The Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies is pleased to announce the publication of the 5th issue of Currents: Briefs on Contemporary Israel, our bi-annual publication. The Spring 2022 issue features an article by the Center's Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Alon Tam, "Between Egypt and Israel: Egyptian Jews, the Yishuv, and Israeli Society."

UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, May 11, 2022 – The UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center’s new issue of Currents: Briefs on Contemporary Israel was published this week, featuring an essay by the Center's Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Alon Tam, "Between Egypt and Israel: Egyptian Jews, the Yishuv, and Israeli Society."  The brief focuses on the history of Egyptian Jewish involvement with the Zionist Yishuv in pre-1948 Palestine while destabilizing the commonly accepted view of 1948 as a clear breaking point in the history of Israel in the Middle East, or in the history of the region’s Jewish communities.

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"This fascinating article by Dr. Alon Tam, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Nazarian Center, sheds new light on the modern history of Egyptian Jews and their important, often overlooked, contributions to the Yishuv and the State of Israel. Rather than simply subsume the Egyptian Jewish experience with Zionism and Israel into a simplistic, monolithic narrative about Mizrahim, this article provides a much more nuanced analysis of a once sizable and successful Jewish community that is, sadly, now almost extinct," said Professor Dov Waxman, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies, director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center, and editor-in-chief of Currents: Briefs on Contemporary Israel. 

About the Author

Dr. Alon Tam is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. He is a social and cultural historian of the Middle East and North Africa. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include the social history of Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa. As the Nazarian Center's Postdoctoral Fellow in 2021-22, Tam will promote his research on the social and political history of Egyptian Jews in Israel post-1948, as well as about the close ties of that community to the Yishuv in Israel/Palestine before 1948. Prior to joining the center, Tam was the Israel Institute Visiting Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He also is a former fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Covering Israel’s society, politics, economy, and culture, Currents aims to disseminate scholarly expertise, cutting-edge research, and innovative analyses of Israel to a wide audience.