Gift to UCLA’S Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies bolsters field of Moroccan Jewish studies

The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies has received a pledge of $100,000 from its Moroccan academic partner, the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) to support Arabic translation projects pertaining to Moroccan Jewish studies.

Meet Aomar Boum, UCLA’s new Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies

As a professor of anthropology and of Near Eastern languages and cultures at UCLA, Boum takes a global perspective on the history of Jews from Morocco, including those who settled in Los Angeles, New York or Montreal, while also examining the larger context of minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. (photo: Joel Mason-Gaines/USHMM)

The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging

Observers often imagine personal political identities in the Middle East as ancient, inevitable, and immutable. But the twentieth-century history of Morocco’s Jewish Communists is a compelling testament to the contingency of such affiliations. Heckman focuses on the careers of five prominent members of the Moroccan Jewish community from the days of the French protectorate, in the early twentieth century, to the end of the reign of Hassan II, in 1999.

Meet the Authors: Alma Rachel Heckman

Meet the authors of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series: Alma Rachel Heckman in conversation with series editor Sarah Abrevaya Stein about The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging

Mais encore avec Mohamed Kenbib

Hamid Berrada reçoit dans cette édition l’historien Mohamed Kenbib.

Why Did Morocco Just Demolish a Holocaust Memorial?

A German guerilla artist-activist has revived the stormy debate about who controls the narrative of the Holocaust in Morocco, and its entanglement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

PERCHÉ IL MAROCCO HA APPENA DEMOLITO UN MEMORIALE DELL’OLOCAUSTO?

Pubblichiamo di seguito la traduzione dell’articolo di Aomar Boum e Daniel Schroeter uscito su Haaretz, sulla narrazione dell’Olocausto in Marocco.

Un attivista e artista tedesco ha riacceso il tempestoso dibattito su chi controlli la narrazione dell’Olocausto in Marocco, e la sua correlazione con il conflitto israelo-palestinese.

Announcing Jewish Story Partners

Jewish Story Partners (JSP), a new Los Angeles-based film foundation, has launched with an ambitious vision and will soon announce its first round of grantees. Jewish Story Partners stimulates and supports the highest caliber independent films that utilize fresh, nuanced perspectives to tell stories about a diverse spectrum of Jewish experiences, histories, and cultures. Jewish Story Partners responds to the glaring gap in funding as well as the pressing need to expand the range of stories reflecting Jewish lives.

The Things We Love – Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Esmé Shapiro

My 2019 book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century, explores the Levys’ fraught and fascinating history over the arc of a century, through seven generations, and across the reach of the globe. Here, I focus on a few compelling members of the family to answer an overarching question: Why do people love the things they do, and can a life be represented by a single thing a person held dear? The essay is illustrated with original watercolors by Esmé Shapiro.

Sephardic Jews Are Fighting for Their History to be Represented

In 1952, on South La Brea Avenue, a restaurant called Robaire’s opened for business. It had stereotypical Parisian décor, a fantasized French atmosphere and a very French menu. 

But did you know the founder and owner was not French, but a Sephardic Jew who emigrated from Tunisia?

His story, along with dozens of others involving the mutual interplay between Los Angeles and Sephardic Jews, is part of an online exhibition called “100 Years of Sephardic Life in Los Angeles,” which, since Feb. 9, has been accessible via the internet.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Jewish Heritage Isn’t About You by Maxwell Ezra Greenberg, Max Modiano Daniel

SHAUL MAGID’S recent essay in Jewish Currents started a nuanced conversation about the meaning of Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Jewish heritage. Magid convincingly begins and ends his argument with an important historical example of intercommunal Jewish gatekeeping from 16th century Safed, highlighting competing notions of Jewish authenticity amongst Jews—issues which have embroiled Ocasio-Cortez’s declaration of Jewish heritage since she made it public, and are as ancient as the Spanish Inquisition. However, the piece also argues that Ocasio-Cortez’s self-ascription into Jewishness is valuable and significant precisely because it has unsettled American Jews in the present. This conclusion unproductively situates Ocasio-Cortez’s self-identification in competitive tension with normative (read: white Ashkenazi American) Jewish experiences. We believe this misses an opportunity to highlight the historic and contemporary intersections between Sephardic histories and Latinidad (Latino-ness) in the United States.

This historian is preserving North African Jewish music from a bygone era

Chris Silver, a professor of Jewish History at McGill University, collects records from around the world for the first archive of North African Jewish music, currently housed in his apartment in Montreal. (Courtesy of Chris Silver)

How My Muslim Journey Led Me to Study Jews – Aomar Boum

I never envisaged that my life journey would take me to study the Jews of my southern Moroccan oases and North Africa. Growing up as a practicing Muslim in a Moroccan village, I never could have imagined that I would, one day, do research with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Vichy and Nazi policies in North Africa, or that I would become affiliated with the UCLA Center of Jewish Studies, one of the oldest centers in the United States, and become a member of the Association for Jewish Studies.

How did this happen to a Muslim Moroccan boy?

Bound Together by Law – Jessica M. Marglin

Terrorism; attacks on a kosher supermarket in Paris; fights over who can pray on the Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif. When we juxtapose Jews and Muslims today, these are the sorts of associations that usually come to mind. The conflict in Israel/Palestine, and its spillover in Europe, has come to dominate discussions about how Jews and Muslims interact.

Jessica Marglin – Jews, Credit and Usury in medieval and early modern times: What’s new in the field?

Jessica Maya Marglin (University of Southern California) Jews, Credit, and Usury in 19th-Century Morocco: Between Shari’a and Custom.

Bridging Time, Distance and Distrust, With Music

Neta Elkayam, an Israeli singer, plumbs the rich culture of the Moroccan Jews she descended from, and introduces it to new audiences in both countries.

By Aida Alami, with comments from Aomar Boum and Chris Silver.

African scholars say it’s time to discuss the Holocaust, again

Once upon a time, the Holocaust mattered to Africans. While Germans rampaged through North Africa, African newspaper editors saw Nazi atrocities as yet another argument against the so-called civilizing benefits of Western colonialism. African nations tried to prevent their Jewish residents from being hauled off to camps, some of which became synonymous in the native language with the word for hell.

Then came the struggles of African independence and the 1967 Six-Day War, after which many African nations broke off relations with Israel, and interest in the Holocaust all but disappeared.

But last week, a new generation of African scholars did something extraordinary: They held a conference to talk about the Holocaust again.

By Roberto Loiederman, with comments from Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein.

SACRED PROTECTORS: Crossing Boundaries of Time and Faith, These Muslims Safeguard Morocco’s Holy Jewish Sites

It’s a hot summer day when I arrive at Khmis Arazan, a small rural town in southern Morocco, about 170 miles south of Marrakesh. It’s Thursday, market day, and a group of local children spots me. Before I say a word, they know where I’m headed. There’s only one reason why outsiders find their way to this remote community: to visit the synagogue.

By Aomar Boum

Interview with Luke Yarbrough

With his vast knowledge in pre-modern Islamic societies, Luke Yarbrough (Ph.D. 2012, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University) brings a unique perspective to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Luke is our new Islamic Studies hire and will be teaching two classes in Winter quarter: a class called “Islamic Thought” for undergrads and a workshop for student research for grad students.

Aomar Boum on Radio El Malah

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Oren Kosansky on Radio El Malah

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Jamaa Baïda on Radio El Malah

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Khalid Ben Srhir. Prix du livre du Maroc 2016 Option Traduction

Cérémonie de remise du Prix du livre du Maroc 2016 option de traduction à Khalid Ben Srhir pour la traduction de Memoirs of Absence de Aomar Boum.
حفل تسليم جائزة المغرب للكتاب برسم 2016، صنف الترجمة للأستاذ خالد بن الصغير عن ترجمته لكتاب: يهود المغرب وحديث الذاكرة ، لصاحبه عمر بوم الصادر ضمن منشورات كلية الآداب والعلوم الإنسانية بالرباط.