ABOUT THE EVENT

This panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah of University of Groningen, will feature experts on the Jewish communities of Iran, Yemen, and Morocco. After providing an overview of the history of Jewish life in the Middle East, Dr. Goldstein-Sabbah will facilitate a fascinating discussion that will explore the distinctive aspects of these ancient Jewish communities and consider how they fit into the broader tapestry of contemporary Jewish life.

Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah
Assistant Professor Middle Eastern Studies, University of Groningen
Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. She is specialised in the modern history of Middle Eastern and North African Jewry and her research considers how, disparate Jewish communities interacted with each other through philanthropic, business, and religious networks. She is the author of numerous scholarly and trade publications including her recent monograph Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism (Brill, 2021).

Daniella L. Farah, PhD
Visiting Assistant Professor of History & Jewish Studies
University of California, Irvine
Dr. Daniella Farah (PhD Stanford University, 2021) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. As a historian of the Jews of the modern Middle East and North Africa, her research focuses on Jewish-Muslim relations, national belonging, and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries Iran and Turkey. Her current book project, Jewish Belonging in Modern Iran: Education, the Press, and Integration, explores how Iran’s Jews leveraged education, the press, and nationalistic sentiment to claim belonging to the nation.

Ari Ariel
Associate Professor of Instruction, History and International Studies,
Director of International Studies, University of Iowa
Ari Ariel is an associate professor of Instruction in History and International Studies at the University of Iowa. His work focuses on Middle Eastern Jews in the Arab world and Israel, and he is particularly interested in migration, ethnic and national identity, and foodways.

Daniel J. Schroeter
Professor and Amos S. Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History, Department of History, University of Minnesota
Daniel J. Schroeter is the Amos S. Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.  Schroeter has written extensively on the history and historiography of Morocco and the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East in premodern and modern times. His works include The Sultan’s Jew:  Morocco and the Sephardi World and  Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886; both books were translated to Arabic and published in Morocco. He is co-editor of Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2011), and is currently co-authoring a book on Morocco and the Holocaust: The Story of King Mohammed V Saving the Jews during World War II