"Amateur Films and Sephardi Joy: A Global Spin," with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, University of California, Los Angeles

Annual Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Lecture In Jewish Civilization

"Amateur Films and Sephardi Joy: A Global Spin," with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Distinguished Professor and Viterbi Family Endowed Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

This talk explores family photographs and amateur films of Sephardi communities as a springboard from which to dive deeply into the everyday lives of southeastern European Jewish children, women, and men before the Holocaust. Scattered in private hands and a few archives around the world, family films capture Sephardi Jews living before their near-total extermination—and offer a moving and intimate glimpse of a lost milieu. In this presentation, Stein thinks about amateur film and photography as sites of interaction, shaped by intimate relationships between photographer and subject, which offer a unique “archive of joy” for the Sephardi world. Our site of entry is Ottoman Monaster [current day Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia], a city that has been Ottoman, Serbian, Bulgarian, Yugoslavian, German, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and North Macedonian over the last 120 years.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Distinguished Professor of History and Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. She is the author and editor of ten award winning books, including, most recently, Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (co-edited with Aomar Boum, Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022) and Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (FSG/Macmillan, 2019).

Cosponsored by Jewish United Fund

Cost: Free and open to the public.

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