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The confluence of Jews and Communism has long been noted by scholars. However, most historiography has treated European contexts, with the addition of some work on the Americas and the Yishuv, but neglected the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Works that do purport to survey and compare the phenomenon across contexts have typically given the MENA short shrift. Further, most discussion of leftist Jewish politics halts after World War II, just when the story is gaining momentum in the MENA, particularly within anticolonial movements. In this article, I draw on Hannah Arendt's work on the so-called conscious pariah to bridge historiographies and link leftist Jews in the MENA, the Americas, and Europe. Using archival sources, newspapers, oral histories, and novels, I present Jewish involvement in the Parti Communist Marocain as a case study to examine the complications of Jewish involvement in leftist politics in concentric geographic, temporal, and historiographic circles. In so doing, I seek to complicate the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism and the reconciliation of Jewish affiliations and identities with the nation-state and the colonial.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893—with exhibits and participants streaming in from across the globe and 25 million visitors marveling at its palaces, pavilions, and foreign villages—is understood as a formative moment in Chicago's history. Less well documented, however, is the fair's significance for Jews, notably those living half a world away in Paris, Tetouan, Jaffa, and Smyrna. Yet they too were present. Their exhibits of crafts, art, and student accomplishments were on display in the largest of the fair's structures, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building, thanks to an unprecedented global constellation of philanthropists, luminaries, teachers, and students.

Jews are one of the few (indeed, if not the only) minorities that historically extended across the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, from Morocco to Iran, and everywhere in between. Until relatively recently, the trend in both Jewish and MENA historiographical circles was to segment Jews from Muslims (not to mention other minorities), reproducing colonial political strategy in narrative form. One cannot simply “add Jews and stir” to the narrative of the Middle East, just as one cannot “add women and stir” or any other population (incorrectly) deemed ancillary to major story lines and themes. As with

Heckman reviews Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israelite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895-1915 by Jonathan Sciarcon.