Jay Prosser, ”Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns” (Black Spring Press, 2024)

A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities. Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Mentioned in the podcast:

• Diana Saltoon, My Sister Meda: A Memoir of Old Singapore (2023)

• The Jews of Singapore Museum

Recent literature on the Sassoon family includes:

• Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai (2021)

• Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (2022)

• Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons (2023)

Jay Prosser is a reader in humanities at the University of Leeds in England, where he has taught since 1999.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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