Impostures
al-Ḥarīrī, NYU Press, 2020 An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation...
View ArticleSubcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory & Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany
Esra Özyürek, Stanford University Press, 2023 At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country’s Holocaust memory culture—not as...
View ArticleDiary of a Black Jewish Messiah The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David...
Alan Verskin, Stanford University Press, 2023 In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era...
View ArticleLand Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq
Bartle Bull, Grove Press, 2024 Land Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with...
View ArticleIncidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land
John LLoyd Stephens, Dover Publications, Republished in 2011 Perhaps best known for his discovery of the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, lawyer-turned-archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) was the...
View ArticleThe Phoebe A. Hearst Expedition to Deir el-Ballas: The Non-elite Cemeteries...
Victoria Jensen, Brill Publishing, 2025 This lavishly-illustrated book presents the unpublished excavations of the Hearst Expedition (1900–1901) at Deir el-Ballas, and thus makes a major contribution...
View ArticleJewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages
Louis Finkelstein, The Jewish theological seminary of America (New York), 1924 A comprehensive history of the constitutional activities of the European Jewish communities during the Middle Ages....
View ArticleKabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought...
Brian Ogren, New York University Press, 2021 In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he...
View ArticleThe Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam’s Mystical Tradition
Yamin Levy, MHC Press, 2023 Between the years 900 and 1300 C.E. the Jewish communities of Western Asia, North Africa, and Andalusia (Southern Spain) produced some of the most remarkable works in the...
View ArticleIraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern...
Edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha, Palgrave Macmillian Publishing, 2008 Iraq’s Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq’s once-vibrant,...
View ArticleThe Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited
David Lowenthal, Cambridge University Press, 2015 The past remains essential – and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man’s attitudes to his past, David...
View ArticleNurith Aviv’s Dual Identities and Dueling Languages
By Olivia Poust, Sapientia Language is a contradiction: At once home and foreign, a unifier and a divider, a liberator and an oppressor. This is the landscape that groundbreaking French filmmaker...
View ArticleSecrets of a Matzah Mantel
Like many adventurous historical quests, uncovering the American Sephardi Federation’s marvelous embroidery and textile collection happened by sheer chance. After overhearing a corridor conversation...
View ArticleNew at Bookhouse: The Music Room
The Music Room at Bookhouse, a collaborative space of the American Sephardi Federation and Centro Primo Levi. During the past two years, Bookhouse has become home to students and the public for...
View ArticleZack Youcha
Zack Youcha is the founder and Executive Director of Music is Culture (MiC), a nonprofit organization that sponsors, promotes, and publishes community-based music preservation efforts around the world....
View ArticleDaniel Elias
Daniel Elias is a founding member of the Elias Ladino Ensemble. The grandson of Rabbi David Elias Cassorla and the son of Joe Elias, he has been performing Ladino music since 1977. Dan learned the...
View ArticleMusic Room dummy post
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the...
View ArticleElya Assayag mines the American Sephardi Federation’s Textile Collection
This summer, Elya Assayag has been a fellow at Bookhouse and produced a catalog of the American Sephardi Federation’s textile collection. She was assisted by and trained Michael Fulgencio, who interns...
View ArticleNYPL Researcher Spotlight: Elya Assayag
We are delighted to repost this interview conducted by our friend and colleague Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the NYPL Dorot Jewish Division This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling...
View ArticleTextile dummy post
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the...
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