Twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately. Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together for so long: Arab music.

With this book, Dr. Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. This interactive talk will introduce the audience to some of the North African musicians who helped define their era.  For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices, whose music still resonates well into our present.

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Dr. Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. He is the author of numerous articles on North African history and music, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Hespéris-Tamuda. 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 twentieth century. His first book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in June 2022 with Stanford University Press.