The “Arab Jews” lived in diverse cultural worlds across the Middle East and North Africa for over two thousand years, developing deep and enduring relationships with non-Jews. They were instrumental in shaping local, regional, and national cultures and politics. Are there Arab Jews today? Is Arab Jewishness still possible? Professor Nizri will discuss these questions within the context of these complex contemporary relationships.

Yigal S. Nizri is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on a monograph on the emergence of a Jewish Moroccan scribal culture in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of trans-Mediterranean Maghribi-Jewish diasporic networks.
Sponsor: Gail Bass

Jewish Sites in Western Ukraine
Filmmaker, photographer, and documentarian David Kaufman will discuss the precarious state of Jewish material culture and its largely forgotten illustrious pre-war Jewish history. Using his photographs of Jewish sites from many trips to Eastern Europe, he will describe the remnant of Jewish life in Lviv (Lvov) and Chernivtsi (Czernovitz), two large cities of western Ukraine that had once been major pre-WWII Jewish population centres.

David Kaufman’s work focuses on Jewish heritage sites. His large-scale photographs have been featured in eight solo exhibitions in Toronto and will be on display in 2019 at the Yiddish Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. He spent 18 years working at the CBC as a producer/director of The Journal and The Fifth Estate. He has made many independent films, including a feature documentary entitled Song of the Lodz Ghetto.
Sponsor: Ronnee Alter, in memory of her husband, Lloyd