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1 To Morocco and Back Tourism and Pilgrimage among Moroccan-Born Israelis ANDRE LEVY EDITORS' COMMENTS This chapter is Andre Levy's "To Morocco and Back: Tourism and Pilgrimage among Moroccan-Born Israelis." Its focus is on a trend that has been developing in the past few years: the pilgrimages of Israeli Jews back to their or their parents' homelands in Eastern Europe and North Africa. Levy's chapter is an analysis ofone such voyage, which is in a deep sense a search for identity in the old home country of Morocco. It is based on fieldwork carried out when the author accompanied a group of Moroccan-born Israelis on what can be described as a part pilgrimic voyage and part tourist excursion back to their land of birth. When the group left Israel, these people thought ofMorocco as an integral part-in a sense, as the 'real' part-of their identity. But what Levy found was a paradox : people discovered their Israeli-ness in Morocco. Over the past several years, organized tour groups of Moroccan-born Israelis have been traveling back to their native land. These tours back to 'childhood districts' are part of the ethnic revival in Israel, and can also be seen as part of the emergence of a worldwide trend toward a "new ethnicity."l The emergence of this kind of ethnicity raises an important set of questions related to ethnocultural continuity and change in complex industrialized societies : Does the trend toward ethnic renewal express a nostalgic yearning for 25 1 To Morocco and Back Tourism and Pilgrimage among Moroccan-Born Israelis ANDRE LEVY EDITORS' COMMENTS This chapter is Andre Levy's "To Morocco and Back: Tourism and Pilgrimage among Moroccan-Born Israelis." Its focus is on a trend that has been developing in the past few years: the pilgrimages of Israeli Jews back to their or their parents' homelands in Eastern Europe and North Africa. Levy's chapter is an analysis ofone such voyage, which is in a deep sense a search for identity in the old home country of Morocco. It is based on fieldwork carried out when the author accompanied a group of Moroccan-born Israelis on what can be described as a part pilgrimic voyage and part tourist excursion back to their land of birth. When the group left Israel, these people thought ofMorocco as an integral part-in a sense, as the (real' part-of their identity. But what Levy found was a paradox : people discovered their Israeli-ness in Morocco. Over the past several years, organized tour groups of Moroccan-born Israelis have been traveling back to their native land. These tours back to 'childhood districts' are part of the ethnic revival in Israel, and can also be seen as part of the emergence of a worldwide trend toward a "new ethnicity."l The emergence of this kind of ethnicity raises an important set of questions related to ethnocultural continuity and change in complex industrialized societies : Does the trend toward ethnic renewal express a nostalgic yearning for 25 26 Andre Levy a (remembered and imagined) 'better past' and "good old tradition"? Or, does it represent, following Gans (1979), a further stage in the acculturation and assimilation of ethnic minorities into the larger society? This chapter, dealing with these issues in the context of Israelis' travel to Morocco, centers on two main modes of travel-tourism and pilgrimageand on their relation to ethnicity. The chapter poses two fundamental questions : How do the 'touristic' and 'pilgrimic' experiences (upon which we elaborate later) influence the modes of selection, presentation, and interpretation of travelers' ethnic identities? What are the implications of the selection , presentation, and interpretation of the travelers' ethnic identities for an understanding of the 'new ethnicity' in the contemporary Israeli context? This analysis of the ethnic identities draws its basic assumptions from the situational approach to ethnicity. This approach attempted to overcome "the problem of reification of the concept of ethnic group that follows from its identification with an objectively defined, shared, uniform cultural inventory or with common normative patterns of behavior that are assumed to be consistently adhered to" (Okamura 1981:452). Following Okamura, we may distinguish between the 'objective' and 'subjective' points of view of analysis , that is, the structural features of the setting that provide the overall framework of social relations, and the situation in which actors may pursue different courses of action, according to their understanding of their personal circumstances within the overall framework. As I demonstrate later...

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