Yehouda Shenhav (Hebrew: יהודה שנהב; born 26 February 1952) is an Israeli sociologist and critical theorist.
He is known for his contributions in the fields of bureaucracy, management and capitalism, as well as for his research on ethnicity in Israeli society and its relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
[citation needed] Shenhav is a well-known figure in Israel as a public intellectual and as one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, a social movement founded in 1996 by descendants of Jewish refugees, Olim, from Arab countries, which defines itself as an extra-parliamentary movement seeking to challenge the ethnic structure in the Israeli society.
[1] In late 1996 Shenhav published in Haaretz an article titled "The Bond of Silence",[2] which generated a great deal of reaction.
It does not endanger their position as a hegemonic cultural group in Israeli society or as an economic class" and that "Dealing with the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians earns them laurels of humanism, the esteemed roles of slaughterers of sacred cows and seekers of peace, the badge of the rebel, and a catharsis in light of the crime of their parents' generation" yet the Palestinian is marked as the "Other", which can be kept on the other side of the fence.
The Mizrahi Jews, on the other hand, "cannot be turned into an "other," nor can they be cast beyond the fence; at most, one can construct detours to bypass development towns and poverty neighborhoods".
It was followed by 25 response article in Haaretz and the multiplicity of references in the media was considered to have marked the beginning of a new public discussion.
Shenhav seeks to undermine those categories, which he believes to be fixated and do not allow a description of Mizrahi history from a comparative perspective.
[5] Shenhav argued that this Arab Jewish identity is a hybrid one, and is in part the result of dual consciousness - national and colonial - of Zionism.
So from a critical position, Shenhav accepts the conceptualization of the Mizrahi in the Israeli political and ethnic discussion since, according to him, the common experience of the various "communities" in Israel - in the education system, the IDF, the development towns and so forth - has blurred their distinctions and created a great deal of similarity between them.
[7] From a postcolonial and epistemological perspective obligating identity politics, Shenhav believes the Israeli society must become multi-ethnic and therefore multi-culturalist.
Among his publications on the subject is the anthology Coloniality and the Postcolonial Condition which included translations of founding texts by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said.
[8] Shenhav seeks to look at the postcolonial and postmodern discourse frames not merely as critical and deconstructivist frameworks, but rather as ones proposing a principal basis to change reality.
He thinks nationality, wisely using the values of liberalism and democracy, is major a mechanism of oppression and discrimination in the Israeli society.
[8] Appropriate multiculturalist alternatives, according to Shenhav, may include, for instance, a cultural/national autonomy to the Israeli Arabs, or the establishment of a binational state in Israel or the West Bank.