Monday, September 26, 2016
7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (ET)
PALMTN Gannett Auditorium
Event Type
Lecture
Contact
518-580-5590
Department
Special Programs
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=15026
Researching and
Narrating Morocco's Jewish Community
A lecture by Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, 2016
Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence with Yigal S. Nizri, Department for the Study
of Religion & Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of
Toronto.
In some ways
'Moroccan Jewry' no longer exists. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish
community left Morocco about 60 years ago, becoming scattered diasporic
communities. Yet 'Moroccan Jewry' did not become an anachronistic category and
it is still a meaningful, emotive, and sometimes contentious area of cultural
and intellectual production in Israel, Morocco, and to a lesser degree also in
France and Canada. Spatial separations, political confrontations, and methodological
and disciplinary differences have atomized the historiographies about the
Moroccan Jewry, creating epistemological islands.
Orit
Ouaknine-Yekutieli is the Dr. Sam and Edna Lemkin Career Development Chair in
Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her research
is focused on modern Morocco. Her MA thesis dealt with "The Never Ending
Story" of Thami al-Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakesh, and her PhD
dissertation was dedicated to "Artisans in the Medina of Fes –
Transformation Processes in Modern Morocco. Currently, Dr. Ouaknine-Yekutieli
deals with various aspects of the Vichy period in Morocco such as the intricate
links between corporatism, nationalism and colonialism, as well as with
identity politics. In addition she studies themes in Moroccan Caidalism; the
history of labor, work associations, and modernity in Morocco; and the
historiography about Moroccan Jewry. She also runs a project which deals with
the history of the Moroccan diaspora in Israel. Her articles appear in
scholarly journals such as Hespéris - Tamuda, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.