Books

A memoir by a survivor from Rhodes recalling daily life, customs, and Judeo Spanish culture in the island's Jewish quarter before the 1944 deportation to Auschwitz, and her own experience of the Holocaust.

A picture book biography of Flory Jagoda, who grew up in Bosnia, escaped the Holocaust, and kept Ladino song alive in America, carrying her family's Sephardic music across generations.

An ethnolinguistic study of the Judeo Arabic spoken by the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco, combining grammar, recorded texts, and a glossary with insight into the community's material culture and daily life.

A historical novel about Yonah Toledano, a young Jew who stays in Spain after the 1492 expulsion, hiding his identity as he travels the country and tries to keep his faith alive under the Inquisition.

Traces two Baghdadi Jewish families, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, who built commercial empires in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the mid nineteenth century through war, revolution, and the Communist takeover.

A detailed history of the Jews of Turkey and the Balkans from 1808 to 1945, covering Ottoman reforms, community institutions, demographic change, nationalism, and the Holocaust.

A novel that braids the story of a Berkeley student of Jewish and Muslim descent with a thousand years of Muslim watchmen guarding Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue and its Geniza, including Solomon Schechter's nineteenth century visit.

A 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.

Lucette 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.

A historical novel about Amalia Riques, a descendant of converso mapmakers in fifteenth century Spain, whose life spans the Inquisition, the 1492 expulsion, and the struggle to keep her Jewish identity.

Argues against the popular image of medieval Islamic Spain as a model of tolerance, presenting evidence of religious restrictions and violence faced by Christians and Jews under Muslim rule in al Andalus.

Through translations of Israel’s 1950 government inquiry into education in immigrant camps and extensive historical analysis, Zameret explores the political and social tensions surrounding the education of new immigrants, particularly Mizrahi Jews, and their lasting impact on Israeli society, including the emergence of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi political party Shas.