In 2026, I presented the lecture “Navigating Arab-Jewish Diaspora between Baghdad and Berlin: Reclaiming Identity and Memory in the Heart of Europe” at the conference “Teaching Jewish Diversity Between East and West” at the Jewish Museum Berlin that was organized by Joshuas Krug. I showed how the framing of “Jewishness” in Germany consistently refers to the Ashkenazi experience. I offered two examples: The first was an art piece titled "A(llen)by Road" (or "Abby Road Tel Aviv") created by Israeli pop artist Amit Shimoni - (Here is a clean photo of it). It was printed on the brochure of the Zionist movement that was distributed among the audience during a reading in a Jewish salon in Hamburg. It depicted four figures crossing a street in reference to the famous Abbey Road cover: Ben-Gurion, Herzl, Golda Meir, and Moshe Dayan—yet no figure represented Arab-Jews (or Palestinians).

The second example concerned an image produced in Israel for a major article that was published on “Haaretz” on diasporic writing outside of Israel. In the illustration, a young blonde girl sits by a window in a stylized animated scene; she is depicted as a blonde-haired woman – a symbol for the symbolic “whiteness” of the European Jews. In both cases, the visual imagination of Jewish identity excludes Arab-Jewish presence and Palestinian imagery.

I presented the lecture “Navigating Arab-Jewish Diaspora between Baghdad and Berlin: Reclaiming Identity and Memory in the Heart of Europe” at the conference “Teaching Jewish Diversity Between East and West” at the Jewish Museum Berlin.