Please join us on Zoom on Wednesday, February 22 at 4pm (EST) for “Reckoning with Loss: Moroccan Jews Return in Literature and Film,” an informative and fascinating presentation on the accounting of Morocco’s emigrated Jewish population. Our speaker will be Indigenous Amazigh scholar, Dr. Brahim El Guabli, Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

Moroccan literature and film are finally accounting for the loss of the country’s emigrated Jewish population. Up until six decades ago, Morocco had the largest Jewish population in Tamazgha (the broader North Africa). Moroccan Jews lived with their Muslim co-citizens in both urban centers and remote villages, forming communities and forging bonds that are no longer available to the younger generations due to the departure of Moroccan Jews in the 1960s. Waves of migration between 1956 and 1973 took the majority of Moroccan Jews outside their country of origin, leaving a deep void in the places where they used to live.

Although the former presence of Moroccan Jews is the object of a vivid intergenerational memory, cultural production, for the most part, avoided any engagement with this crucial part of the country’s history until the last twenty years. However, a vibrant and increasingly rich literature and film are finally rising from Morocco’s Jewish-Muslim past, accounting for the departed Jewish community. This talk will contextualize the return of Moroccan Jews in literature and film within a larger context of reckoning with the country’s past. Particularly, the talk will show how literature and film are creating space for a novel Jewish-Muslim history in Morocco.

We look forward to your participation in this event. Please RSVP via our website if you plan on attending.