Jewish-Muslim Interactions

Reviews / Votes

"This collection dances off the page, with a series of engaging, accessible, insightful essays on the many ways in which Jewish and Muslim artists and performers from North Africa engaged (and continue to engage) with one another creatively, through comedy, art, film, theater, and music, from the colonial period to the present day."
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, UCLA "Excellent ouvrage appele a faire date. Savamment argumente et novateur, il bouscule intelligemment des schemes et des prejuges fossilises. Les eclairages qu'il apporte sur les relations entre Juifs et Musulmans, oubliees ou occultees, sont pertinents et vivifiants. La mise en evidence, solidement argumentee et nuancee, de leurs affinites artistiques, culturelles et autres, va a contre-courant de l'approche conflictuelle habituelle de leurs interactions. Ce livre a l'immense merite de sortir des sentiers battus et d'ouvrir de stimulantes perspectives de recherches. A l'ere des extremes et du deferlement du populisme, sa lecture s'impose absolument." - Mohammed Kenbib, Universite Mohammed V de Rabat [Original quote]
"A landmark volume that skilfully and innovatively disrupts fossilized schemas and prejudices through its arguments. The insights that it brings to bear on Jewish-Muslim relations, hitherto obfuscated or forgotten, are pertinent and restorative. Its elucidation of artistic and cultural affinities, convincingly argued and with great nuance, serves as a counterpoint to the more commonplace narrative of conflict when it comes to such interactions. This book is particularly noteworthy as it takes us off the beaten track and opens up stimulating avenues for research. In an era of extremes and a surge in populism it is a must read." - Mohammed Kenbib, Universite Mohammed V de Rabat [English translation] "Quand les arts et la creation artistique racontent les relations des juifs et des musulmans, ils offrent, alors, au lecteur les echos vibrants d'une histoire partagee dont les heritages resonnent encore aujourd'hui. C'est le defi releve par les auteurs de cet ouvrage, affranchis des paradigmes politiques et ideologiques, et qui entre passe et present renouent avec une histoire qui n'existe plus." - Karima Direche, CNRS TELEMME [Original quote]
"When the creative and performing arts recount relations between Jews and Muslims, they offer to the reader vibrant echoes of a shared history whose legacies continue to resound today. Such is the challenge taken up by the authors of this volume who, free from political and ideological paradigms, reconnect with a forgotten history, somewhere between past and present." - Karima Direche, CNRS TELEMME [English translation] "A fascinating, eminently readable collection of essays documenting the dynamic, creative, and surprisingly close collaboration between Muslims and Jews in all domains of the performing arts in the Maghreb and in France from the 1920s to the contemporary post-independence period. In this collection, we encounter a colourful gallery of artists, authors, producers - both Muslims and Jews - who together entertained generations of mixed audiences with theatre plays in vernacular Arabic, cabaret performances, concerts, films, and comic one-man shows.
This volume offers us a welcome and timely antidote to the feeling of complete deterioration of the relations between Jews and Muslims in recent decades."
Professor Lucette Valensi, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales 'In brief, this is an exciting and much needed contribution to intercommunal religious studies in North Africa and France. ...Scholars in art, music, theater and film will undoubtedly applaud the incontestable demonstration that the arts deeply matter in history and geopolitics.'


Tamara Dee Turner, The Journal of North African Studies 'Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France provides a fascinating multidisciplinary illustration of how Jewish-Muslim interactions have created a shared cultural heritage and a legacy that ties past to present and that will no doubt continue to play on and out in sound, stage, and screen performances into the future'

Laura Reeck, Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature(Vol. 37, Issue 2) 'By going across and beyond disciplinary thinking, by combining field and archival work together with a cultural analysis, and by offering an alternative chronology and narrative to a conflict-based perspective, Jewish-Muslim Interactions shows the extent to which postcolonial studies and Jewish studies are close'

Adel Manai, African Studies Quarterly(Vol. 21, Issue 2) 'Jewish-Muslim Interactions constitutes a very valuable contribution to the field of North African and Sephardi Studies, and it is to be hoped that more works on aspects such as those investigated by its authors will appear in the future. This way, it will be possible to continue uncovering the historical encounters between Jews and Muslims and their reverberation in a Mediterranean present that is often portrayed as dominated only by interethnic and interreligious tension.'

Dario Miccoli, Ca' Foscari University of Venice 'In brief, this is an exciting and much needed contribution to intercommunal religious studies in North Africa and France. ...Scholars in art, music, theater and film will undoubtedly applaud the incontestable demonstration that the arts deeply matter in history and geopolitics.'

Tamara Dee Turner, The Journal of North African Studies