This talk investigates questions of the political meanings of Arab-Jewish cultural inheritance in the wake of its dislocations. How do we read the possibilities of reparative work of Arab-Jewish cultural production amid its unending manipulations and deployments by reactionary forces? How might we go beyond narratives of cultural revival that rehearse Zionist logics offering historical redemption through entry into the Israeli state’s timeline? This talk looks closely at the work of musicians, performers, and cultural workers across generations who engage with their Arab-Jewish cultural inheritance. It considers their works as sites for not only reconstituting elements of the past but also for negotiating the unsettled processes that have sought to transform and conscript Arab-Jews within the settler colonial project, and for inhabiting the non-totalizing effect of this transformation. This talk asks in particular what we might gain from looking at the work of women artists, addressing the ways in which gendered dimensions play out in the unsettled sonic and performed space. Ultimately, this research seeks to add to understandings of the role of cultural work in the study of Arab-Jews in relation to Palestine.
Tamar Sella is a scholar of music and performance cultures. She is currently working on her first book, Unsettled Sounds, which proposes a lens for understanding the political meanings of Arab-Jewish cultural inheritance in the wake of its dislocations. Her work has been published in journals including Women and Music, American Music, and Ethnomusicology. Before her current position as assistant professor at the University of North Texas, Tamar held a postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University, and in Fall ‘25 she will be assistant visiting professor and research fellow at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD from Harvard and a BA from UC Berkeley, both in music.
Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative modern Jewish literatures, especially in Hebrew and German. She is the author of almost thirty scientific articles, more than a hundred of essays, op-eds and public intellectualism, and four books. Her collection (co-edited with Dotan HaLevi) Israel’s Hetrotopy: Gaza in Israeli Politics and Culture was published in Gama press in 2023 and her fourth book Politics and Magic Making: The Benjamin Netanyahu Tetralogy is forthcoming in June 2025 with Blima press. In the academic years 2019–2022, she was an associated EUME Fellow.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.