"Etched in Stone" / "Outlined in Shadows": The Twentieth-Century Lives of American Sephardic Cemeteries

This project investigates conceptualizations of American Jewishness through the twentieth century by tracing the dynamic 'lives' of Sephardic cemeteries in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. It brings the fields of memory and cemetery studies into conversation with histories of Sephardic identity-making in America. I posit cemeteries as archives and methodological touchstones, arguing that they were loci of encounters between Iberian, Ottoman, and Ashkenazic Jews at key moments in the twentieth century. As I demonstrate, these sites embodied the dynamism of Sephardic self-conception in the United States in a way that makes them critical spaces for the study of untold histories today. I look to commemorations, tensions, and forms of neglect in these cemeteries to better understand how the sites were shaped by changing Jewish existences and how they, too, transformed the lives and memories of American Jews.