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Jewish Costumes in the Ottoman Empire (Osmanli’da Yahudi Kiyafetleri)
Silvyo Ovadya, Brill Publishing, 1999 Developed in Turkish-English descriptions, this book is about the history of the Jewish costumes between 11th -18th centuries. Furthermore, there are 63...
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The Muslim Discovery of Europe
Edward Lewis, W W Norton & Co Inc., 1985 In the year 1068, a cultivated Muslim historian wrote of the European peoples to the north: “They are more like beasts than like men…. Their temperaments...
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The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic
Stanford J. Shaw, NYU Press, October 1991 Over the course of the last 600 years, the existence of the Jews of western Europe was continually threatened. While many took refuge in the Eastern regions of...
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The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492
Translated and Edited by Peter Cole, Princeton University Press, 2007. Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry...
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Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History
Edited by Martin A. Cohen and Abraham J. Peck, University of Alabama Press, 1993. Multidisciplinary essays examining the historical and cultural history of the Sephardic experience in the Americas,...
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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...
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Subcontractors 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...
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Diary 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...
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Land 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...
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Incidents 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...
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The 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...
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Jewish 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....
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Kabbalah 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...
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The 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...
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Iraq’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,...
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The 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...
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Nurith 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...
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Secrets 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...
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New 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...
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Zack 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....
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