Beyond Suspicion

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For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Scholars, left-wing politicians, and activists tend to view Mizrahim as reacting against their structural exclusion, or more crudely as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the source of their so-called paradoxical behavior within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their outlook and behavior are read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry back on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality as the only authentic human choice—with the grammar of rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need and desire for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.