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This talk explores family photographs and amateur films of Sephardi communities as a springboard from which to dive deeply into the everyday lives of southeastern European Jewish children, women, and men before the Holocaust. Scattered in private hands and a few archives around the world, family films capture Sephardi Jews living before their near-total extermination—and offer a moving and intimate glimpse of a lost milieu. In this presentation, Stein thinks about amateur film and photography as sites of interaction, shaped by intimate relationships between photographer and subject, which offer a unique “archive of joy” for the Sephardi world. Our site of entry is Ottoman Monastir [current day Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia], a city that has been Ottoman, Serbian, Bulgarian, Yugoslavian, German, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and North Macedonian over the last 120 years.Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Distinguished Professor of History and Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. She is the author or editor of ten books, including, most recently, Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, co-authored with Aomar Boum, 2023), and Family Papers, a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2019), named a Best Book of 2019 by The Economist and an Editor’s Choice Book by the New York Times Book Review. She is recipient of the 2025 Salo W. and Jeanette M. Senior Scholar Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research on the Jewish Experience from the University of Vienna, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple National Jewish Book Awards.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Thompson House de l’Université McGill, 3630 Rue McTavish, Montréal, QC H3A 1Y2, Canada, Montreal
