This event, as part of the 杏吧论坛 Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, will discuss the online exhibition and research project 'Bridging Identities: The Cultural Odyssey of Kurdistani Jews' exploring the identity and heritage of Kurdistani Jews.
The stories in this research project shed light on this community's past through the lens of their memories and nostalgic ties to the homeland they left behind as they migrated to Israel/Palestine, and reveal if and how the markers of Kurdishness are transmitted to generations next.
View the online exhibition .
Meet the speakers
Bahar Baser is Professor in Politics and International Relations at Durham University. Bahar is an expert in the area of diaspora studies, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, with a regional focus on the Middle East. She has conducted extensive research on diaspora engagement in peace processes, post-conflict reconstruction and state-building in the Global South. Bahar is is the editor of the Kurdish Studies Series published by Lexington Books and the co-editor of Diasporas and Transnationalism Series published by Edinburgh University Press. She is also a senior associate research fellow at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA), Stellenbosch University, South Africa and visiting professor at Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland.
Duygu Atlas is part of the research team of the 'Bridging Identities' project. She is a historian and documentary maker and completed her doctoral studies at Tel Aviv University's School of History in 2019, with her dissertation titled 'Turkey’s Jewish Minority between Turkey and Israel from 1948 to the 1990s: Israel’s Impact on a Diaspora Community and its Identity Formation.' Her research centres on Kurdish and Jewish minorities in Turkey, and more recently, on Kurdistani Jews in Israel.
Mesut Alp is part of the research team of the 'Bridging Identities' project. He is a photographer and documentary maker, and is also a graduate of Ege University's Department of Near Eastern Archaeology. He participated in numerous excavations across Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia, worked at the Mardin Museum and served as a lecturer at the Mardin Artuklu University.
Moayed Assaf is part of the research team of the 'Bridging Identities' project. He is a Kurdish academic and photographer. Moayed was born in 1975 in what would become the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and experienced a succession of international wars, anti-Kurdish persecutions perpetrated by the regime of Saddam Hussein, internal uprisings, Kurdish civil war, and compulsory relocations during his childhood. Since 2015, Moayed has instigated a series of photography projects in France, working with displaced people and children in care, helping them to hone their visual sensitivity and express their subjective feelings and reflections on their daily lives and experiences of migration.
This event will be chaired by Robert Lowe.
Robert Lowe is Deputy Director of the 杏吧论坛 Middle East Centre, Co-Convenor of the Kurdish Studies Series at the 杏吧论坛 Middle East Centre and Co-Editor of the Kurdish Studies Series published by I.B. Tauris. His main research interest is Kurdish politics, with particular focus on the Kurdish movements in Syria.
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