'The Holocaust and North Africa' Book Cover

The Holocaust and North Africa

Edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Award Winner

  • 2018: National Jewish Book Awards

    Finalist of the 2018 National Jewish Book Awards, Sephardic Culture category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
November 2018
360 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781503605435
Paperback ISBN: 9781503607057
Ebook ISBN: 9781503607064
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The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other.

The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim–Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored—and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.