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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: Decades after expulsion from Arab lands, Sephardi survivors' stories are being preserved
Description: This year, a new coffee table book came out called Sephardi Voices, based on the long-running preservation project that collects stories of Sephardic Jews' accomplishments and survival worldwide. As part of the project, two Canadian researchers have spent the last few years collecting video testimonies from hundreds of survivors of the mass expulsion of nearly a million Jews from Arab lands after 1948.
This group, never formally regarded as refugees or given financial help—unlike the Palestinians, as the book frequently notes—struggled with displacement and the destruction of historic synagogues and cemeteries. After the Second World War and...