A Confiscated Memory

This beautifully written book tells the story of refugees and immigrants who lived during the twentieth century in a single neighborhood in Haifa (Wadi Salib), enduring victimization as a result of war and long ethnic, national, and social discrimination and transformation. Yfaat Weiss focuses on a pre-1948 Palestinian neighborhood in a predominantly Jewish City, laying out the way the displacement of Palestinians gave way to Jewish migrants, who were themselves refugees enduring social discrimination in Israel and were evicted as a result of Israel's most famous social upheaval (1959), a watershed moment in Israeli ethnic relations between Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jews. This captivating history of a mosaic of exclusion and inclusion of national and immigrant minorities-in addition to its other merits, it is an outstanding urban study--reveals the parallel and separate experiences of repeated displacement. This community of 'diachronic neighbors' illuminates the memory of a place and a sequence of displacements. Weiss brings to life and revives the memory of disappeared cultures displaced by war and the drive to modernization. -- Elazar Barkan, professor of international and public affairs and director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, and coauthor of No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation [T]his study adds to the broader discourse on identity and conflict in Israel. Choice [An] important contribution to the growing literature on collective memory and forgetting. -- Michael Feige, Ben-Gurion University American Historical Review