Sarah Abrevaya Stein

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

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, 2020

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, many of them prize-winning. 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 numerous prizes, including 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

• 2022: Association for Jewish Libraries Judaica Reference Award for Wartime North Africa
• 2022: American Library Association Best Historical Materials for Wartime North Africa
• 2019: The Economist Best Book of 2019 for Family Papers
• 2019: The New York Times Book Review Editors' Pick
• 2019: National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Family Papers
• 2018: Distinguished Teaching Award for Senate Faculty, UCLA
• 2018: National Jewish Book Award Finalist for 'Holocaust and North Africa
• 2017: National Jewish Book Award in the Sephardic Culture category for Extraterritorial Dreams
• 2015: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Family Papers
• 2014: National Jewish Book Award in the Sephardic Culture category for Sephardi Lives
• 2012: National Jewish Book Award Finalist for A Jewish Voice
• 2012: American Academy for Jewish Research Elected Member
• 2012: Walter D. Love Article Prize of the North American Conference of British Studies for Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire, American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 80-108
• 2010: Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for Plumes
• 2010: National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant for Sephardi Lives
• 2010: Annual New England Book Show Winner for Plumes
• 2008: Higby Prize by the Modern European section of the American Historical Association for Best Article in The Journal of Modern History, 2006-2008 for Falling into Feathers: Jews and the trans-Atlantic ostrich feather trade 79/4 (Winter).
• 2004: Koret Jewish Book Prize Finalist for Making Jews Modern
• 2004: American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryksamp Research Fellowship for Plumes
• 2004: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Plumes
• 2003: Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies Winner for Making Jews Modern