Gil Rothschild Elyassi’s essay addresses the relationship between whiteness and Israeliness, and in particular how social, institutional, and interpersonal spaces become white or function as such. But what is the white space? And how does whiteness provide a starting point for Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identity in Israel? Through the body, which refuses to be categorized and insists on knowing that which space and consciousness make us forget, Rothschild Elyassi writes the success and failure of the whitewashing of place through the continuous attempt to expropriate, purify, and remap it from a perspective that needs the “East” in order to take course. Amidst all this, the body and the place remind us that the white space was never white in the first place. But how is it possible that we and the body remember differently? And if we are “here”, where is the remembering body?
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