Chris Silver, Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa
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Pearl and Jack Mandel Lecture in Jewish Studies
Chris Silver (McGill University)
"Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa"
This event is co-sponsored by the Faculty of Music
If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them.
Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. Recipient of grants from the Posen Foundation, the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Silver is the author of numerous articles on North African history and music, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (which won the “Best Article Award” from the Jewish Music Study Group in 2022) and Hespéris-Tamuda. He is also the founder and curator of the website Gharamophone.com, a digital archive of North African records from the first half of the twentieth century. His first book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in June 2022 with Stanford University Press.