land sunk to the height of the canvas walls of thewinter rain-soaked tent.

Samir’s self-conscious engagement with his Iraqi ancestry motivated him toproduce this film. How could Samir, a Swiss national, do what so many Israelishave failed to do, namely to engage on an intimate level with Israeli ethnicidentity politics?8 From an Israeli perspective the fact that Samir is an out-sider—he is neither Jewish nor Israeli, nor is he embroiled in the politics ofMiddle Eastern culture—makes him especially well suited to undertake sucha challenge. He introduces new variables to the representation of Iraqi Jews

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that hitherto were not available in the film medium.9 A comparison withSasson Somekh’s recently published memoir, Baghdad, Yesterday (2004), isinstructive in this regard. First serialized for two years in Ha’aretz, a leadingdaily Israeli newspaper, where it enjoyed an enthusiastic reception, the bookis a rich personal testimony of Iraqi Jewish life in Baghdad prior to immigra-tion. However, unlike the voices of Samir’s interlocutors, Somekh’s book, com-ing from within the culture as a legitimate stage of representation, does nothave an obvious critical edge. Somekh gained admission to Israeli public dis-course via his academic achievements: he is a top scholar of modern Arabicliterature. Memory, he attests, is non-political; he “does not write as a sociol-ogist, or as a historian, or as a folklorist” (2004). It was as though his memoryitself wrote his narrative. Nevertheless, Baghdad emerges through his elo-quent pen as a cross-cultural and multifaceted city.

Samir’s own nostalgia feeds the spirit of the recuperation: his imaginedcommunity of childhood includes Jews as well as Muslim and Christian minori-ties. As an outsider, his very person blurs the national and religious boundariesthat otherwise dominant the conflicted discourse of Zionism and Mizrahim inIsrael. Moreover, the cinematic invitation that he extends to Israeli Iraqi Jewshelps to create a novel cultural space in which he and the participants insist oncontinuing a disrupted conversation about the multicultural space of mid-twentieth century Baghdad. In the multiethnic society of Israel the highly hier-archical and selective mechanism of the system of social codes determines theparameters of inclusion and exclusion, controlling who can speak and fromwhich cultural location. Forget Baghdad explores another dimension of minor-ity discourse by introducing a new context for framing the key questions of towhom one speaks and to whom one’s narrative is addressed. In this context,traveling through memory is a potentially radical psychological act with itsown trajectory. Memory precedes both the intellect and the language: and yet,in itself, is more than an emotional attachment to places infused with nostal-gia; rather, it can often constitute a political act that enables one to repositiononeself within history, in this case, Israeli cultural history.

Samir traveled from Switzerland to Israel in making his film aboutBaghdad. Incidentally, it is only as a European passport holder that non-Jewish Iraqis can even enter Israel. It was in the relaxed atmosphere of Israeliand US living rooms that he and his interlocutors could slip into the Iraqidialect of Arabic and savor Iraqi cuisine. The body postures of Ballas andMichael are revealing; instead of their usual edginess they appear relaxed andcomfortable with themselves. The conversations in Arabic are friendly and

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flow easily as the five earnestly recount their personal stories. From the priv-ileged position of remembering, they are able to focus not only on the mem-ory of life in Baghdad, but on the very nature of the colonizing encounterbetween Baghdad (Iraq) and Israel. Their candid demeanor allows them to beboth more trenchantly critical when discussing ethnic and cultural politics.

Samir’s quest for the missing Jewish links of his childhood maps onto amore inclusive cultural terrain that extends beyond the limited Israeli framesof references; beyond the ethnocentric localism of canonical Zionist conven-tions to embrace the forgotten “ethnoscape,” or landscape of ethnicity, ofBaghdad. Israel, from his perspective, is but one diasporaic destination, albeitan important one, for Iraqi immigrants. New York (Shohat) and Switzerland(Samir) are two others.

On the cultural map of Jewish experience, Baghdad (Iraq) has long been car-icatured in opposition to Israel: it is Arab, it is the enemy, it is backward, andmodern Israel is moving forward. Consequently, over the last fifty years, thediscourse about Iraq and Iraqis has tended to be stereotypically reductive. Thecanonic Jewish narrative of Babylon of antiquity of the time of the Talmud andlater of the Geonim, instead is highlighted, and contemporary ethnic differ-ences are underplayed in favor of promoting a singular common Jewish iden-tity. This discourse conforms to the basic premise of Zionism: What Jewsaround the globe share in common is much more substantial than what anyone group of Jews share with their neighbors in the Diaspora. In other words,a Jew from a small Russian village and a Jew from Cairo or San’a share deeperhistorical roots and future aspirations than they do with Russians, Egyptians,or Yemenites. The logic of this premise is being challenged now in the wake ofa massive wave of Russian immigrants of “dubious Jewishness,” and by the vis-ible presence of foreign workers from Thailand, Nigeria, and elsewhere.

Forget Baghdad redefines the relationship of Israelis to Iraq by presentingBaghdad as another home(land). Home is a contested construct; it can evenbe regarded as the place where one can exercise the very privilege and legit-imacy to remember. If the question was once “Where is the home(land)?” it isnow coupled with the additional question, “What does it mean to go home?”Is it Israel, where the Law of Return, premised on the ideal of a Jewish statefor the Jewish people, automatically grants every Jew the right of citizenshipupon arrival? Is it Baghdad? Which Baghdad? Babylonian Baghdad? BritishBaghdad? Ba’athist Baghdad? The bombed out Baghdad now occupied by theUS army? Or the Baghdad wistfully remembered and imagined as an intimatecity with fluid boundaries among religions, nationalities, and languages?

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The collective return of Samir and his five interlocutors exposes theBaghdadi experience not as a reified category, but as an accumulated con-sciousness that ruptures the dominant Israeli cultural codes of rejection,intimidation, and humiliation. From this position, the hybrid, hyphenatedidentity of Iraqi-Jew, or Arab-Jew, is carefully crafted by the five, adding newstories to the general Jewish archive of personal narratives, along with thosecontributed by Polish Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and Sephardic Jews.

True, a melancholic tone is threaded throughout the film, symptomatic ofmourning for the past, so strikingly highlighted by the intellectual isolation ofeach of the speakers and his or her sense of lost community. In the 1930s and1940s, Communism and Zionism were the two totalizing movements in whichthe young, educated Jewish men of Baghdad could participate (Rajwan 1985:233–235). In an Iraqi Jewish context, Communism was largely a radical move-ment of enthusiastic young intellectuals who felt that they could change theirworld. They read Marx in English, a colonial language under the BritishMandate, and at times supported anti-Nazis and anti-Arab government posi-tions, at other times adopted an anti-colonial stance against the British. Mostimportant for them was the notion that to be Communist was to believe in thesolidarity of Jewish and Arab intellectuals striving together for a commonsocial cause. As Sami Michael asserts, “Communism was the main ideology ofthe twentieth century.” And to be an intellectual in Baghdad at that timemeant to be a Communist.

In many ways this political affiliation amplified Iraqiness by assumingmembership in an intellectual community so desperately missing in Israel.Like Zionism, Marxism also offered a manifesto of belonging, politically andintellectually, in the face of the destabilizing processes (for Jews) of pan-Arabism and forced immigration. Ironically, in Israel of the early 1950s,Communism, which attracted members of the newly lower-class emigrants ofthe ma’abarah, was invested with a new edge of resistance as the young menof Iraqi ancestry organized protest marches, demonstrating for jobs andbread. Beyond their nostalgic, sentimental value, these six individual yet gen-eralizable narratives of return have socio-political value in generating thealternative space for new modes and subjects of communication. They pro-vide an opportunity for the speakers and viewer alike to rethink, in differentlanguages and contexts, the histories and realities of ethnic differences, andthose posed by Baghdadis (Iraqis) in particular.

In many ways the film enables its participants to come out of the ethnicclosets by giving an ostensibly unfiltered personal account of their experience

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as Baghdadi or Iraqi Jews in Israel, especially in the early years of the state.Being a member in both the Communist Party and the Zionist Undergroundwarranted a secretive life and identity that implied the existence of anotherkind of closet to negotiate. Their story of oppression lies in the shadow of theShoah, or The Holocaust, the dominant public discourse of Jewish victimiza-tion. The overdetermined discursive space of Israeli wars and nationaldefense, together with the brittle political economy of ethnic identity contin-uously agitated by exigencies of immigration, labor needs, and religious dog-matism, diminish, disable, and trivialize the versatility and multi-dimension-ality of the story of Iraqi Jews.

In this context, the inclusion of Ella Shohat in the film is crucial, and not justbecause she represents a largely absent female—and feminist—perspective.Her postcolonial meta-narrative of Israeli ethnicity helps to place the other per-sonal narratives within a wider context of third world politics, racism, andfemale experience with its specific vocabulary and language. But Shohat’s pres-ence in the film is not limited to her status as a scholar. Some of the most evoca-tive passages in the film are of her girlhood memories of the internalized humil-iation of ethnocentric discrimination in the immigrant enclave of PetachTikvah. It is in this film that she narrates publicly for the first time her raw anddistressing experience of racism and its impact on her life and work.

I have commented at length on the virtuous and power of Forget Baghdad.In conclusion, I wish to draw attention to what I perceive as an ironic over-sight. In a film that seeks to recuperate the vitality of Jewish individuals ofIraqi ancestry, it is curious that the literary and academic achievements of thefive interlocutors are not fully incorporated into the cinematic montage.Especially because the integrity and dynamism of the Iraqi Jewish communi-ty is at issue in this film, the exclusion of their actual literary productions isboth perplexing and a missed opportunity to further inform viewers. Nor dothe five interlocutors take the opportunity to incorporate their complexly tex-tured and nuanced work into their monologues and interviews with Samir.

In this connection, the case of the late Samir Naqqash is particularly rele-vant. As a Jewish novelist who wrote exclusively in Arabic, and who is celebrat-ed in the Arab literary world, his work remains relatively inaccessible to Israeliand US readers. At the times Naqqash is aknowledged as an important writer,it is often without any engagement with his body of work. In the film, it is hisphysical body that is present in his role as Samir’s interlocutors. I would liketo conclude this review of Forget Baghdad by remembering Naqqash’s literarybody. Two short paragraphs from his short story “Prophesies of a Madman in

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a Cursed City,”10 are especially evocative of the way Naqqash articulated “pres-ence” in literature as the ultimate testimony of his credo.

Many tasks await me, but my only skill is in following the command anduttering “here I am” (in Arabic, the original, ha-ana-dha, in Hebrew, itsintertext, hinneini). And I have nothing in my dominion but this covertmission that fills my very being, measureless and without color, butwhose weightlessness already makes it like lead. And if I dare to rebelagainst its voice, it will transgress and put me to death—if I do not say“Here I am.” Yet, it is my most prized possession, even though peoplerefer to it as a mental defect and even distance themselves, and utterlyconvinced, call it insanity.

As for me, I have my tears, my flesh, and my suffering. I quickly learnedthat shedding tears and expressing grief are but the other face of revo-lution and rebellion. They are the resistance of an important madmanfrom whom, in every syllable of the words flowing from his mouth, canbe heard that here is his sole of only possession: “Here I am.”

ENDNOTES1Someck 2005: 40.2Samir’s earlier documentary is “Babylon 2” (1993).3Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs— the Iraqi Connection, written and directed by Samir, wasreleased on December 5, 2003. The film was produced by Samir, Karin Koch and Gerd Haadunder the auspices of Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion, Zurich. For further informationabout the film, see http://www.forgetbaghdad.com/.4The city of Baghdad was founded in AD 762 by Abu Jafar al-Mansur, the second Abbasidcaliph, on the west bank of the Tigris River. The capital was surrounded by a circular wall,and became known as the “Round City.” Since then, Baghdad has been a major heteroge-neous metropolis and center of scholarship, where text in Greek, Persian, Syriac, and Hindulanguages into Arabic. 5Another orchestrated occasion for remembering Baghdad was a conference in Vienna inJuly 2004, titled, “Re-member Baghdad,” which aimed to “re-member history, historiogra-phy and collective memory and to rethink the contribution of such a potential communityto the future of the Middle East, and especially Iraq, Israel and Palestine.” 6The subtext of the narrative of going back to Baghdad is the more common public one of goingback to Europe of The Holocaust, either as a personal journey or as a collective one in the formof organized tours to concentration camps and other key sites of European Jewish life. 7Israel Zionism recapitulated—ironically—the very social hierarchy and discourse that wasused in Europe to discriminate against Jews.

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8The US literary scholar Ammiel Alcalay traveled to Israel to interview Mizrahi writers andtranslate their poetry and prose into English. The fact that some of the works in his anthol-ogy have not yet been published in Hebrew is revealing (Alcalay 1983, 1993, 1996). 9Note, for example, how different is the 53-minute documentary, “The Black Panthers (inIsrael) Speak,” directed by Eli Hamo and Sami Shalom Chetrit. In the film, leading activistsof the Panthers, a radical Marxist group of the 1970s, describe their experience and reflecton the political significance of the movement then and its present-day ramifications.Although the film was released at the same time as “Forget Baghdad” (2003), it is framedvery differently. Whereas Samir provides a filmic context enabling extended narration,Hamo and Chetrit opt for conveying a political edge, through an almost rushed urgency ofdelivery. 10Translated from Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Joseph Halibi and Ali Jimale Ahmed (Alcalay 1996).

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Alcalay, Ammiel. 1993. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

__________, ed. 1996. Keys to the Garden: Israeli Writers in the Middle East. San Francisco:City Lights Books.

Ballas, Shimon. 1996. “At Home in Exile: An Interview with Shimon Ballas.” In A. AlcalayKeys to the Garden: Israeli Writers in the Middle East, pp.62-69. San Francisco: City LightsBooks.

__________. 2003. “The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak.” Eli Hamo & Sami Shalom Chetrit,Israel.

Hess, Amira. 1993. “Hirhurim be-‘Ikvot Mot Vivi’ (Reflections following Vivi’s Death).” ha-Me’asef, p. 7.

Naqqash, Samir. 1993. “Signs in the Great Disorder: An Interview with Samir Naqqash byAmmiel Alcalay.” In A. Alcalay Keys to the Garden: Israeli Writers in the Middle East, pp.101-110. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

__________. 1993. “Prophesies of a Madman in a Cursed City.” Ammiel Alcalay, JosephHalibi and Ali Jimale Ahmed. trans. In A. Alcalay, Keys to the Garden: Israeli Writers in theMiddle East, pp. 111-132. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Rajwan, Nissim. 1985. The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture. Boulder, CO.:Westview Press.

Samir. 2003. “Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs—The Iraqi Connection.” A film by Samir.Germany/ Switzerland.

Shohat. Ella Habiba. 1989. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation.Austin: University of Texas Press.

Someck, Ronny. 2005. The Milk Underground. Or-Yehuda: Kineret, Zmora-Bittan, Dvir.

Somekh, Sasson. 2003. Bagdad ‘Etmol (Baghdad, Yesterday). Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Me’uchad.