Books
Books recommended by JIMENA staff for readers, students, and educators exploring the history, literature, languages, and traditions of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Browse children’s books, novels, history, Jewish languages, and Sephardic thought.
Buy BookHistory & Nonfiction
The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First-person accounts from Egypt’s Jewish community in the Twentieth Century
by Liliane DammondA collection of first person accounts by Egyptian Jews describing community, family, and daily life in Cairo and Alexandria in the twentieth century and their departures after 1948 and 1956.
Buy BookMemoirs & Biographies
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
by Lucette LagnadoLucette Lagnado's memoir of her father Leon, a dapper Cairo businessman, recounts her family's life in Jewish Cairo, their departure from Nasser's Egypt in the early 1960s, and their hard years as refugees in Paris and Brooklyn.
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The One Facing Us
by Ronit Matalon (Author), Marsha Weinstein (Translator)Through Esther, an Israeli teenager sent to stay with her uncle in Cameroon, and an album of family photographs and captions, the novel reconstructs the scattering of a Cairo Jewish family across Israel, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
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Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema
by Deborah A. StarrA study of Togo Mizrahi, the Alexandrian Jewish director and producer whose films of the 1930s and 1940s helped build the Egyptian film industry and portrayed Egypt's cosmopolitan, multiethnic society.
Buy BookMemoirs & Biographies
When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History
by Massoud HayounJournalist Massoud Hayoun retells the lives of the grandparents who raised him, who grew up in Egypt and Tunisia and later moved through France to Los Angeles, to argue for an Arab Jewish identity he sees as erased by colonialism.