Description | Dr. Devi Mays will use the life of Mauricio Fresco—an Ottoman Jew cum Mexican diplomat— as a foil for exploring the multiple tensions, at times coexisting and at times conflicting, that undergirded global Sephardic life in the tempestuous years of the late interwar and World War-II eras. Her research draws the narrative of transnational Sephardic networks into a period in which they began to break down just as they were most crucial. While in many ways an exceptional character, Fresco nonetheless embedded himself within, contributed to, and drew on Sephardi ties within and without Mexico. Simultaneously, he rocketed to prominence as a Mexican diplomat, traveling the world and bearing written witness to some of the era’s greatest calamities—the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria, the Nazi occupation of Paris and its subsequent liberation, Spanish Civil War refugees languishing in French concentration camps. RSVP requested. |
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