Sephardi Modernities is a transnational forum devoted to the study of Sephardi and Mizrahi histories, cultures, and experiences of modernity.
Launched in 2021 by Angy Cohen and Yuval Evri, the Sephardi Modernities Seminar Series has brought together scholars, artists, and activists to rethink Jewish modernity beyond dominant European frameworks and to foreground the histories, languages, memories, and political imaginations of Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Middle Eastern Jewish worlds.
Moving across archives, literature, political history, ethnography, religious life, music, memory, and contemporary debates, Sephardi Modernities opens a space for conversations that are both scholarly and collaborative.
We speak of Sephardi modernities in the plural because Jewish experiences in the Arab and Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were multiple and diverse, shaped by different relationships with European powers, local Muslim cultures, languages, and religious responses to change.
Over six years, the seminar has served as a laboratory for testing ideas, sharing perspectives, and developing a multifaceted approach to Jewish culture and history. It has mapped some of the central questions in Sephardi Studies while also asking how different Sephardi pasts might help us imagine different futures.