Ronit Matalon (b. 1959), the sabra daughter of Egyptian parents, is Israel’s most prominent younger mizraḥi fiction writer and essayist. Her extraordinarily successful first novel Zeh ʿim ha-Panim Elenu (1995; in English, The One Facing Us, 1998), set both in North Africa and Israel, delicately probed her reflections on her family’s complex of identities. More broadly, by incorporating whole chapters from Jacqueline Kahanoff’s essays aggrandizing “Levantinism” in its most positive multi-ethnic sense, Matalon affirmed but also critiqued mizraḥi perspectives of generations…