Yad Mizrah Magazine
The first and only contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi literary magazine.
Yad Mizrah Issue 4
Exile & Return
Reflecting on Mizrahi and Sephardic dual exile and dual homeland in all its complexity.
Feature Essay
“Memory is a Mechanism for Forgetting”: Reflections on the Nostalgia of Exile.
Why do Jews forced to leave Arab countries have positive memories? By Lyn Julius.
Feature Essay
When Cairo’s Jews Vanished, My Uncle Was Left With the Keys.
By Jasmin Attia
Essay
Why My Iraqi Family Never Talks About What Happened to Them.
By Sarah Sassoon.
Essay
Albert Elia and the Last Echo of Lebanese Jewry.
Albert Elia translated a Hebrew poem about exile. Then, he disappeared. By Aurele Tobelem.
Poetry
JERUSALEM
By B.A. Van Sise
in 2022, I was deported from Kurdistan.
Like the Jews Before Me, I Was Told to Leave and Not Return.
By Levi Meir Clancy.
Al Mutanabbi Street, Aleppo, Syria. Charcoal and oil on tablecloth, 63x56. 2023. By Rochelle Dweck, whose work explores themes of Jewish identity, exile, and the preservation of cultural memory that draw from her Syrian and Egyptian Jewish heritage,
what we’re reading
Reviews, Reflections, and More.
Nonfiction
How Do You Mourn a Language You Never Really Spoke?
Samantha Ellis’s new memoir wrestles with the fragile inheritance of Judeo-Arabic. By Maia Zelkha, Editor.
Fiction
Rediscovering Yemenite Heritage, Love, and Loss in Ayelet Tsabari’s New Novel.
How music, memory, and a mother’s voice pull a daughter back to what she tried to leave behind. By Einav Grushka.
Nonfiction
Tracing a Family Tree Across a Shattered Sephardic World.
Victor Perera traces the scattered roots of his Sephardic family tree in his deeply personal memoir. By Manuel Férez.
Nonfiction
André Aciman’s vivid memoir of his last days of Jewish Alexandria, painted through memories. By Lievnath Faber-Cohen.
Out of Egypt, but Never Far.
What We’re Watching
Two distinct films on the exile and disappearance of Iraqi Jewry.
THE DOVE FLYER Film Review: The first and only Judeo-Arabic film captures the final days of Iraqi Jewry through the eyes of young Kabi.
By Aaron Cohen.
Interview with Carol Isaacs on THE WOLF OF BAGHDAD: A conversation on memory, music, and a Baghdad haunted by ghosts— its lost Jews.
By Frank Stern.
