Announcing new oral history archive and more

[Dalia Kandiyoti]

Dear Colleagues, Friends,

Happy 2026 to all! We are excited to announce that our oral history interviews  with descendants of Sephardic Jews on Spanish and Portuguese citizenship is now available as a digital archive through the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington Libraries. We are grateful to our narrators for making the archive possible and to the staff and program director, Devin Naar, for their collaboration and labor  to make these 62 interviews available to the public.  

You can find here the Showcase page, with excerpts from six interviews: https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/spanish-portuguese-citizenship-sephardi-jewish-descendants-oral-history/

And this is the page with all of the available interviews: https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/p16786coll3/search/searchterm/%22Sephardi%20Citizenship%20Oral%20History%22/field/all/mode/all/conn/and/cosuppress/

We hope you find the content compelling and can also use the interviews in your  teaching, cultural work,  and other contexts.  The interviews are relevant to those interested in history (including family history and oral history), modern citizenship, genealogy, Sephardic and Jewish Studies, multiplicity of identities; religion, ethnography, anthropology, area studies (e.g. Iberian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, et al.) among many other fields as well as those exploring genealogy and ancestry. 

Relatedly, the paperback version of our edited volume of scholarly articles and personal essays on this topic has also just been released. An e-book is also available. Please visit:  https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KandiyotiBenmayorReparative

All our best wishes,

Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor

 

Dalia Kandiyoti

Professor

Department of English

College of Staten Island

City University of New York

 

Author of:

Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal  

 

The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture