The sixth edition of the seminar explored the concept of diaspora as a lens for understanding the modern and contemporary Sephardi world. By engaging with the histories and experiences of Sephardi communities across imperial, colonial, and post-colonial landscapes, the series examined questions of multiple belongings, identity formation, and cultural transmission. It addressed the diversity of modern Sephardi Jewish experiences by considering diaspora as shaped by histories of migration and return, continuity and rupture, belonging and exclusion. 

Through theoretical and historical reflections alongside ethnographic research, our guest speakers discussed how modern and contemporary Sephardi subjects have grappled with their position between centers and peripheries, often redefining notions of home, tradition, and modernity.

January 26, 2026

Devin Naar (University of Washington)

Thinking with Diaspora: A Multi-Rooted Approach to the Sephardic Jewish Experience 

In this session, Devin Naar explored the theme of diaspora through the concept of poly-enracinement, or multi-rootedness, drawing on the work of Sephardic French thinker Edgar Morin and on the history of Ladino-speaking Jews from Salonika. Rather than understanding diaspora through the familiar opposition between a single homeland and its dispersion, the lecture proposed multi-rootedness as a way to think about overlapping, simultaneous, and sometimes competing forms of belonging.

The talk traced how Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman world articulated attachments to multiple homelands: Jerusalem, Sepharad, Salonika, the Ottoman Empire, the Levant, and later the United States. Through examples from Ladino sources, immigration documents, newspapers, poetry, memoirs, and communal debates, Naar showed how these affiliations were not merely emotional or symbolic. They also had concrete political consequences, shaping questions of nationality, citizenship, racial classification, legal status, and communal recognition.

Salonika emerged throughout the session as a central case: a “mother city,” a rabbinic and cultural center, a patria madre, and later a lost homeland mourned after the upheavals of the Balkan Wars, World War I, migration, and the Holocaust. The lecture also examined how Sephardic Jews in the United States negotiated their place within American society and within a Jewish world often dominated by Ashkenazi categories, sometimes claiming Levantine, Spanish, Ottoman, or Sephardic identities in strategic ways.

The session invited us to rethink diaspora beyond nation-state frameworks and beyond linear models of origin and dispersal. Multi-rootedness offers instead a language of complexity, connection, mobility, and layered belonging—one especially useful for understanding Sephardic histories across the Mediterranean, the Levant, Europe, and the Americas.

February 23, 2026

Aomar Boum (UCLA and the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco)

Fashioning Diaspora: Moroccan Jewish Histories in Los Angeles 

The second session was led by Aomar Boum who reconstructed the history and migration trajectory of the Marciano family, the founders of the clothing brand Guess, as part of the formation of the Moroccan Jewish diaspora in the United States. Focusing on post–World War II migration to North America and the emergence of communities in cities such as New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, Prof. Boum examined how Moroccan Jews negotiated Sephardi identity and economic participation through work in the fashion industry. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research, he introduced the concept of “sartorial funds of knowledge”, embodied and socially transmitted repertoires of expertise that Moroccan immigrants mobilized through family networks and community ties. 

March 5, 2026
Andre Levy (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
From Morocco, Elsewhere: Jewish–Muslim Entanglements Through the Lens of Cultural Intimacy

André Levy offered a compelling rethinking of the Moroccan Jewish experience that challenges dominant analytical frameworks in diaspora and Jewish modernity studies. Drawing on his ethnographic work, he questioned the traditional center–periphery model, proposing instead a multi-centered configuration in which Morocco can be understood as a Jewish center, and even Israel as a “diaspora of Hebrew,” rather than its unquestioned core.

A particularly insightful contribution was his use of cultural intimacy as an alternative to idealized notions of coexistence. This framework allows us to account not only for harmonious relations between Jews and Muslims, but also for tensions, ambivalences, and deeply embedded forms of mutual understanding. In our conversation with Levy, we also discussed categories such as “Sephardi,” “Mizrahi,” or “Arab Jew,” highlighting the gap between scholarly classifications and the situated ways individuals refer to themselves (Moroccan, Meknesi, Tangawi, and so on). This reflection speaks to a broader theoretical debate on how to account for the diversity of non-European Jewish identities without reducing them to fixed or homogenizing frameworks.

Finally, the session explored how migration and diasporic conditions reshape Moroccan Jewish identity, particularly in contexts such as Israel and the Americas, where more rigid dichotomies (religious/secular, tradition/modernity) tend to prevail. In contrast, the Moroccan case foregrounds alternative modernities characterized by ambiguity, overlapping forms of belonging, and the use of the Jewish past as a resource for activists, minorities, and marginalized groups in Morocco to imagine diversity and equality in the present.

April 16, 2026

Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

Between Israel and Morocco: Jewish Moroccan Cultural Displays in the Homeland and the Diaspora 

In this session, Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli explored Jewish-Moroccan cultural production between Israel and Morocco, tracing how Moroccan Jewish heritage has been displayed, reimagined, and politically mobilized across homeland and diaspora. Beginning with the rupture caused by the mass departure of Jews from Morocco in the mid-twentieth century, the talk followed two interconnected trajectories: the marginalization and later revival of Moroccan Jewish culture in Israel, and the renewed visibility of Jewish heritage in Morocco through museums, cinema, restoration projects, digital archives, and official narratives of pluralism.

Rather than approaching culture as a static inheritance, Ouaknine-Yekutieli examined music, ritual, performance, language, pilgrimage, food, memory, and heritage sites as practices actively made, negotiated, and contested. In Israel, Moroccan Jewish culture has moved from repression and folklorization to a vibrant field of artistic creation, political assertion, and intergenerational repair. In Morocco, Jewish presence has become increasingly symbolic yet culturally resonant, incorporated into national narratives of diversity while still marked by unresolved histories of migration, marginalization, and rupture.

The session invited us to think of diaspora not as a simple separation between homeland and exile, but as a dynamic field of circulation. Through returns, heritage trips, artistic collaborations, religious pilgrimages, digital archives, and everyday practices, Moroccan Jews continue to reshape both Israeliness and Moroccanness. The discussion also opened broader questions for Mizrahi studies, suggesting that Moroccan Jewish experiences can help expand the field beyond Israeli sociological frameworks toward transnational approaches to memory, mobility, heritage politics, and post-diasporic belonging.