Dr. Aomar Boum
Assistant Professor
Marshall 454 Currently on junior leave 520-626-0931 http://www.boum.faculty.arizona.edu/ bouma@email.arizona.edu
Dr. Aomar Boum was born and raised in the oasis of Mhamid, Foum Zguid (Province of Tata, southern Morocco). As a socio-cultural anthropologist, his main research explores how Moroccan Muslims remember, picture, and construct Jewishness and Moroccan Judaism.
Dr. Boum has published a number of academic articles on the representation of Jews in Moroccan museums, the migration of Saharan Jewry toward Israel in 1962, traditional Jewish education and the Alliance Israélite Universelle in southern Moroccan oases, the performance of toleration and Judeo-Muslim symbiosis in post-independence Morocco, the relationship between Muslim judges and Jews in southern Morocco, and the history and historiography of rural Moroccan Jewry. He has written a number of entries on the Jews of southern Morocco in the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. He also published on ethnic folkdances and nationalism, traditional Islamic and modern education, as well as Hip-hop and youth dissent in Morocco, and youth culture.
He is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco.
Recent Publications:
- Saharan Jewry: History, Memory and Imagined Community. Journal of North African Studies 16(3):325-341, 2011.
- The Culture of Despair: Youth, Unemployment and Educational Failures in North Africa. Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies 16(1), 2011.
- The Plastic Eye: The Politics of Jewish Representation in Moroccan Museums. Ethnos 75(1):49-77, 2010.
- From 'Little Jerusalems' to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism and Rural Jewish Emigration. Journal of North African Studies 15(1):51-69, 2010.
- Schooling in the Bled: Jewish Education and the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Southern Morocco. Journal of Jewish Identities 3(1):1-24, 2010.
- The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Communitiy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39(2):205-223, 2008.