Program Description:

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. When 20th century wars changed the borders around them, the Levys were transformed from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members spread out from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. Whole branches were nearly eradicated in the Holocaust. Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe.

Presenter Bio:

Prizewinning historian of Sephardic Jewry, Sarah Abrevaya Stein serves as Director of the Leve Center for Jewish Studies, the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at UCLA.  She is the author and editor of ten award-winning books including Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (2019) and Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (2022).