Between Imagining Egypt, Imagining the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Local Present and the Cosmopolitan Past

Alexandria has been represented in literature and film as a cosmopolitan city where people of different religions and nationalities co-existed. Competing parochial nationalist discourses in the mid-Twentieth Century challenged and ultimately undermined this culture of coexistence. I will examine two films that explore the interrelationships between Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and of one of these nationalist discourses, Zionism. Both films, Youssef Chahine's Alexandria... Why? [Iskandariya... Lih? (Egypt, 1978)] and Moshe Mizrahi's The House on Chelouche Street [Ha-bayit bi-rehov shelush (Israel, 1973)], were produced in the 1970s and are set in the 1940s. We will trace the ways that Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and Zionism mutually disrupt but also inform one another in these films. Deborah Starr is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge, 2009). She is also the co-editor, with Sasson Somekh, of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford University Press, 2011). She is currently at work on a new project on the films of Egyptian-Jewish filmmaker Togo Mizrahi. This event is co-sponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Information: 919 668-2603.