Returning to Ben Hamo: Dror Mishani and the Demon of Israeli Literature
Abstract
This essay returns to Yehoshua Kenaz’s famous belly dance scene in his novel Infiltration (1986), its incredible reception against the backdrop of ethnic shifts and ruptures in Israel, and especially the reading it received in Dror Mishani’s remarkable and forgotten research on representations of Mizrahim in Israeli literature from 2006. Although I offer an in-depth interpretative reading of the dance scene, my main arguments concern the reception of secondary scholarly literature itself, in the long turbulent relationship between Israeli and Jewish Studies and its confrontation and suppression of racial frictions among Jews. The rupture concerns the relation between words and body; between the spirit and the flesh.
Submitted: April 1, 2025 | Accepted: Nov. 17, 2025 | Published Dec. 15, 2025 | Language: en
Keywords Israeli Literature • Dror Mishani • Postcolonial Studies • Yehoshua Kenaz • Abdellatif Kechiche • Queer Studies • Decolonisation of Jewish Studies
Copyright © 2025 Omri Ben Yehuda. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/979-12-5742-004-8/007