Dear colleagues,
On February 23 at 12:30 pm Eastern Time (6:30 pm in Spain), the Sephardi Modernities (Sephardi–Mizrahi) Seminar Series will host Aomar Boum, who will be speaking on
“Fashioning Diaspora: Moroccan Jewish Histories in Los Angeles.”After World War II, Moroccan Jews began migrating to the United States and Canada in modest numbers, and by the 1960s, subsequent relocations from Europe, Canada, Israel, and Latin America had produced sizable Moroccan Jewish communities in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Based on Luis Moll’s work on the relationship between household, community, and education, the talk advances the concept of sartorial funds of knowledge, understood as the embodied, socially transmitted, and commercially deployable repertoires through which Moroccan immigrants built market competence in Montreal, Los Angeles, and the global fashion industry. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research in the Moroccan Jewish community in Los Angeles, I examine how Moroccan Jews negotiated their Sephardic cultural identity and economic participation through fashion work, treating dress, shoes, and bags as both a medium of belonging and a practical infrastructure for entrepreneurship. I argue that Moroccan Jews helped constitute a distinctive synthesis between an elegant European aesthetic, introduced especially by migrants from France and Montreal, and Los Angeles’s utilitarian, informal style. Through family networks, business partnerships, and community organizations, these family entrepreneurs translated sartorial expertise into reputational capital, niche positioning, and durable commercial ties, thereby contributing to the growth of the city’s garment and fashion sectors.
To register, please use this link:
https://brandeis.zoom.us/meeting/register/aag6ejvYSnqFBwttBoutaw?_x_zm_rtaid=3QLMdLoXQtyrpei0tavYTw.1771273198542.21191133f2c3852a4052006b2e27b418&_x_zm_rhtaid=763&fbclid=IwY2xjawQEB0RleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe2uxKjt3svB0aheAEKqgxYtiJZDr3jZmtqApSAvossdbQLbnCcCARHJto2w8_aem_8IRiQYukJ685OJ5J0-ZzyQ#/registrationBest regards,
Aviad