Today, Jews constitute only tiny communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, but the region has a rich and varied Jewish past that is now preserved in an extensive reservoir of material culture. Numerous synagogues, cemeteries, ritual objects and other Judaica, and writings are dispersed across Arab and Islamic countries.

The Jewish Culture and Contexts series is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in association with the Katz Center. The series is co-edited by Steven Weitzman, Francesca Trivellato (Institute for Advanced Study), Shaul Magid (Dartmouth College), and Beth Berkowitz (Barnard College), and its goal is to deepen understanding of Jewish culture within the specific historical and geographic contexts in which it has developed. Broadly interdisciplinary, this series features monographs in all areas of Judaic studies.

Raanan Rein: Rather than being a scholarly field in itself, Jewish Latin American studies should be viewed as a subfield of both Latin American studies and Jewish studies. For many years Jewish Latin American studies fell outside of the main parameters of the two abovementioned fields.