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 BookChildren’s & Young Adult Books
A Sweet Meeting on Mimouna Night
by Allison Ofanansky (Author), Rotem Teplow (Illustrator)A picture book for early grades in which Miriam, a Moroccan Jewish girl seeking flour for the Mimouna celebration after Passover, befriends Jasmine, a Muslim neighbor, and remembers her years later in Jerusalem.
Buy BookChildren’s & Young Adult Books
A Treasury of Sephardic Bedtime Stories
by Shmuel Blitz (Author) Rabbi David Sutton (Editor)A collection of illustrated stories for children about great Sephardic rabbis and sages and the values they taught, published for family reading in the ArtScroll Youth series.
Buy BookReligion & Philosophy
A Treasury of Sephardic Laws and Customs: The Ritual Practices of Syrian, Moroccan, Judeo-Spanish and Spanish and Portuguese Jews of North America
by Herbert C. Dobrinsky
Buy BookReligion & Philosophy
Abrabanel on Pirke Avot: A Digest of Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel’s “Nahalat Avot”
by Isaac Abrabanel (Author), Abraham Chill (Compiler)An English digest by Abraham Chill of Nahalat Avot, the commentary on Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) written by Don Isaac Abrabanel, the Spanish statesman and scholar, after the 1492 expulsion.
Buy BookHistory & Nonfiction
After the Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel
by Herbert S. LewisAn anthropological study of Yemenite Jews who came to Israel in the 1949 to 1950 airlift, examining their community life, adaptation, and relations with Israeli society.
Buy BookFiction & Literature
Aleppo Tales
by Haim SabatoA work of fiction by Israeli author Haim Sabato that gathers tales of the rabbis, scholars, and pious families of Jewish Aleppo, evoking the learning, faith, and community life of Syrian Jewry.
Buy BookHistory & Nonfiction
An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty
by Renée Levine MelammedA translation and study of Ladino verses by Bouena Sarfatty, who recorded life in Salonika's Jewish community and its destruction in the Holocaust in more than five hundred short poems.
Buy BookChildren’s & Young Adult Books
Apples and Pomegranates: A Rosh Hashanah Seder
by Rahel Musleah, Judy Jarrett GierA picture book that walks children through the Rosh Hashanah seder of Iraqi and other Sephardic and Mizrahi families, with the symbolic foods, blessings, stories, recipes, and crafts for each part.
Buy BookFiction & Literature
Auto-da-Fé
by Elias CanettiA novel by Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria, about Peter Kien, a reclusive Viennese scholar whose world collapses after he marries his scheming housekeeper; first published in German in 1935.
Buy BookHistory & Nonfiction
Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era
by Julia Phillips CohenA history of Ottoman Sephardic Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how they embraced Ottoman citizenship and imperial belonging during the era of reform.
Buy BookFiction & Literature
Benghazi–Bergen-Belsen
by Yossi SucaryBased on the wartime fate of Libya's Jews, the novel follows Silvana Hajaj and her family from their comfortable life in Benghazi through deportation by the Italian Fascist and Nazi authorities to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Buy BookHistory & Nonfiction
Between Foreigners and Shi‘is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and its Jewish Minority
by Daniel TsadikA history of Iran's Jewish minority in the nineteenth century, examining how Shi'i clerics, the Qajar state, and foreign powers and organizations shaped their legal status and daily life.