Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, 2020

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is an American historian of Sephardic and Mediterranean Jewries.

She is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Professor of History, and holder of the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from Brown University.

Stein is the author of ten books. Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic.

Stein is the author of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century.Her 2008 book Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

New York Times contributor Matti Friedman has written that "Stein, a U.C.L.A. historian, has ferocious research talents....and a writing voice that is admirably light and human."'

Stein’s books, articles, and pedagogy have won two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. She is co-editor, with David Biale of Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture.

Stein has served as consultant, advisor, and board member for institutions as varied as The Walt Disney Company, Pixar, The World’s Jewish Museum of Tel Aviv, the Skirball Cultural Center, Jewish Story Partners, Facing History & Ourselves, the television series I Love Dick, and universities around the world. She is a frequent speaker and writer on Jewish diversity.

Books

• Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 co-edited with Aomar Boum (Stanford University Press with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2023)
• Papeles de familia Spanish translation of Family Papers by Inglés de Vicente Campos González (Galaxia Gutenberg), 2021.
• Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
• The Holocaust and North Africa co-edited with Aomar Boum (Stanford University Press with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019)
• Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors (Stanford University Press), 2018).
• Ninette of Sin Street, co-edited with Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein with translation by Jane Kuntz (Stanford University Press, 2017).
• Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, (University of Chicago Press, 2014)).
• A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi co-authored with Aron Rodrigue and Isaac Jerusalmi (Stanford University Press, 2012)
• Plumes: ostrich feathers, Jews, and a lost world of global commerce (Yale University Press, 2008)
• Making Jews modern : the Yiddish and Ladino press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press, 2004)

Awards

• 2017: National Jewish Book Award in the Sephardic Culture category for Extraterritorial Dreams