Books

Lagnado's second memoir follows her mother Edith, a gifted young teacher in Cairo's Jewish community, and Lucette herself from Egypt to Brooklyn, exploring women's lives, lost status, and the cost of exile.

A memoir by Ayelet Tsabari about growing up in a Yemenite family in Israel, losing her father at age nine, serving in the army, and years of wandering through India, Canada, and beyond in search of home.

A collection of scholarly, humorous, and personal reflections by Sam Bension Maimon, a Seattle Sephardic leader of Turkish origin, on Ottoman Sephardic customs, the Ladino language, and Sephardic family and community life.

A family saga novel about four generations of women in the Sephardic Ermosa family of Jerusalem, from the late Ottoman period through the British Mandate and the founding of Israel.

A collection of short stories by Ayelet Tsabari about Mizrahi Israelis, many of Yemenite background, navigating family, war, migration, and identity in Israel, India, and Canada; winner of the Sami Rohr Prize.

A Hanukkah picture book about Joshua Mendes, a Sephardic boy in colonial Newport whose family imports cacao, who helps his friend in Boston open a chocolate shop on the night of the Boston Tea Party.

A middle grade time travel novel in which Jewish Ava and her Muslim cousin Nadeem, facing a bully at school, are carried back to medieval North Africa to help an ancestor protect a fleeing Muslim prince.

A gathering of writings by Hakham José Faur, the Syrian Sephardic rabbi and scholar, on Jewish law, Maimonides, rabbinic interpretation, and the humanistic intellectual tradition of Sephardic Judaism.

Albert Memmi's 1957 classic, written from his experience as a Jew in French colonial Tunisia, analyzes how colonialism shapes and damages both colonizer and colonized; essential background for understanding North African Jews caught between French rule and Arab nationalism.

Set in Baghdad in the years before the mass exodus of 1950 and 1951, the novel follows Kabi, a teenage boy in an Iraqi Jewish family, as his community faces rising persecution, political upheaval, and the decision to leave the country it had called home for millennia.

Peter Cole's English translations of more than four hundred poems by Hebrew poets of Muslim and Christian Spain, from Dunash ben Labrat and Shmuel HaNagid to Ibn Gabirol and Yehuda HaLevi, spanning 950 to 1492, with introductions and notes.

A collection of studies by ten French and Israeli historians, edited by Shmuel Trigano, on the mass departure of Jews from Arab countries and Iran between roughly 1945 and 1970 and the conditions that drove it.