Resilience Amidst the Ruins: Nfis Valley Endures After the Quake
A Moroccan scholar from the earthquake region, Aomar Boum, and his UCLA colleague Sarah A. Stein, provide more context on the Atlas Mountains communities hit by the temblor.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Aomar Boum is a cultural anthropologist at UCLA, where he is Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies and Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco, and the coauthor of The Holocaust and North Africa as well as A Concise History of the Middle East (2018) and co-author with Mohamed Daadaoui of the Historical Dictionary of the Arab Uprisings (2020). His most recent work is Undesirables, a Holocaust Journey to North Africa, a graphic novel of European refugees in Vichy camps in North Africa during the Second World War, with art by the late Nadjib Berber. Aomar was born and raised in the oasis of Mhamid, Foum Zguid in the Province of Tata, Morocco. He is a contributing editor at The Markaz Review.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. She is the author and editor of ten books, including, most recently, Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (co-edited by 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).