Books

Shahrzad Elghanayan offers readers the story of the life and death of her extraordinary grandfather Habib Elghanian, the first civilian executed by Khomeini’s regime in the early days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Contextualizing the lives of Jews in twentieth-century Iran, she starts by introducing Habib’s very large extended family, bringing us into their homes and businesses. She describes the weddings, the funerals, and especially the festive holidays like Nowruz, with their complex and sentimental rituals. She takes such care to describe this world because it will soon be utterly and completely destroyed.

A 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.

A broad survey by a leading scholar of Moroccan Jewry covering two millennia of Jewish history in Morocco, with chapters on communal institutions, religious law, mysticism, poetry, popular culture, and relations with Muslim neighbors.

A graphic novel grounded in archival research that follows Hans Frank, a German Jewish journalist who flees the Nazis and is interned in Vichy labor camps in the Algerian Sahara, revealing the little known Holocaust history of North Africa.

A counting book for toddlers, ages 0 to 2, by Ladino singer Sarah Aroeste that introduces numbers in Ladino through Sephardic objects such as oil candles, hand drums, and biscochos, with papercut illustrations.

"Lyn Julius provides a riveting account of a fascinating, but disgracefully overlooked subject. Anyone who really wants to understand the Middle East, Israel and world history, should read it." —Tom Gross, former Middle East correspondent, Sunday Telegraph; contributor to The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal

Argues that the near total disappearance of Jewish communities across the Arab world in the twentieth century resulted from nationalism, Islamism, and state persecution, tracing the exodus of nearly a million Jews and its legacy.

Victoria from girlhood in a crowded Jewish courtyard house in early twentieth century Baghdad through marriage, poverty, and family upheaval, a richly detailed portrait of Iraqi Jewish family and women's lives before the community's departure.

A study of Sephardic rabbis and thinkers from the Ottoman and Mediterranean world after the 1492 expulsion, showing how they responded to exile, modernity, and change through their writings on law, ethics, and community life.

Journalist 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.

A novel in linked stories by Gila Green following a Yemenite Jewish family across generations, from nineteenth century Yemen to pre state Palestine, modern Israel, and Canada.

An anthology of translated medieval Yemenite Jewish commentaries on the Torah, showing how Yemen's scholars blended Jewish tradition with philosophy, science, and Islamic thought.