BOOKHOUSE

Bookhouse is an intimate space located at the American Sephardi Federation and inhabited by Centro Primo Levi, Dan Wyman Books, the Jewish Book Art Collective, the Textiles and Carpets Workshop, and the Music Room. Like an old-fashioned bookstore, it offers readings and talks, coffee and tea, and a curated selection of books on the pre-nation-state era, Ottoman history, and culture. Come visit, suggest new titles, inquire about our inventory.

TEXTILES & CARPETS

The Workshop welcomes scholars, practitioners, collectors, and amateurs who work with and on textile, embroidery, and carpets.

Mining the American Sephardi Federation’s Textile Collection

Elya Assayag

This summer, Elya Assayag has been a fellow at Bookhouse and produced a catalog of the American Sephardi Federation’s textile collection. She was assisted by and trained Michael Fulgencio, who interns at CPL from CCNY, and Naila Hassan, a former CCNY intern who is now activities coordinator.

We thank Elya for her wonderful work, her dedication to the students, and the beautiful catalog she has assembled. We look forward to continuing to work with her developing a map of textiles and embroideries from the former Ottoman Lands, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and beyond.

Elya Assayag studies the social and cultural history of women in Morocco during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since written materials by and about women are scarce, she uses women-designated crafts as central sources for historical analysis. Her dissertation, “Embroidering Histories: Women, Craft, and Colonial Powers in Morocco,” centers on embroidery. As a nonverbal means of communication, embroidery provides a way to trace the histories of Muslim, Jewish, and European women in Morocco that are often absent from written archives. The dissertation explores how different powers operated within women’s spheres and reveals the circulation of knowledge and aesthetic trends within Morocco and between Morocco and Europe.

To “read” embroidery as a nonverbal means of communication, the study employs a combined, multidisciplinary methodology. In addition to archival research, private and public embroidery collections are analyzed using material analysis tools. These are combined with oral history interviews that are enriched by embroidering with the women to better understand the craft and its production.

Elya’s work has been supported by various institutions, including: the New York Public Library (NYPL) Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship; the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS); Columbia Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG); the European Research Council (ERC); the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship (FLAS); Columbia Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS); the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR); and The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.

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.