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Collection Guide: Oral Histories

American Sephardi Federation

Archival Highlights

American Sephardic Jewish Voices: A Jewish Oral History Project 

This project was sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation, with the University of Miami and Hebrew University. Interviewees are from the fields of politics, philanthropy, and the arts, and have backgrounds in a number of different fields and organizations from Sephardi and Mizrahi lands from around the world who immigrated to and settled in the United States. The experience about which the interviewees speak cover roughly the period from period from 1930's to 1980's. There are a total of 9 interviews available.

Guide to the Tamar Morad, Dennis and Robert Shasha Collection of Iraqi Jewish Oral Histories (ASF AR 72)

This collection contains oral history materials collected by Tamar Morad, Robert Shasha, and Dennis Shasha, in connection with the writing and compilation of the book Iraq's Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), including approximately 60 audio recordings, with at least one third accompanied by transcripts; a few transcripts or narratives without recordings; and a small amount of related biographical material, including memoirs and other writings, one family history, and photographs (Series II). The interviewees and their families represent a range of professions, including international merchants and bankers, as well as rabbis, doctors, politicians, intellectuals, musicians, poets, and artists. The materials convey personal accounts of Jewish life in Iraq from approximately the 1920s to the early 1980s, as well as Iraqi Jewish experiences of emigration, transit journeys, and new lives in the diaspora, in locations including Iran, India, Japan, China, Israel, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

Library Materials

Iraq's last Jews : stories of daily life, upheaval, and escape from modern Babylon / edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Judeo-Spanish ballads from oral tradition / by Samuel G. Armistead, Joseph H. Silverman ; with musical transcriptions and studies by Israel J. Katz. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986.

La comunidad hebrea de Cuba : la memoria y la historia / autora y compiladora, Margalit Bejarano ; editor, Haim Avni.

Pathways through the Holocaust : oral history by eye-witnesses / by Clara Isaacman ; illustrated by Janet Katz.

Shoah : an oral history of the Holocaust : the complete text of the film / Claude Lanzmann ; preface by Simone de Beauvoir ; [English subtitles of the film by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron]. New York : Pantheon Books, c1985.

The mezuzah in the Madonna's foot : oral histories exploring five hundred years in the paradoxical relationship of Spain and the Jews / Trudi Alexy. New York : Simon & Schuster, c1993.