Jessie Serene Stoolman

JESSIE STOOLMAN, then a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles, California, was granted funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Black and Jewish: The Social Life of Archives in Morocco,” supervised by Dr. Aomar Boum. The grantee documented thousands of records related to-Black-Jewish history in Morocco through visits to community-run and State-supported archives nationwide, conducted extensive interviews with memory workers at archival institutions as well as non-archival sites of memory like synagogues about their curatorial practices, and spent over 75 hours observing community members as they visited sites of memory across the country. Preliminary findings suggests that inequities in the North African archival landscape and the Israelification of Jewish heritage — that is, the instrumentalization of Jewish heritage projects to cultivate relationships with the State of Israel and its allies — contribute to the marginalization of Black-Jewish histories in the region. While institutional archives contain primary sources that shed light on the dynamic nature of Black-Jewish engagements across space and time, these institutions frame intra-Indigenous relationships through a Muslim-Jewish binary, thus flattening differences across and within these communities. Nevertheless, sites of memory that are not traditionally viewed as archival — such as cemeteries and synagogues — as well as grassroots heritage projects led by community members counter the silencing effects of curation.