In this timely, engrossing documentary on the neglected history of the Mizrahim, Israel's Arab-Jews, Iraqi-Swiss filmmaker Samir travels to Israel, where most of Iraq's Jews immigrated a half century ago. On a personal mission to learn about his father's past in the Iraqi communist party, he meets four intriguing and charismatic Baghdadi Jews and former communists, who weave a fascinating tale that for most audiences will likely shed an unfamiliar light on the Jewish history of the modern Middle East. They speak of their youthful opposition to British colonialism and German fascism (both implicated in the anti-Semitic violence that flared in 1940s Iraq). For them, communism meant pursuing an anti-racist nationalism based on social justice and human decency. Neither Zionists nor eager emigrants, they recall eloquently their dispossession from a beloved land by an Iraqi government secretly in league, according to rumors at the time, with Israeli Zionists desperate to boost the population of the new nation and supply it with cheap labor. Once in Israel, however, they find themselves outsiders again, culturally isolated and socially marginalized by a Europeanized Ashkenazi majority that regards them as backward and of suspect loyalties.

Samir brings impressive archival material to bear on his narrative, interspersing personal photographs; British, Iraqi, and Israeli newsreels; racist Hollywood films; Egyptian musicals; and the popular Israeli "Boureka" comedies, which played on the perceived differences between European and Arab-Jews. Samir's use of split screens, extreme close-ups, and image overlays puts this material in stimulating juxtaposition to his subjects for the most part, but occasionally devolves into a distracting visual competition. Meanwhile, an extensive interview with New York-based Israeli-American scholar Ella Shohat, author of a groundbreaking work on the racial stereotyping of Arab-Jews in Israeli cinema, helps root the cultural ephemera in the contemporary politics of Mizrahim oppression. Shohat even shares her own moving memories of growing up in Israel as the child of Iraqi immigrants.

Forget Baghdad explodes the assumed irreconcilability between "Arab" and "Jewish" identities by reminding us that Arab-Jews have lived peacefully in Arab-Muslim lands for millennia, and by exploring the perpetual outsider status of the Mizrahim. At the same time, given the relevance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the racial and cultural pecking order explored here, one wonders whether the choice to avoid mention of Palestinian Israelis or the Israeli occupation leaves us with an incomplete picture.

Leili Kashani, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University
December 5, 2003