The Frankely Judaic Podcast episode, "Mizrahi History and Aesthetics in the Metaverse" with Frankel Institute Fellow Rafael Balulu is now available on our website and Buzzsprout! This episode is part of the 2022-23 Theme Year, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity." Listen here.
When the modern state of Israel declared independence in 1948, over the next few years, many Jews from Arab lands left their ancestral homes in Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Yemen, and other countries and immigrated to the Jewish State. The Ashkenazi, or European, Jews who controlled the state were fascinated by their co-religionists from the Arab world, but also saw them as primitive and backwards. Many Mizrahi Jews, as they came to be known, discarded their languages, histories, and cultures, in an attempt to recast themselves in the Zionist model of the “New Jew.”
In this episode, filmmaker Rafael Balulu, a Mizrahi Jew whose parents immigrated to Israel from Morocco, describes his vision of using the virtual world of the Metaverse to create spaces and communities where Mizrahi Jews from all backgrounds can explore their heritage and create new traditions and ways of being without interference from the Zionist establishment.
The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.
