University of Florida Homepage
Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Faculty/Grad Student Workshop: “The Rights and Obligations of Divorce: Jews and Moroccan Independence”

October 26, 2018 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Precirculated paper; please RSVP to mcampos@ufl.edu

Dr. Heckman will discuss a chapter that explores the Moroccan Communist Party’s (PCM) evolution into a national liberation party in the post-war period. It addresses urban Jewish communal attitudes to the movement for independence and the available marketplace for political ideas and ideologies, including the accelerating popularity of Zionism.  As Jews began to leave Morocco for Israel, those Jews who were members of the PCM entrenched themselves in national liberation politics. Included in this chapter is the fatefully violent year of 1952, when union activists spearheaded bloodily suppressed popular protests. This prompted Protectorate officials to exile most of the PCM’s Central Committee’s European leaders as well as notable Moroccan Jewish leaders in an attempt to diffuse the situation. The chapter ends on an optimistic note, with the al-Wifaq (“Entente,” a nationalist group dedicated to Jewish and Muslim cooperation) organization in 1956 celebrating Jewish-Muslim political victories and the future of the Moroccan state. This cautious euphoria, however, was short lived.

Alma Heckman is the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies and an Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2015. In addition to her research on radical Jewish politics in Morocco, Heckman is also working to digitize, transcribe, and publish interviews with European Jews who found refuge in North Africa and the Middle East during and after World War II.  This fall, Heckman is a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a past fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sponsored by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies.

Details

Date:
October 26, 2018
Time:
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Venue

Conference Room, KF