Happy Mimouna: On a Mechanism for Marginalizing Moroccan Israelis

Abstract

The article focuses on the ways in which the mimouna, a distinct Maghrebi Jewish spring holiday, is framed by the Israeli mainstream as a non-serious event, and its practices as primitive. Yet, while manifesting excluding practices and utterances towards it, the holiday is also endorsed by most Jewish Israelis. It asserts that this duality results from a single and unified socio-political mechanism employed by mainstream Israelis to marginalize Israelis of Moroccan descent: a mechanism of exclusion-by-inclusion. The article begins by tracing the early versions of it in Zionists' reports on the mimouna in the beginning of the twentieth-century Morocco, moves quickly to Morocco under colonial regime, and ends by demonstrating these practices in present-day Israel.