Name: The Resistance of Motherless Tongues
Start: 2026-3-8T15:30+0:00
End: 2026-3-8T17:30+0:00

Bookhouse

ASF Sixth Floor, 15 West 16th Street rsvp@primolevicenter.org

American Sephardi Federation, Centro Primo Levi, Dan Wyman Books, a cooperative initiative

Upcoming Events

March

08MAr3:30 pm5:30 pmThe Resistance of Motherless Tongues

09MAr5:00 pm7:00 pmSephardi Printing in the Ottoman Empire: A Workshop at the Printshop

25MAr6:30 pm8:00 pmEthiopia and the Jews: Between Empires and the Persecution

The Ottoman Catalogue is a curated section of our Bookstore featuring English-language classics and new scholarship on Ottoman history and culture. It explores the impact of nationalism on the Ottoman Empire, the consequences of its decline and dissolution for Europe, and the histories of peoples, lands, religions, and their books before the concept of “the Middle East” emerged as a political and geographical term.

Following two decades of research, programming, and publishing on the history of nationalism, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, Centro Primo Levi moved its attention to the period before 1922, exploring the stories, ideas, exchanges, and transformations that occurred over six centuries of Ottoman rule.

The era that ushered in the rise of the workers movement, totalitarianiasm, the Spanish Civil War, the fall of three empires, the shaping of modern nation-states, and the establishment of an economy based on industrial and scientific growth, banking, and warfare, also brought to an end cultures, concepts of time, language, and rituals that today’s observers often struggle to appreciate.

Much of this history has attracted modest attention from American and English-language scholarship. However, over the past few years, there has been an increase in original and translated research and publications, showcasing this period from various angles and perspectives. As the “Middle East” storms into our societies, challenging the vocabulary of public life, as well as its ethical and epistemological paradigms, we feel that attempting to move our gaze back into this past may help us refine our sensibility and interpretational tools.