THE CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES is co-sponsoring Scripting the Shoah: The Holocaust in Moroccan Official and Public Discourses, a lecture presented by Assistant Prof. Aomar Boum from the University of Arizona. This lecture will be held on Thursday, April 11th, 2013 at 5:30pm in 1210 Heller Hall.
Event: Scripting the Shoah: The Holocaust in Moroccan Official and Public Discourses. A lecture by Aomar Boum, assistant professor, School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religious Studies Program, University of Arizona
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2013
Time: 5:30pm
Location: 1210 Heller Hall, West Bank
Description:
Since the end of WWII, the Holocaust has been a prominent issue in Arab political and intellectual discourse. Although this issue has largely played out in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, it has also been an integral part of the North African debate in general and the Moroccan anti-Israeli and Zionist discussions in particular by the early years of Independence.
Using archival material and ethnographic interviews, Professor Boum will argue that North African and Moroccan perspectives about the Holocaust are part of what he calls the durable structures of acceptance and minimization. Using Bourdieu's habitus, Boum claims that Moroccan debates about the Holocaust have been framed and ossified in a context of social and political pre-dispositions of minimization of the Holocaust generating typological and conflicting scripts. Therefore, when individuals go against the grain and question this habitus, they are perceived as going against the principles of regular continuity that has governed the Arab/Moroccan critique of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
Dr. Aomar Boum was born and raised in the oasis of Mhamid, Foum Zguid (Province of Tata, southern Morocco). As a socio-cultural anthropologist, his main research focuses on how Moroccan Muslims remember, picture, and construct Jewishness and Moroccan Judaism. Dr. Boum has written a number of entries on the Jews of southern Morocco in The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World; he also published on ethnic folk dances and nationalism, traditional Islamic and modern education, as well as on hip-hop and youth dissent in Morocco, and youth culture.
He is currently working on a manuscript, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco, as well as journal articles on Moroccan Jews in national movies and the national debate regarding the status of Moroccan Jews in national newspapers.
Please see attached flyer.
Boumfinal.pdf
Sponsored by: The Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study.
