Aomar Boum - Near Eastern Languages & Cultures

Aomar Boum

Professor

E-mail: aboum@anthro.ucla.edu Phone: 310-825-9516

Aomar Boum is Professor and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Department of History and Department of Near eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. A historical anthropologist, Boum is interested in the place of religious and ethnic minorities such as Jews, Baha’is, Shias and Christian in post-independence Middle Eastern and North African nation states. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford University Press, 2013), co-editor of Wartime North Africa: A Documentary history, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2022) and author of the forthcoming graphic history: Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Education

PhD, University of Arizona (2006)

Publications

Articles

Books

2013 Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Articles

2014 Partners Against Anti-Semitism: Muslims and Jews Respond to Nazism in French North African Colonies, 1936-1940. The Journal of North African Studies 19(14):550-570.

2014 “The Virtual Genizah:” Emerging North African Jewish and Muslim Identities Online. International Journal of Middle East Studies46(3):597-601.

2013 Shoot-outs for the Nation: Football and Politics in Post-Colonial Algerian-Moroccan Relations. Soccer and Society 14(4):548-564.

2012 The ‘Jewish Question’ in Postcolonial Moroccan Cinema.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44(3):421-442. (co-authored with Oren Kosansky).

2012 Festivalizing Dissent in Morocco. Middle East Report 263(summer): 22-25

2012 The Performance of ‘Convivencia’: Communities of Tolerance and the Reification of Toleration. Religion Compass 6(3):174-184.

2012 ‘Sacred Week’: Re-Experiencing Jewish-Muslim Co-existence in Urban Moroccan Space. In Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-communal Relations around Holy Places, Glenn Bowman, ed. pp. 139-155. UK: Berghahn Books.

2012 Youth, Political Activism and the Festivalization of Hip-hop Music in Morocco. In Contemporary Morocco: State, Politics and Society under Mohammed VI, Daniel Zisenwine and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, eds., pp. 161-177. London: Routledge.

2011 “Southern Moroccan Jewry between the Colonial Manufacture of Knowledge and the Postcolonial Historiographical Silence. In Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, Emily Gottreich and Daniel Schroeter, eds, pp. 73-92. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

2011 Saharan Jewry: History, Memory and Imagined Identity. The Journal of North African Studies 16(3): 325-341.

2010 The Plastic Eye: The Politics of Jewish Representation in Moroccan Museums. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 75(1):49-77.

2010 From ‘Little Jerusalems’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism and Rural Jewish Emigration. The Journal of North African Studies 15(1):51-69.

2010 Schooling in the Bled: Jewish Education and the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Southern Rural Morocco, 1830-1962. Journal of Jewish Identities 3(1):1-24.

2008 The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39(2):205-223.