• MENA Jewry after "the Middle Eastern Turn":Modernity and Its Shadows
• Michelle Campos (bio), Orit Bashkin (bio), and Lior Sternfeld (bio)

In the fall of 2021 Netflix began broadcasting an original Turkish dramatic series, "Kulüp" (The Club), which centered on the tragic story of a Sephardi Jewish convicted murderer, Matilda Aseo, as she earned early release from prison and attempted to rebuild her new life. Based on the family story of one of the screenwriters, Rana Denizer, and directed by Zeynep Günay Tan and Seren Yüce, the series' ten episodes follow Matilda as she navigates old ghosts and new relationships in 1950s Istanbul. The streets are peopled with Matilda's fellow Jews but also with Armenians, Greeks, secret crypto-Greeks and various other characters who "pass" as Muslims, and migrant Muslims from the countryside struggling to survive in the big city.¹ The viewer is exposed to Ladino conversations and songs in the homes, synagogues, courtyards, and streets of Istanbul, as well as in Matilda's place of employment, a cutting-edge nightclub owned by "Orhan Bey," the crypto-Greek Niko who, battling his own ghosts, employs numerous minorities in addition to its star entertainer, a closeted gay Muslim singer who has been disowned by his family.

With the intimacy and familiarity of the street-level scenes, "The Club" reembeds non-Muslims into Istanbul's urban landscape, visually and sonically, as well as historically and socially.² However, "The Club"'s Istanbul is anything but a cosmopolitan paradise, [End Page 3] and darker forces wait in the wings to threaten its fragile everyday coexistence. The dangers of communal boundary crossing are at the center of Matilda's personal story, a tragic tale of star-crossed intercommunal romance, betrayal, and murder. On the state level, virulent Turkish nationalism appears first in shattering Matilda's nuclear family, then in the club with demands made on the owner to fire all non-Muslim employees in order to "Turkify" the institution, until—in the climax of the series—horrendous violence overruns the streets when state-instigated rioters attack its "non-Turkish" residents. Matilda and her estranged daughter Raşel, herself claiming a Turkish name (Aysel) to chase after a Muslim suitor, survive, aided by her Muslim coworkers, and the series ends with "their" Istanbul shrunken into a tiny but safe island of tolerance, enclosed within the four walls of the club.

The tragic stories at the heart of "The Club"—and the visceral images of the impact of the darker side of Turkish nationalism on Turkey's Jews and other non-Muslim minorities—are a sharp departure from the alternatively silent or celebratory narrative of Turkey's tiny Jewish community, which at least officially and publicly lauds Turkey as the successor to the Ottoman "safe haven" for expelled Iberian Sephardi Jews.³ As such, "The Club" provides an important platform for digging up painful periods in republican Turkish history, from the 1942 wealth tax (varlık vergisi) that disproportionately affected the Jewish and Christian communities, to the 1955 Istanbul riots that decimated the Greek community in the city with which the series ends.⁴ These events are long overdue for sustained public awareness and scholarly conversation, and the wide-ranging reactions to "The Club" in Turkey, Greece, Israel, and the rest of the world reflect the gap between the collective memory of ethnoreligious minorities and the public discussion of their experiences, not to mention the anxiety about the current and future direction of the Turkish republic. At the same time, as the series vacillates between hope, inclusion, and harmonious relations on the one hand, and exclusion, violence, and erasure, on the other, it also serves as a reminder that urban belonging for Istanbul's Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and migrant and working-class Muslims has always been fragile and contingent, and not just in the face of nationalism. The jealousy, greed, hatred of the "other," political and economic expediency, and various petty or weighty motives that shape actors' individual and collective choices in the series have, of course, shaped history itself.

More broadly, the series and its local and global reception reflect a major change from past historiographical and cultural trends that...

• “中东转向”后的中东和北非犹太人：现代性及其阴影
• 米歇尔·坎波斯（简介）、奥里特·巴什金（简介）和利奥尔·斯特恩菲尔德（简介）

2021 年秋季，Netflix 开始播放土耳其原创剧集《Kulüp》（俱乐部），该剧讲述了一名被定罪的塞法迪犹太人杀人犯玛蒂尔达·阿塞奥 (Matilda Aseo) 的悲惨故事，她提前出狱并试图重建自己的家园。新生活。该剧根据编剧之一 Rana Denizer 的家庭故事改编，由 Zeynep Günay Tan 和 Seren Yüce 执导，共有 10 集，讲述玛蒂尔达在 20 世纪 50 年代的伊斯坦布尔应对旧鬼魂和新关系的故事。街道上挤满了玛蒂尔达的犹太人同胞，但也有亚美尼亚人、希腊人、秘密的希腊人和其他“冒充”穆斯林的人物，以及来自农村、在大城市挣扎求生的移民穆斯林。¹观众可以在伊斯坦布尔的家中、犹太教堂、庭院和街道以及玛蒂尔达的工作地点接触拉迪诺人的对话和歌曲，这是一家由“Orhan Bey”拥有的尖端夜总会，他是一位神秘的希腊人尼科，与自己的鬼魂作斗争，除了其明星艺人（一位已被家人断绝关系的未出柜的同性恋穆斯林歌手）之外，还雇用了众多少数族裔。

凭借街道场景的亲密性和熟悉性，《俱乐部》在视觉上、声音上、历史上和社会上将非穆斯林重新融入伊斯坦布尔的城市景观。²然而，《俱乐部》里的伊斯坦布尔绝非国际化的天堂，[完第3页]黑暗势力伺机而动，威胁其脆弱的日常共存。跨越族群边界的危险是玛蒂尔达个人故事的中心，这是一个关于族群间不幸的浪漫、背叛和谋杀的悲惨故事。在国家层面，恶毒的土耳其民族主义首先出现在粉碎玛蒂尔达的核心家庭中，然后在俱乐部中要求老板解雇所有非穆斯林员工，以便“土耳其化”该机构，直到——在该系列的高潮中——当国家煽动的暴徒袭击“非土耳其”居民时，可怕的暴力充斥着街道。玛蒂尔达和她关系疏远的女儿拉塞尔（Raşel）在穆斯林同事的帮助下幸存下来，她自己也用土耳其名字（Aysel）来追捕一名穆斯林求婚者，

《俱乐部》核心的悲剧故事，以及土耳其民族主义阴暗面对土耳其犹太人和其他非穆斯林少数民族影响的内心形象，与土耳其这个小国或沉默或庆祝的叙事截然不同。犹太社区至少在官方和公开场合称赞土耳其是奥斯曼帝国的继承者，是被驱逐的伊比利亚塞法迪犹太人的“避风港”。³因此，“俱乐部”为挖掘土耳其共和国历史上的痛苦时期提供了一个重要的平台，从对犹太教和基督教社区造成不成比例影响的1942 年财富税 ( varlık vergisi )，到 1955 年伊斯坦布尔骚乱，摧毁了希腊社区在该系列结束的城市。⁴这些事件早就应该引起持续的公众意识和学术对话，而土耳其、希腊、以色列和世界其他地区对“俱乐部”的广泛反应反映了民族宗教少数群体与公众的集体记忆之间的差距讨论他们的经历，更不用说对土耳其共和国当前和未来方向的焦虑。与此同时，由于该系列在希望、包容和和谐关系与排斥、暴力和抹除之间摇摆不定，它也提醒人们，伊斯坦布尔的犹太人、亚美尼亚人和希腊人的城市归属感，移民和工人阶级穆斯林一直是脆弱和偶然的，而且不仅仅是面对民族主义。对“他人”的嫉妒、贪婪、仇恨，

更广泛地说，该系列及其在当地和全球的反响反映了过去历史学和文化趋势的重大变化……