The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
"The publication of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff is much anticipated, as many of her principal critical and creative essays are now collected in one place, affording more scholars and students working on the Eastern Mediterranean the opportunity to examine her work . . . The publication of Mongrels or Marvels marks an important moment in the study of th
Journal of Levantine Studies
"Reviving Kahanoff . . . [is] a way of communing with the true spirit of the Middle East, and coming to terms with its true essence: a twined, multilayered, pantheistic crucible of identities, rather than the prevalent image of a uniform universe of Arabs alone-or for that matter Jews alone-that advocates of exclusivist identities still cling to."
Bustan: The Middle East Book Review
"Kahanoff's extraordinarily important writings have held a certain aura or mystery for many decades and have been unavailable in their original English language form. They are of particular interest; in part because she is a woman, and Jewish, but most importantly because her ideas, sometimes anachronistic, idiosyncratic, and even contradictory, were clearly ahead of her time. Her work has endurin
