(E)motional Maps: Affective Geographies among Jewish Migrants from North Africa and the Middle East 

The migration of Jews from Muslim-majority countries between the 1940s and the 1970s—the departure of roughly 900,000 individuals from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) lands—was one of the most significant demographic transformations in modern Jewish history.¹ Migration is rarely just the movement of a population across space; it is almost always, especially when occurring on a massive scale, a disruption, a recalibration, and a profound reimagining of the self and the migrating group in relation to space. As such, it is deeply emotional and the cartographies it generates are encoded with affect.

Thus far, much of the emotional complexity of these migrations is often flattened by conflicting nationalist narratives. In the early Zionist discourse and Israeli state historiography, Jewish migration from Arab countries was presented as part of an epic return to the ancestral homeland—a teleological process of ‘aliyah, a concept rooted in biblical tradition denoting the spiritual and national return of Jews to the Land of Israel. In the modern era, it also came to signify a redemptive migration from non-Western countries—particularly for Jews from decolonizing Asian and African states—whose ‘aliyah was framed as a rescue from political, social, and cultural marginalization in “lands of distress.”² This view emphasized religious longing and political danger that cast many Asian and African states in the post-colonial period in an increasingly hostile and unstable light. Such was the case of Ethiopian Jews, whose dramatic emigration was similarly framed as a rescue of a Jewish remnant from a “land of distress.” Operation Moses (1984-1985) brought around 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel via Sudan in a covert airlift, while Operation Solomon in 1991 evacuated nearly 15,000 more in under thirty-six hours. These operations were celebrated in Israeli discourse as urgent, redemptive acts of national and spiritual salvation, reinforcing the narrative of ‘aliyah as both rescue and ethnonational repatriation.³

Concurrently, Palestinian and pan-Arab intellectuals have advanced a counter-narrative, arguing that Jewish emigration was not voluntary but the result of Zionist provocation, Western imperial interference, and local Arab regimes’ complicity. Abbas Shiblak,⁴ one of the earliest proponents of this construction, claimed that Zionist agents planted bombs in Jewish areas of Baghdad in order to terrorize Jews into fleeing to Israel—a view that became known as the “terror thesis.” These opposing narratives—Zionist redemption versus Arab betrayal—were mobilized to fuel emotionally charged nationalist debates about migration, reducing the complex and varied experiences of Jewish departure to tools of political discourse.

Such historiographic frameworks, though ideologically divergent, often converge in their simplification of personal emotions within large cartographies. Both tend to erase the agency and affective worlds of the migrants themselves. 

It was not until recent decades that scholars began to utterly interrogate the multiplicity of Jewish migration experiences and examine how emotions—particularly nostalgia, fear, pride, and shame—shaped the ways Jews navigated their exits, remembered their pasts, and redrew their affective geographies.⁵ By understanding the emotional charge embedded in these migrations, as we hope to show in this issue, we obtain an essential point of departure for rethinking how geography is imagined, felt, and remembered by displaced populations.

This issue, (E)motional Maps: Affective Geographies among Jewish Migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, explores the emotional dimensions of Jewish migration from the MENA lands (and Ethiopia) through affective and spatial lenses. It is situated within a constellation of recent interdisciplinary turns—not only the “emotional turn” but also the “spatial turn” and the “mobilities turn.” Drawing on these frameworks, the contributors to this issue reconsider how migration stories are narrated, remembered, and silenced, and how these processes are spatialized through texts, artworks, embodied memory, and performance. 

From Physical Cartographies to Emotional Maps

The “spatial turn” of the 1970s reoriented social theory toward the centrality of space in human life.⁶ As Yi-Fu Tuan famously observed, space becomes place as it is endowed with meaning, a process inherently tied to emotion. With the spatial turn in the 1970s, the study of migration in the humanities and social sciences transmogrified from investigating mere physical movement between places to exploring deeply personal and emotive journeys intricately woven with perceptions, narratives, utopias, and cherished memories.⁷ The subsequent “mobilities turn” further enriched this discussion, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between human movement across space and material cultures.⁸ Most recently, the “emotional turn” has shifted our understanding of emotion from an external reaction to a core part of the human experience.⁹

Thus, in recent years, it has become widely acknowledged that migration is not merely a physical act of displacement but also a poignant emotional voyage. This journey severs individuals from their homelands and elicits a spectrum of emotional responses, such as nostalgia and forgetting, that are significant in community-building processes. Until recently, however, there has been a tendency in the social sciences “to overlook emotions in migration studies generally […] something of a gap in mutual knowledge and recognition between the fields of migration studies and emotion studies.”¹⁰ In this context, continue Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar, “the central question to be addressed […] is what the study of emotion adds to our understanding of ‘migrant experience’; and how transnational migration studies, in turn, contribute to the social science debate on emotions.”¹¹ Rather than treating emotions as subjective ephemera, scholars who embrace the emotional turn understand affect as historically and culturally mediated and bound up with political, social as well as spatial structures.¹²

Inspired by this promising dialogue between geography and migration studies and emotion studies, we aim to examine how Jewish migrants from MENA and Ethiopia, now living in Israel, Europe, and the Americas, recall and interpret their mobility experiences. Our analysis centers on the ways emotional geographies are both constituted by and constitutive of memory, whether articulated through collective narratives or conveyed in individual recollections. In so doing, we aim to trace and delineate “mental maps”—or, more precisely, “(e)motional maps”—that capture the emotionally charged memories embedded in migration experiences. 

“Mental Maps”

In the second half of the twentieth century, coinciding with a profound debate between regional primacy and thematic primacy in the philosophy of human geography, new ideas of humankind’s understanding of its environment emerged. In 1960, the urban planner Kevin Lynch broached the novel theory of different geographical approaches toward the same environment by different people and laid the foundations of the idea of “mental maps.”¹³ Mental maps, Lynch advises, are “the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual.”¹⁴ An environmental image emerges through the dynamic interplay between the physical environment—which offers distinctions and spatial relationships—and the observer, who actively selects, organizes, and imbues these elements with meaning.¹⁵ About a decade later, Peter Gould and Rodney White developed the idea into a more comprehensive framework: the study of a “geography of perception”—of the mental images we form of places, which are inevitably shaped by selective channeling of information.¹⁶ The theoretical basis of mental maps influenced scholars, artists, authors and politicians in many ways.¹⁷ In an interesting study of mental maps in various historic periods and cultures in the context of the Middle East, for example, Angelika Hartman-Giessen finds that attempts to map people’s feelings have been implemented in urban planning practices,¹⁸ while other scholars, re-examining the spatial experience of boundary zones and immigration, claim that geographic conditions and mental states have a major effect on cognitive mapping.¹⁹

Moreover, recent work in neuroscience and anthropology has redefined mapping itself—no longer a static representation of space but an active, embodied, and emotional process. As Matthew Schafer and Daniela Schiller argue, humans construct “cognitive maps” that encode not just spatial but also social and affective information that are attached to space.²⁰ These maps, located in the hippocampus and related structures, support the navigation of both physical environments and relational spaces such as social hierarchies and memories.

Indeed, mapping is always more than measurement. As ֹElise Olmedo and Sebastien Caquard argue in their study of Rwandan exile narratives,²¹ geolocated cartographies emphasize explicit spatial markers, while “sensitive mapping” or “dislocated cartographies” aim to express the emotional interiors of stories—the “guts,” not just the “skin,” of a narrative. In this vein, mental mapping and its various definitions and dimensions contributes to MENA Jewish studies, revising our understanding of ethnicity and migration in that regard.²²

This Issue

This issue brings together a variety of studies that explore how emotions, memory, and space are connected in the context of Jewish migration from the MENA lands and beyond, thereby generating a range of often-overlooked mental geographies and affective mappings of displacement and belonging. They center on non-elite migrants, women, artists, and religious minorities—to yield a more complete and diverse understanding of Jewish migration. A unifying methodological approach across the diverse case studies presented here involves the construction of alternative mappings of personal and communal experience—mappings that diverge from formal geopolitical or institutional cartographies.

These alternatives often arise from experiences of exclusion or nostalgia and challenge the boundaries drawn by states and official histories. Haim Bitton’s study of Moroccan troubadours in Israel uncovers a counter-map within Israeli society. As tens of thousands of Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, most were resettled in peripheral “development towns” or transit camps that exposed them to cultural marginalization and racialized stigma. The “sung” mental map that Bitton sketches partitions Israeli space into experienced places of marginality and power: transit camps, peripheral towns, and urban slums for Mizrahi (“Oriental”) immigrants versus the affluent urban centers of the privileged “veteran” Ashkenazim.

Emotion is not simply a reaction to place; it actively constitutes it. Affective geographies thus explore how emotions and places shape one another. Fattal-Kuperwasser’s article contributes a crucial third dimension: the place of narration as integral to the interplay between memory and cartography. By closely comparing two memoirs by Baghdadi Jews who emigrated to London, she illustrates how their present diasporic context profoundly influences the way they reconstruct the landscapes of Baghdad and, particularly, the spatial experiences of the Farhud—an eruption of violence that targeted the Jews of Baghdad on June 1-2, 1941. The article highlights these memoirists as active agents who shape historical and spatial narratives through their distinct choices of language, audience, and emotional expression.

Fattal-Kuperwasser’s analysis thus opens the door to a broader reflection on how memoirs operate as emotionally charged cartographies—or what some scholars refer to as “mental maps.” These are shaped not only by memory and spatial experience but also by key narrative choices, including language, audience, and culturally specific emotional frameworks. As intimate as the memoir form may be, it is always written with a readership in mind. This communicative function necessitates strategic decisions, the most immediate of which, in Kuperwasser’s case study, is the choice between Arabic and English. Such decisions inevitably shape both the content and the emotional tone of the narrative. Authors may intuitively select which emotions to express, suppress, or amplify based on what they believe will resonate with their intended audience. These dynamics reflect Carol and Peter Stearns’s useful distinction between “emotions”—the felt experiences of individuals or groups—and “emotionology,” the social norms and cultural expectations governing the appropriate expression of emotion (Stearns and Stearns 1985, 813).²³

This relation is also relevant in Aviad Moreno’s and Magdalena Kozłowska’s case studies as well, although they explore two different types of sources: the latter centering on letters and the former on retrospective texts. Moreno’s essay on Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli, a Moroccan-born Jew who embraced the anti-Zionist “ultra-Orthodox,” Ashkenazi Musar (ethicist) movement, further entangles the interplay between migration and spiritual emotions. By tracing Elgrabli’s biblical exegesis in Tumat Yesharim, Moreno maps the evolution of the rabbi’s spatial imaginaries as they develop alongside his ethical and spiritual transformation. Elgrabli’s narrative, composed in 1980s Israel, charts a journey from Meknes to Jerusalem—through Europe and the Americas—not to affirm a singular return to the Holy Land, but to articulate a diasporic spiritual path shaped by divine providence, ethical discipline, and communal responsibility. As Moreno argues, Elgrabli challenges both Zionist narratives of return and the inward-focused Musar tradition, offering instead a “layered map of spiritual becoming—rather than homecoming.” 

Kozlowska explores the microhistory of Rebecca Goldman—a Polish Jew who taught for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU)—and the journey she took from her hometown of Kalisz, Poland, to Paris, where she attended the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), and finally to Beirut, following her appointment by the AIU as a teacher in the Lebanese port city. In particular, Kozlowska compares Goldman’s reports to the AIU board in Paris with reports on Goldman’s work from the headmasters of the schools where she worked to the same board. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of cultural dissonance, which Kozłowska attributes to the shifting cognitive and affective frameworks—or “mental maps”—that Goldman developed across different stages of her life. 

Kozlowska's work narrative reminds us that emotional cartographies shift across historical contexts and geographies and take shape through diverse expressive forms. As Alon Tam shows in his contribution, emotions are conducive to such broadening and deepening, a process that allows a collective memory, alternative “to the hegemonic one espoused by Egyptian Jews in Israel,” to rise to the surface. Tam’s article on Egyptian Jews in Israel examines a contemporary example of “memory cartography”: an online social-media group titled “From Egypt and Back.” This Facebook group, created by descendants of Egyptian Jews now living in Israel, has become a vibrant archive of recollections, photographs, and discussions about life in mid-twentieth-century Cairo and Alexandria. The group, Tam argues, has “created an alternative to the dominant narrative in Egyptian Jewish collective memory”—a nostalgia-intensive narrative of elite cosmopolitanism that emphasizes a lost golden age and the trauma of exile (a narrative that conveniently dovetails with Zionist tropes of rescue). The maps his analysis presents, speckled with ordinary cafés, synagogues, and local slang and songs, remain vividly “immersed in Egyptian-Arabic culture” rather than in the Francophone milieu of the pre-1950s Jewish elite in that country. 

In her article, Hadas Shabat-Nadir examines the memoir Farewell, Babylon by Iraqi-Jewish writer Naïm Kattan. After leaving Baghdad in 1947, Kattan wrote his memoir thirty years later in Montreal, where he reconstructed the world of his youth through narrative. His reflections clearly map the experience of a Jewish community that had largely vanished due to mass emigration and political upheaval. Writing about the city becomes a way of projecting memory onto a place that no longer exists as he once knew it. The emotional landscape of the memoir is shaped by a longing for a cosmopolitan past marked by literary and cultural life, yet it is constantly interrupted by memories of violence—especially the traumatic events of the Farhud, as also explored in Fattal-Kuperwasser’s work. Shabat-Nadir shows how Kattan constructs an imagined Baghdad from the dual perspective of a nostalgic former resident and a disillusioned exile.

Gilat Brav bases her contribution on the memoirs of nine “francisés” Tunisian Jews who moved from Tunis to Paris during the second half of the twentieth century. By examining representations of domestic spaces in these writings, Brav reveals how emigrants emotionally and spatially map their experiences of displacement and resettlement. Central to these emotional cartographies is the idea of home as a fluid, emotionally charged site—what Guy Miron calls a “liquid place of human existence”—that extends from intimate family interactions to broader community spaces.²⁴ Brav highlights how, in these memoirs, domestic space is often anchored emotionally by maternal maps, reflecting deeper shifts in the emotional and communal dimensions of Jewish life as it moved from the familiar context of Tunis to the unfamiliar landscapes of Paris.

If texts and memories map migration in imaginative ways, so do bodies and cultural performances. Hannah Kosstrin’s article on Ethiopian-Israeli dance offers a striking example of emotional geographies embodied in physical movement by members of a community whose voice has long been overshadowed by dominant establishment narratives. Kosstrin examines the choreography of Dege Feder, an Ethiopian-born Jewish dancer who migrated to Israel as a child in Operation Moses (1984). Feder’s contemporary dance works explicitly grapple with the Ethiopian Jewish journey and its aftermath. Kosstrin argues that dance—the physical performance of movement—can function as a form of mapping that transcends traditional cartography. She asks, “What if we identify diaspora through the body, instead of through [physical] maps?” By “grounding the emotional map of migration within the body,” Kosstrin “makes corporeal, temporal, and artistic interventions” into how we understand affective geographies. In Feder’s dances, the history of displacement is not illustrated by lines on a map but is rather inscribed in gestures, rhythms, and physical techniques that make different sense of one’s memory of home and relocation. For example, Feder incorporates eskesta—a traditional Ethiopian shoulder dance—into modern dance tableaux that depict stories of exile and homecoming. The distinctive shoulder shimmies and torso undulations of eskesta carry cultural memory; they index an African past even as Feder performs them on Israeli stages.

Finally, in this special issue, we emphasize the critical role that emotions, memories, and creative mapping play in reshaping our understanding of Jewish migrations from North Africa and the Middle East and beyond. Central to our exploration has been the idea that geographic displacement involves more than physical movement; it escalates into an emotional, symbolic, and deeply personal process that generates alternative cartographies—mental and affective maps reflecting individual and collective experiences. Ewa Tartakowsky’s project offers a valuable extension of this conceptual approach, applying it to an East European Jewish context through an innovative pedagogical practice that she terms “creative cartography.” Tartakowsky’s initiative, implemented in a course at Sciences Po Paris, invites students to engage emotionally and intellectually with the complexities of Central and East European Jewish history, specifically through Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. By having students map subjective experiences, emotional landscapes, and spatial perceptions derived from Tokarczuk’s narrative, Tartakowsky underscores the potential of creative cartography as both a scholarly and an artistic method. In bridging Tartakowsky’s work with our special issue, we foreground the transformative potential of emotional and imaginative cartographic practices. Tartakowsky’s project thus complements and enriches our collective endeavor by illustrating how affective mapping techniques can be effectively integrated into pedagogical settings, fostering deeper insights into the intricate connections between geography, memory, and emotion in diverse Jewish historical contexts.

* This issue is the result of a collaborative initiative led by the Communities and Mobilities Research Hub at the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies(MALI), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the direction of Aviad Moreno, in collaboration with Piera Rossetto, Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. We gratefully acknowledge the support of MALI and the contribution of the Rita Levi Montalcini Program for Young Researchers (Bando 2020). We also thank Zohar Gannot for creating the mental maps featured in this volume.

¹ Malka Hillel Shulewitz, The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (London: Continuum, 2000), 139.

² Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (London: Routledge, 2004); Tamar Katriel, “The Rhetoric of Rescue: ‘Salvage Immigration’ Narratives in Israeli Culture,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, eds. Raʼanan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 185-203.

³ Steven Kaplan and Chaim Rosen, “Ethiopian Jews in Israel,” American Jewish Year Book 1994 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994), 59-109; Shalva Weil, “The Complexities of Conversion among the ‘Felesmura,’” in Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement, eds. Eloi Ficquet, Ahmed Hassen Omer, and Thomas Osmond (Addis Ababa: Centre français des études éthiopiennes, 2016), 421-431.

⁴ Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews (London: Al Saqi Books, 1986).

⁵ Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); André Levy and Alex Weingrod, eds., Homelands and Diasporas. Holy Lands and Other Places (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

⁶ Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]); Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

⁷ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Boston: The MIT Press, 1960); Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience; Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008).

⁸ Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1 no. 1 (2006): 1-22; Caroline Brettell, “Conceptualizing Migration and Mobility in Anthropology: An Historical Analysis,” Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration 2, no. 1 (2018): 1-25; Paul Basu and Simon Coleman, “Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures,” Mobilities 3, no.3 (2008): 313-330.

⁹ Joseph Ben Prestel, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Karen Barkey, “Reimagining the Emotional Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 2 (2021): 457-472; Derek J. Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023).

¹⁰ Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar, “Emotions on the Move; Mapping the Emergent Field of Emotion and Migration,” Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015): 73-80; 74.

¹¹ Boccagni and Baldassar, “Emotions on the Move,” 73-74.

¹² Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Ben Prestel, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910; Barkey, “Reimagining the Emotional Turn.”

¹³ Lynch, Image of the City.

¹⁴ Ibid., 4.

¹⁵ Luis da Vinha, “Charting Geographic Mental Maps in Foreign Policy Analysis: A Literature Review,” Human Geographies 6, no. 1 (2012): 5-17, 6; Lynch, Image of the City, 6. 

¹⁶ Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

¹⁷ Zef Segal and Bram Vannleuwenhuyze, eds., Motion in Maps, Maps in Motion. Mapping Stories and Movement through Time (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

¹⁸ Angelika Hartman-Giessen, “Mental Maps, Cognitive Mapping and Mental Space in Context of Near and Middle Eastern Societies,” in Authority, Privacy and Public Order in Islam—Orientalia Lovaniensia Analetica 148, eds. Barbara Michalak-Pikulska and Andrzej Pikulski (Peeters: Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA, 2006), 329-339; Emir Galilee, “A Nomadic State of Mind: Mental Maps of Bedouins in the Negev and Sinai During the Time of the Ottomans, the British Mandate, and the State of Israel,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 6, no. 4 (2019): 1-13; Yodan Rofè, “Mapping People’s Feelings in a Neighborhood: Technique, Analysis and Applications,” Planum. The Journal of Urbanism 9, no. 2 (2004): 2-27; Shlomie Hazam and Daniel Felsenstein, “Terror, Fear and Behavior in the Jerusalem Housing Market,” Urban Studies 44, no. 13 (2007): 2529-2546.

¹⁹ Breanna Bishop, Eric C. J. Oliver, and Claudio Aporta, “Co-producing Maps as Boundary Objects: Bridging Labrador Inuit Knowledge and Oceanographic Research,” Journal of Cultural Geography 39, no. 1 (2022): 55-89; ֹElise Olmedo and Sebastien Caquard, “Mapping the Skin and the Guts of Stories: A Dialogue between Geolocated and Dislocated Cartographies,” Cartographica 57, no. 2 (2022): 127-146.

²⁰ Matthew Schafer and Daniela Schiller, “Navigating Social Space,” Neuron 100, no. 2 (2018): 476-491.

²¹ Caquard and Olmedo, “Mapping the Skin and the Guts of Stories.”

²² Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, Devenir métropolitain: Politique d’intégration et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en métropole (1954–1962) (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2020); Piera Rossetto, “A Map of Words: Research-creation Perspectives on Jewish Mediterranean Mobilities,” in Mediterranean Mobility between Migrations and Colonialism, ed. Gabriele Montalbano (Bologna: Viella, 2024), 203-218; Aviad Moreno, “Remapping ‘Tradition’: Community Formation and Spatiocultural Imagination among Jews in Colonial Northern Morocco,” Jewish Culture and History 22, no. 4 (2021): 378-400; Aviad Moreno, “There’s No Home Like Place: Homogenizing Nostalgia among Moroccan Jews in Venezuela,” Jewish History 39, no. 1-2 (2025). 

²³ Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813-836.

²⁴ Guy Miron, To Be a Jew in Nazi Germany: Space and Time (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2022) [in Hebrew].

Aviad Moreno is Senior Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and head of the Communities and Mobilities Hub at the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies. His research explores Jewish migration from Muslim-majority countries through comparative and global historical lenses. His publications include the co-edited volume The Long History of Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Islamic Countries (Ben-Gurion University Press, 2021) and the monograph Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community (Indiana University Press, 2024), which was recently awarded both the National Jewish Book Award and the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) Book Award.

Piera Rossetto is Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). In 2022, she was awarded the Rita Levi Montalcini fellowship for young researchers by the Italian Ministry for University and Research. In this position, she currently runs the research project "Gender, Ageing and Migration: Memory and Jewish Masculinities from North Africa and the Middle East." She is the author of Juifs de Libye. Constellations de mémoires (Effigi, 2023) and of the Italian translation of Be-guf rishon, the autobiography of Shimon Ballas, Israeli author of Iraqi descent (In prima persona, Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2024).

Emir Galilee is an associate scholar at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Kaye College, Be'er Sheva. His publications focus on the geography and history of nomadic societies in Israel and the Middle East and geography of leisure in historical perspective. His areas of interest include historical, social and cultural geography; ethnic, religious, nomadic and Indigenous groups; leisure, outdoor tourism and minorities in the Middle East. He is the author of “A Nomadic State of Mind: Mental Maps of Bedouins in the Negev and Sinai During the Time of the Ottomans, the British Mandate, and the State of Israel,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 6, no. 4 (2019): 1-13, and co-author, with Ruth Kark, of Transformation of the Jezreel Valley: Marj Ibn 'Amer in the late Ottoman period (Israel Academic Press, 2017).