Author Event! Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's "The Jewelers of the Ummah"

Join us at 6pm on February 28th as we host Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, who will be reading from her latest, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World.

About the book:

A deeply personal exploration of family, empire, art and identity - from the author of Potential History

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay examines the disruption of Jewish Muslim life in Algeria and broadly in the Maghreb and the Middle East by two colonial projects: French rule and the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which provoked the departure of Jews from these areas.
Jewelry making was a profession that marked the Algerian Jews’ place in the world they shared in the ummah, the borderless community of Muslims. The objects they crafted continue to unsettle the clear-cut separation of Jews from Muslims and of Jews from Algeria. In this jewelry, and in the history of those who made, wore, and sold it, Azoulay finds a path to reviving the lost wisdom of her ancestors.
Emptying Africa of its Jews is a tragedy which Azoulay refuses to accept. In these letters, she reintroduces Muslim Jews to the violence of colonization and

About the author:

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches at Brown political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture. Her latest books: The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), La resistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023) and Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); She recently published her first children book Golden Threads Ayin Press, 2024). Her latest films include the trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025), The world like a jewel in the hand (2023), Un-documented (2019); her latest exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Signed copies of the book will available for purchase during the event.

We can't wait to see you there!

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff