Reclaiming Jewish Muslim Belonging as Anti-Colonial Ancestral Practice

Join us in conversation with author and anti-colonial theorist ariella aïsha azoulay as she shares of her newest work, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World and Golden Threads. azoulay invites radical reclamation of ancestral connection and challenging colonial power as a pathway toward remembering Jewish Muslim belonging and dreaming liberatory futures.

Meet Our Guest Speaker

ariella aïsha azoulay is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of photography and material culture. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is of Algerian and Palestinian descent and identifies as a Muslim Jew, which she powerfully unpacks in her article “Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues” (Boston Review, 2021). azoulay recently published The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024) and a children’s story, Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2025), an illustrated tale of Jewish and Muslim traditional crafts and communal power challenging the visual legacy of colonial photography in Morocco in the early 20th century.