Associate Professor, Jewish Studies & History

(Fall 2024)

I am starting a new book project that examines the fragile and contradictory Jewish and Christian experiences of interwar citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It takes as its starting point the incomplete but dynamic political and social struggles of the imperial Ottoman milieu that were then transferred onto the mandatory, colonial, newly independent, and decolonizing states in the MENA. Boundaries around political membership, rights of citizenship, and collective identity were reshaped in the interwar period against the backdrop of rising nationalism, anticolonialism, and the tensions between Islamism and secularism, on the one hand, but also alongside new modes of liberalism, socioeconomic transformation, and urban participation, on the other. As a result, MENA communities navigated belonging and unbelonging with at times violent and tragic consequences for its Jewish and other non-Muslim communities.