Past Meetings

November 13, 2023 (UC Santa Cruz):
  • Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA) and Jessica Marglin (USC), “A Jewish Tastemaker of Islamic Art: Non-Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa and ‘Persomania’ Between the Wars”
  • Emily Gottreich (UC Berkeley), “Jewish Pasts, Muslim Futures: The Mobilization of Jewish Heritage and History in the Contemporary Islamic World”
  • Juliette Rosenthal (UCLA), “Paper Trails: The Intersecting Paths of Three Jewish Intellectuals and Journalists in the Modern Mediterranean”
  • Shira Klein (Chapman), “The History that Wasn’t: How Italian Jews Failed to Impact their Libyan Brethren”
May 15, 2023 (UC Irvine):
  • Panel on Antisemitism in the MENA, with Susan Miller (UC Davis), Aron Rodrigue (Stanford), and Ethan Katz (UC Berkeley)
  • Jacob Daniels (Stanford), “Introduction: Borderland Central: Edirne and its Jewish Community from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early Turkish Republic”
  • Sarah Levin (UC Berkeley), “T’halalit, Permissible (or Not): Ambiguous Boundaries”
  • Roy Marom (UC Berkeley), “The Moshavot: Early Jewish-Arab Encounters in Rural Palestine, 1878-1914”
November 3, 2022 (UCLA):
  • Panel on multidirectional memory with Michael Zalta (USC) and Rebecca Gross (UCSC)
  • Rebecca Glasberg (UCLA), “The Many Iterations of Henriette Gozlan: Tracing the Evolution of Rachid Boudjedra’s recurring Jewish-Muslim figure”
  • Olivia Harrison (USC), “When does an Indigenous Jew become a French Native?”
  • Ethan Katz (UC Berkeley), “Freeing the Empire: The Uprising of Jews and Antisemites that Helped Win World War II,” Excerpts
November 3, 2022 (UCLA):
  • Panel on multidirectional memory with Michael Zalta (USC) and Rebecca Gross (UCSC)
  • Rebecca Glasberg (UCLA), “The Many Iterations of Henriette Gozlan: Tracing the Evolution of Rachid Boudjedra’s recurring Jewish-Muslim figure”
  • Olivia Harrison (USC), “When does an Indigenous Jew become a French Native?”
  • Ethan Katz (UC Berkeley), “Freeing the Empire: The Uprising of Jews and Antisemites that Helped Win World War II,” Excerpts
May 10-11, 2022 (UC Davis):
  • Visualizing Scholarship on the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in the Next Decade
  • Panelists: Aomar Boum (UCLA), Emily Gottreich (UC Berkeley), Alma Heckman (UC Santa Cruz), Oren Kosansky (Lewis & Clark), Matthias Lehmann (UC Irvine), Lital Levy (Princeton), Jessica Marglin (USC), Susan Miller (UC Davis), Chris Silver (McGill), and Sarah Stein (UCLA)
December 3, 2021 (Zoom):
  • Rachel Smith (UCLA), “Superstition and the Haunting of Sephardic Modernity.”
  • Brendan Goldman (University of Washington), “‘A People Plundered and Despoiled’ (Isaiah 42:22): Mass Incarceration, Minorities and Carceral State Logic in Medieval Egypt.”
March 5, 2021 (Zoom):
  • Daniella Farah (UCLA), “Forming Iranian Jewish Identities: Education, National Belonging, the Jewish Press, and Integration, 1945-1981.”
  • Max Modiano Daniel (UCLA), “A Sephardic Century: Relational Formation of a Los Angeles Community, 1893-1992.”
November 13, 2020 (Zoom):
  • Roundtable discussion on pedagogy: teaching Jews in the Middle East and North Africa
March 31, 2019 (USC):
  • Liran Yadgar (UCLA), “The Hebrew Bible in the Writings of Ibn Taymiyya.”
  • Robin Buller (UC Berkeley), “Sephardi Immigrants in Paris: Navigating Community, Culture, and Citizenship in Interwar and Wartime France.”
  • Ethan Pack (UCLA), Routes of Displacement: The Representation of Exile Between Germany, Turkey, Israel and Palestine, selected chapters.
October 28, 2018 (UC Berkeley):
  • Jacob Daniels (Stanford), “Prospects from the Edge of Empire: The Jews of Ottoman Edirne before the Balkan Wars”
  • Shira Klein (Chapman University), “Italian Jewish Encounters with the Jews of Libya and Ethiopia”
  • Susan Gilson Miller (UC Davis), The Undesirables: Nelly Benatar and the Refugee Crisis in Morocco During World War II
March 25, 2018 (USC):
  • Mostafa Hussein (USC Society of Fellows), Islam and the Construction of a Jewish Culture in the Holy Land
  • Marie-Pierre Ulloa (Stanford),“California Dreaming: North African Jews, out of North Africa, out of France”
October 27, 2017 (UC Berkeley):
  • Sarah Levin (UC Berkeley), “Narrative Remembrance: Close Encounters Between Muslims and Jews in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains”
  • Francesco Spangolo (UC Berkeley, Curator of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life), tour of the exhibition “The Invisible Museum: History and Memory of Morocco”
November 4, 2016 (UC Berkeley):
  • Lia Brozgal (UCLA), “An Arab Massacre, a Jewish Story: October 17, 1961”.
  • Chris Silver (UCLA), “‘Where were you, mademoiselle? Every day I ask about you’: Popular music, mixed company, and its discontents in the interwar Maghrib”
  • Emily Gottreich (UC Berkeley), “Jewish Morocco: From Pre-Islamic to Post-Colonial Times”
April 1, 2016 (USC):
  • Reuven Firestone (HUC), “The ‘Other’ Ishmael in Islamic Sripture and Tradition”
  • Aomar Boum (UCLA), “The Righteous Sultan: Mohammed V in Post-Colonial Holocaust Geographies”
November 13, 2015 (USC):
  • Alma Heckman (UC Santa Cruz), “‘I was hoping to leave it with less brutality’: Vichy and the Politicization of Moroccan Jewry.”
  • Susan Slyomovics (UCLA), “Abraham Serfaty: Moroccan Jew and Conscious Pariah.”