Yearning for Yemen: Migration and Memory

Yemeni Jewish migration to Palestine/Israel began as early as the 1880s, and continued until recent years. Throughout this period, Yemeni Jews employed strategies to maintain connected with Yemen, and to resist assimilation, while also working to integrate into Israeli society. This lecture interrogates two kinds of sources, Yemeni Jewish cultural practice and immigrant memoirs, to ask what these sites of memory can tell us about Muslim-Jewish relations and Yemeni Jewish identity in Yemen, and Yemeni Jewish life in Israel after migration. The lecture is part of the Averroës Lecture Series on Jewish Communities in Muslim Lands, sponsored by CNES.



Ari Ariel is a historian of Jewish communities in the Arab world and Mizrahi communities in Israel. He received his doctorate from Columbia University and has taught at NYU, Bryn Mawr College, Boston University and now at the University of Iowa, where he is a lecturer in History and International Studies. He is the author of Jewish-Muslim Relations and Migration from Yemen to Palestine in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Brill, 2014), as well as many articles on Yemeni Jewish history, migration and foodways.

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Duration: 00:57:53