Christopher Silver
Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture
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. Recipient of awards from the Posen Foundation, the American Academy of Jewish Research, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Silver’s scholarship on history and music has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Hespéris-Tamuda, AJS Perspectives, History Today, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.
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. Find out more at christopherbsilver.com.
Articles
Blog
A Forgotten Song Surfaces about World War II in North Africa
From Reboot Network Member, Christopher Silver, we are shining a light on the sounds and stories of North African Jewish artists who found themselves silenced and subjugated under fascist rule during the Second World War. For the many Jewish musicians of North Africa who had played an outsized role in crafting the region’s popular sounds, that silencing took on a quite literal form. Pushed off of radio and off the stage, some of the most important cultural figures of their time could no longer be heard at a particularly dire moment in history. Such was the case with the Algerian Jewish recording artist Lili Boniche, whose rising star was forced into retreat as World War II reached his side of the Mediterranean with the fall of France in summer 1940. Read more here.