In this lecture, Tam explores the history of different Nostalgias that have been created around the Jewish community in Egypt since its demise in the middle of the 20th century. How have Egyptian Jews remembered and commemorated their lives in Egypt from the places they migrated to? How have the Egyptian state and society remembered and commemorated the Egyptian Jewish community? How have these memories been shaped by different political, social, and cultural interests, agendas, and historical developments? How have these memories changed over time, right until the present? This lecture will try to answer some of those questions.

Alon Tam is a social and cultural historian of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, and of that region's Jewish communities. His research interests broadly include urban history, social relations and identities, historical anthropology, culture and politics. Tam received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with an award-winning dissertation about Cairo’s coffeehouses, while his current research focuses on Jewish social identities in twentieth century Cairo. A recent fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, Tam presently holds the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia and Fordham.

In partnership with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Supported by the Rabin and Shvidler families.

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