UCLA

In this dissertation, I contend that, though Lebanon has long been imagined as a haven of diversity in the Middle East, only recently has the country’s once-flourishing Jewish community been considered by state powers and the public as a representation of local cosmopolitanism. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), Jewish synagogues, neighborhoods, schools, and cemeteries faced the same threats of destruction and abandonment as the greater built environment. Lebanese Jews, who stood at roughly 14,000 in the decade prior to the war, now almost exclusively live in the diaspora. Today, Jewish spaces have been refurbished by developers, repaired by diasporic groups, and adapted to house refugees of Palestinian and Syrian origin. To understand how diverse relationships to the spaces of an absent minority group influence concepts of belonging among the Lebanese body politic, I consider how those interfacing with Jewish sites reflect on their prior histories and articulate their own aspirations through processes of multidirectional memory.

The Introduction to the dissertation introduces Lebanon, its Jewish past, and the main questions and research modalities of the dissertation. Chapter One narrativizes Lebanon’s Jewish history within the broader scope of imperial projects and the development of a Lebanese state and national identity. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to the growth of a communal Jewish identity, especially within the scope of the hardening of ethno-religious affiliations into the sole legitimate category of political representation. Chapter Two accounts for the transformation of Wadi Abu Jamil—Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and the location of the country’s only rehabilitated synagogue—vis-a-vis the violent spatial metamorphosis of the surrounding central district since the official cessation of the civil war. I chronicle the process of co-designing a Wadi Abu Jamil walking tour with a Lebanese architect that examined both its Jewish history and its current inaccessibility. In Chapter Three, I focus my analysis on photographs pertaining to Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and its central synagogue. I address the ways in which the mobilization of collective nostalgia through the circulation of these snapshots on three Lebanese Jewish Facebook groups provides a realm for debating, challenging, and reconstructing concepts of belonging as they relate to remembering while remembering a shared homeland from the diaspora. Chapter Four addresses the quotidian transformations of Lebanon’s formerly Jewish neighborhoods, and the ways in which these sites are entangled with varying nationalisms, crises, dislocations, and local political contestations. This chapter draws on ethnographic material from Sidon in order to consider how non-Jewish “cultural brokers”—those who, through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of interacting with/living in formerly Jewish spaces—are charged with the role of interpreting and preserving the histories of these sites.

In the dissertation, I assert that these individuals serve as “cultural brokers”; through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of living in and around formerly Jewish spaces, they interpret and preserve the histories of these sites. I also analyze how political parties and elite state actors mobilize a Lebanese-Jewish past within a narrative that posits a uniquely Lebanese cosmopolitanism as essential to moving beyond ethno-sectarian violence. By examining notions of ‘Jewishness’ within the post-war state, I show how everyday interactions with the built environment construct discursive and social spaces within which people grapple with notions of social difference. The research for this dissertation was carried out over 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork. My fieldwork combined multiple methodologies in order to contend with the afterlives of Jewish spaces in Lebanon, including life history interviews conducted with interlocutors; numerous semi-structured and informal interviews; research conducted in institutional, private, and nontraditional archives; participant observation and “webservation;” visits to formerly Jewish sites across Lebanon; and photographic and experimental visual documentation.