Visiting scholar muses on life, memory and history

Why does a family save its papers?  How does the instinct for preservation defy wars, fire, and genocide; migration and conversion; family feuds; and even a stubborn disconnection from the past?  What do we preserve and what does it mean to those who find it?

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, CU-Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies’ 2015 Sondra D. Bender Visiting Scholar, will address those questions during a public lecture and book signing on Thursday, April 16, at 7 p.m. in University Memorial Center 235.

Stein, professor of history and Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, has researched and written extensively on Sephardic Jewry.

Her talk, “Family Papers: A Sephardi Journey through the Twentieth Century,” will use one family’s archive to answer those perennial questions. This story about a single family’s drive to collect and preserve is also the story of the intertwined histories of Sephardi Jewry and the 20^th century—a century of stunning tumult for this community.

Stein is described as one of the most important authors and scholars of her generation. Her most recent book, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, explores the history of a small community of Jews who lived in the M’zab valley in colonial French Algeria.

Joshua Schreier, of Vassar College, describes Saharan Jews, as “fascinating … extremely well-researched book, and imaginative.”

Benjamin C. Brower, from the University of Texas at Austin, writes that “this wonderfully told story breaks new ground in the history of North Africa ... and like the very best work of historians it gives rise to a critical interrogation of the present.”

In 2014, Stein and co-editor Julia Phillips Cohen published Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, which won a 2014 National Jewish Book Award, the largest prize for Jewish literature.

Stein’s previous books include A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi, co-edited with Aron Rodrigue and translated by Isaac Jerushalmi; Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, 52nd Annual New England Book Show Winner, Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest book prize in Jewish literature in the world; Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003 and Koret Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2004.

Stein, an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research, received her A.B. from Brown University in 1993 and her doctorate from Stanford University in 1999.

Her scholarship has ranged across the Yiddish- and Ladino-speaking diasporas and the British and French imperial, Russian, American, Ottoman and wider Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and North African settings, but is always engaged with the reasons for and manifestations of Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period.

For more information on the Program in Jewish Studies click here.

April 10, 2015