Alma
Rachel
Heckman

University of California, Santa Cruz
Professor Samuel Z. Klausner and Professor Roberta G. Sands Fellowship

Research Topic

Radical Roads Not Taken: Moroccan Jewish Trajectories, 1925–1975

Bio

Alma Rachel Heckman is the Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and assistant professor in the Department of History. Her research interests include modern Jewish history, labor history, transnational Jewish political activism, colonialism, nationalism, third worldism, syncretism, and North Africa and the Middle East. In addition, she is working to digitize, transcribe, and publish interviews with European Jewish refugees from World War II who found safe harbor in the Middle East and North Africa in an effort to expand Holocaust studies beyond a Eurocentric narrative.

Heckman received her PhD from UCLA and has previously held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.

Selected publications

  • “Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography,” Jewish Social Studies (forthcoming)

Fellowship

2018–2019

Delving into the meaning of modernity beyond the European, American, and Israeli contexts, looking instead to North Africa, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central and South Asia.