Sounds, Silences, and Echoes: Listening for World War II and the Holocaust from North Africa

Dr. Christopher Silver, McGill University.

The FIT Holocaust Commemoration Committee and the Diversity Collective host “Sounds, Silences, and Echoes: Listening for World War II and the Holocaust from North Africa,” presented by Dr. Christopher Silver.

On the eve of the Second World War, half a million Jews called North Africa home. Among them, were some of the most prominent Arabophone recording artists of the interwar period. With the collapse of France’s Third Republic in 1940, Jewish communities from across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, already subject to the strictures of European colonialism, now found themselves contending with and confronting fascist rule. For musicians, this also meant removal from the airwaves and the stage. If the Maghrib has long been considered marginal to the historiography joining World War II to the Holocaust, this talk considers the implications of bringing the “periphery” to the center of the narrative. To do so, it amplifies an element too often neglected by historians: the realm of the aural. In listening for wartime radio broadcasts and concerts, following the circulation of phonograph records and songbooks, and attending to the sounds and silences of the era, we will ask what music remembers of a history long forgotten.

Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Associate Professor in Jewish History and Culture at McGill University. Recipient of awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and the Posen Foundation, Silver’s scholarship on history, music, and the Jewish-Muslim relationship has appeared in many journals including the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Jewish Social Studies. His book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2022) was awarded the L. Carl Brown Book Prize by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies for outstanding book in North African studies (2023) and was recently translated into Arabic. 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 20th century.

This event is free and open to the public; REGISTER ONLINE.