Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Distinguished Professor, Viterbi Family Endowed Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies
Email: sstein@history.ucla.edu
Office: 6296 Bunche Hall
Phone: 310-825-4153
Personal Website Class WebsiteBiography
Please visit my personal website, sarahastein.com, to learn about speaking engagements, media coverage, and more.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is author or editor of ten books. In The New York Times, Matti Friedman has written that “Stein, a UCLA historian, has ferocious research talents […] and a writing voice that is admirably light and human.”
Stein’s most recent book, with co-editor Aomar Boum, is Wartime North Africa, A Documentary History 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the USHMM, 2022), winner of the Best Historical Materials Award from the American Library Association (2023) and the Judaica Reference Award from the Association for Jewish Libraries (2023). Wartime North Africa is the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, and gives voice to the diversity of those involved—Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble, yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes.
Translated from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French, Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up the history of wartime North Africa.
Stein’s previous book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: Macmillman, 2019), explores the intertwined histories of a single family, Sephardic Jewry, and the dramatic ruptures that transformed southeastern Europe and the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. This book also traces the history of a collection, reflecting on how one family archive came to be built and preserved, and how it knit together a family even as the historic Sephardi heartland of southeastern Europe was unraveling. The Economist named Family Papers a Best Book of 2019, while the New York Times Book Review selected it as an Editors’ Choice Book. Family Papers was also named a National Jewish Book Prize Finalist (2019).
Stein’s books, articles, and pedagogy have won numerous prizes, including the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Jewish Book Awards, three National Jewish Book Award Finalist Awards, Best Historical Materials Award from the American Library Association, Judaica Reference Award from the Association for Jewish Libraries, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic.
Publications
Books
Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950, Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors (Stanford University Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022).
Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Best Book of 2019 (The Economist, Mosaic Magazine), National Jewish Book Award Finalist (2019).
The Holocaust and North Africa, Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors (Stanford University Press, 2018). National Jewish Book Award Finalist (2018) and a Must Read Book of 2018 by the Association of Holocaust Organizations.
Ninette of Sin Street, Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Winner of a 2016 National Jewish Book Award.
Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors (Stanford University Press, 2014). Winner of a 2014 National Jewish Book Award; 2015 Association of Jewish Libraries Reference Award, Honorable Mention.
A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi, , Aron Rodrigue and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, co-editors, translation and glossary by Isaac Jerusalmi (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008). 52nd Annual New England Book Show Winner, Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Paperback published 2010.
Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press, 2004). Winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003; Koret Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2004. Paperback published 2006.
Book-related web material
2012 Online companion to A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: the Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi (Stanford University Press) featuring reproduction of original, soletreo [Ladino handwritten, cursive] memoir with cross-references to romanized Ladino transliteration and English-language translation.
Select articles
2023 “Eating on the ground: picnicking at the end of empire.” American Historical Review, History Unclassified.
2022 “Botánica Sephardica,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64/3 (July).
2022 “The Queen of Herbs: a plant’s-eyed view of a Jewish diaspora,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112/1 (Winter).
2016 “Contentious Archives and the Algerian Jewish Past,” solicited contribution to “Histoire d’archives,” special issue of Archives Juives.
2015 “Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Buried Troves: decolonization and the multi-sited archives of Algerian Jewish history,” American Historical Review 120/3, June.
2015 “Citizens of a Fictional Nation: Ottoman-born Jews in France during the First World War,” Past & Present 226/1.
2014 “The Field of In Between,” solicited contribution to roundtable forum, “Jewish identities in the Middle East, 1876-1956,”International Journal of Middle East Studies 46/3.
2012 With Susan Slymovics, “Jews and Colonial Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 17/4.
2012 “Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara,” Journal of North African Studies 17/4 (online version, 25 September).
2011 “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Creation of the Jewish Colonial,” The American Historical Review (February). Winner, 2012 Walter D. Love Article Prize of the North American Conference of British Studies.
2010 With Julia Phillips Cohen, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100:3 (Summer).
2009 “American Deaf Jewish culture in historical and trans-national context,” American Jewish History 94/3, (September).
2007 “‘Falling into Feathers’: Jews and the trans-Atlantic ostrich feather trade,” The Journal of Modern History 79/4 (Winter): 772-812. Winner of the Higby Prize by the Modern European section of the American Historical Association, for best article in The Journal of Modern History, 2006-2008.
2007 “Mediterranean Jewries and Global Commerce in the modern period: on the trail of the Jewish feather trade,” Jewish Social Studies 13.2 (Winter): 1-39.
2006 “Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96.4 (Fall), 498-509.
Awards & Grants
Sarah Stein’s research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Research, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the Maurice Amado Foundation, among other sources. Her scholarship has been awarded a 2016 National Jewish Book Award (for Extraterritorial Dreams), a 2014 National Jewish Book Award (for Sephardi Lives), and has three times been finalist for this prize (in 2019, for Family Papers, in 2018, for The Holocaust and North Africa, and in 2012, for A Jewish Voice). She has received the 2022 AJL Judaica Reference Award and the 2023 Best Historical Materials Award, sponsored by the American Library Association (for Wartime North Africa), as well as a 2018 Honorable Mention Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries Reference Award (for Sephardi Lives), the 2012 Walter D. Love Article Prize of the North American Conference of British Studies (for “Protected Persons?”), the 2008 Higby Prize by the Modern European section of the American Historical Association for Best Article in The Journal of Modern History (for “Falling into Feathers”), and the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies (2003, for Making Jews Modern). Stein is co-winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (2010, for Plumes) and an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Professor Stein is also the winner of a 2018 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.
