
Series
Volume 16
Remapping Cultural History
See Related
History JournalsEmail Newsletters
Sign up for our email newsletters to get customized updates on new Berghahn publications.
Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants
Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal
Edited by Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor
348 pages, 7 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80073-824-9 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (January 2023)
eISBN 978-1-80073-825-6 eBook Not Yet Published
Reviews
“Kandiyoti and Benmayor's volume brings together the legal and emotional repercussions of a return to Spain and Portugal for Sephardic Jews. Beautifully intermingling questions of expulsion, exclusion and reparation, Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants treats readers to a nuanced and multifaceted examination of Sephardim. By melding personal essays with rigorous academic studies, the editors have compiled a book that speaks to the heart and mind while addressing the discomfiting realities of an invitation six hundred years in the making.” • Sara J. Brenneis, Amherst College
Description
In 2015, both Portugal and Spain passed laws enabling descendants of Sephardi Jews to obtain citizenship, an historic offer of reconciliation for Jews who were forced to undergo conversions or expelled from Iberia nearly half a millennia ago. Drawing from scholarly and first-person essays, Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants analyzes the memory and afterlives of those who were wronged, and how reconciliatory rights impact the lives of those affected.
Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is the author of The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2020), Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures (Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 2009), and numerous articles on contemporary Sephardi, Latinx, and migration/diaspora literatures.
Rina Benmayor is Professor Emerita in the School of Humanities and Communication, California State University Monterey Bay, where she taught oral history, literature, and digital storytelling. Her books include Romances Judeo-Españoles de Oriente (on Sephardic ballads); Latino Cultural Citizenship, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios; and Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation, on oral history in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).