Assistant Professor Devi Mays has won a National Jewish Book Award for her first book, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora, published by Stanford University Press. The book won in the category of Sephardic Culture, receiving the Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy. Awarded by the Jewish Book Council, the National Jewish Book Awards are the longest-running North American awards program in the field of Jewish literature. The 70th National Jewish Book Awards were announced January 27 and will be celebrated on April 12 in a virtual gala. The full list of awardees is available here. 

Forg­ing Ties, Forg­ing Pass­ports explores Sephardi Jewish migrations to Mexico from the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. She argues that the passport regimes that came into being in the aftermath of the First World War did not map easily onto the way of life of cosmopolitan Sephardi Jews, who found themselves out of place in the nation-states that replaced the multinational empires of the prewar period. Many Sephardi Jews, she shows, navigated this trans-migratory landscape by creatively refashioning themselves, shifting citizenships and nationalities in accordance with legal requirements, while retaining the deep cultural, personal, and business ties that forged their everyday identities.  

“Professor Mays’ scholarship speaks to a wide array of audiences and contributes to several disciplines, showing the wide reach of Judaic Studies,” noted Jeffrey Veidlinger, Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. “The book is poetically written and tells the remarkable stories of a diverse group of historical subjects. The National Jewish Book Award is a fitting and well-deserved recognition of her impressive achievement.”

Mays commented, “Forging Ties, Forging Passports investigates the challenges that Sephardi individuals and families faced to maintain connections in a world increasingly divided by policed borders and paperwork. In doing so, I hope that it speaks to similar challenges faced by millions of migrants today."