Finalist New Mexico-Arizona
Book Award for Nonfiction
Sephardic Women's Voices: Out of North Africa
Sephardic Women’s Voices traces the lives and writings of contemporary Jewish women born in North Africa and their migration to France with the meaning of their Sephardic heritage, their roles as women, and their experience of exile.
More about this project's genesis in the interview at bottom of page!
Nina Lichtenstein's book should be required reading...because it fills the gap created by our almost exclusive emphasis on Ashkenazi history...The story is fascinating...A masterpiece!
~Shulamit Reinharz, Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology and Founder/Director Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University
In this crucial text, Nina Lichtenstein illuminates the shrouded histories and complicated religious, political, and cultural identities of seven 20th century Sephardic women writers born in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. By placing them in the context of the little-known Jewish world of the Maghreb, Lichtenstein offers valuable perspectives on the Jewish experience of diaspora, memory, identity, and the search for home.
~Ruth Knafo Setton, author of On the Road to Fez
A timely and necessary work.
~Edna Aizenberg, Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies, Marymount Manhattan College. Coeditor Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas.
Nina Lichtenstein masterfully provides valuable historical background and cultural contextualization together with insightful literary analysis. Her engaging and often lyrical 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.
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…A necessary story, because it speaks of a time when it was possible to be altogether Jewish, Arabic, and Berber, without having to choose one part of oneself over another.
~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.
~Gina Bublil Waldman, Co-founder and President of
JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa)
I am very pleased to be able to support Nina Lichtenstein on the release of her book which takes, in the context of gender studies, an original place in the sociology of the literature of the Maghreb.
~Guy DUGAS, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3 - France
You can learn a little more about how this project came about by checking out the
Hadassah Brandeis Institute Blog
where I was interviewed recently