New Book: Sephardic Women’s Voices: Out of North Africa by Nina Lichtenstein

This is a groundbreaking work which brings to the attention of the English-reading public the important creative work of Jewish women authors of North African origin in France since decolonization. Nina Lichtenstein masterfully provides valuable historical background and cultural contextualization together with insightful literary analysis. Her engaging and often lyric style is at once both intimately conversational and academically intellectual. — Norman A. Stillman, Schusterman-Josey Professor of Judaic History Emeritus, University of Oklahoma. Author of The Jews of Arab Lands and Jews in Arab Lands in Modern Times.

Nina Lichtenstein’s book should be required reading in all Modern Jewish History courses because it fills the gap created by our almost exclusive emphasis on Ashkenazi history…A masterpiece! — Shulamit Reinharz, Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology and Founder/Director Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Author of One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life and twelve other books.

Engaging issues of exodus, marginality, memory and identity, she uncovers historical and fictional worlds for the English-speaking reader…A timely and necessary work. — Edna Aizenberg, Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies, Marymount Manhattan College. Coeditor of Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas.

The Jewish women’s voices we hear in this book, full of sensitive insights and delicate analysis, offer a staggering array of hybrid memories of migrations, displacements, and exiles from North Africa. — Yolande Cohen, FRSC (fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) Historian, Université du Québec, Montréal, Canada, author of Femmes Philanthropes.

It is almost a miracle that the voices of Sephardi Jews can still be heard today, having been rendered inaudible, with the passage of time, by colonizers, Maghreb or Mashreq nationalists, Ashkenazi Jews and French supporters of republican integration…Nina B. Lichtenstein has done this with talent and sensitivity. — Karim Miské, director of Jews and Muslims: Intimate Strangers and author of Arab Jazz

Nina Lichtenstein captures the vibrant voices of Jewish women writers who have lived in Muslim societies, revealing a completely different perspective that has little in common with the lives of the Eurocentric Ashkenazi narrative. — Gina Bublil Waldman, Co-founder and President of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa).