Description: In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry focuses on the life of the majority of the community, which remained in Egypt from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War until the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War; the dispersion and re-establishment of Egyptian Jewish communities in the United States, France, and lsrael; and contested memories of Jewish life in Egypt since President Anwar al-Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Beinin argues that the experiences of Egyptian Jews cannot be adequately accounted for by either Egyptian nationalist or Zionist narratives.

Fusing history, ethnography, literary analysis, and autobiography, this book makes an important contribution to the discussion of how cultures and identities are formed and reformed.

The best sort of historical revisionism -- sophisticated but unobtrusive in its use of theory, consistently contextual in its assessment of sources and texts, open-ended and suggestive of broader implications in its conclusions" -- James Jankowski, coauthor of Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945

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