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.

NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Elya Assayag

We are delighted to repost this interview conducted by our friend and colleague Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the NYPL Dorot Jewish Division. This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library’s collections for the development of their work.

Elya Assayag is a History PhD candidate at Columbia University and was a recipient of a 2022–2023 New York Public Library Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship. Her study focuses on the history of women in Morocco during the 20th century. Due to the lack of written archival sources on the topic, Elya studies the place of “female crafts,” such as embroidery, with the hope that the combination of archival materials, oral history, and material culture will open a path into the under-researched field. Besides trying to figure out her academic path, she volunteers with refugees and asylum seekers and tries to do something useful with the law degree she obtained a few years ago.

Arts Marocains - Broderies by Prosper Ricard. Alger: J. Carbonel, 1918

Ricard, Prosper. Broderies. From the series “Arts Marocains”. Alger: J. Carbonel, 1918.

When did you first get the idea for your research project?

A couple of years ago I encountered a fascinating book named Arts Marocains – Broderies[1] [Moroccan Arts – Embroidery], written by Prosper Ricard, the director of Service des Arts Indigènes [the Indigenous Arts Office], in 1918. The book presents an impressive and diverse survey of different types of Moroccan traditional embroideries. Going over the book made me realize the central place of embroidery in women’s lives, and to try to incorporate this material knowledge into my research. The topic of women’s history in the Moroccan context, as in other contexts, is hard to study due to the scarcity of written archival materials. The reasons for this are diverse and push researchers in the field to come up with creative methods in order to excavate information on women in different periods. In my research embroidery—its materiality and the process of creating it, became part of my methodology. Read

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.