In this talk, Prof. Boum will develop the concept of aesthetic funds of knowledge to name the embodied, socially transmitted, and commercially usable repertoires through which Sephardic Moroccan Jews built aesthetic and sartorial competence across Debdou, France, and the Americas. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic and archival research in the Moroccan Jewish community in...
Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine examines how a cohort of young Jewish radicals from Eastern Europe helped reshape multiracial left-wing activism in Southern California. It traces their migration from the Russian Empire to Los Angeles and their involvement in labor and left-wing movements. Focusing especially on Boyle Heights, the book explores how the neighborhood’s diverse...
Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, and London to Calcutta—found themselves at the heart of global Jewish political discourse. As these intellectuals, politicians, activists, and communal elites navigated shifting political landscapes, some envisioned Palestine as a British dominion, leveraging imperial power for Jewish state-building, while others...
Since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza, difficult questions about when criticism of Israel or support for Palestine becomes antisemitic have moved to the center of public life and political debate. Amid growing antisemitism and fierce disagreement over what is or isn’t antisemitic, what is needed...
Contrary to what we might think at first, biblical and Second Temple Jewish literatures are filled with mathematical thought. The densest concentration of mathematical thought in these texts is found in writings concerned with priestly and priestly-adjacent matters such as temples and sacrifice. Embedded within larger narrative contexts, these instances of counting, calculation, and measurement...
The appearance of Yugoslavia on the political map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I confronted the culturally and linguistically diverse Jewish populations of the former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian imperial borderlands with the question of what it meant to be a “Yugoslav” Jewish community. From Zionism to Sephardism, Jewish activists negotiated the meanings,...