Golden Threads and The Jewelers of the Ummah Book Talk with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Beya Othmani

Join us on Saturday, March 22 at 6pm to celebrate the launch of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s debut children’s book, Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2025). Azoulay will be joined by curator Beya Othmani to discuss the book alongside her recent publication The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024). Expanding upon a series of letters in which she examines colonial violence and uncovers pathways to lost ancestral wisdom, Azoulay wrote Golden Threads as an invitation to her grandchildren, who were born when the Jewish Muslim world was already destroyed, to inhabit this ancestral world, and believe with others that it can be restored.

About Golden Threads
Rachelle is a young girl living in Fès, Morocco in 1920. Surrounded by a warm community of friends, family, and craftspeople—both Jewish and Muslim—Rachelle spends her days playing with other young girls in her neighborhood, trying on her grandmother’s amulets, playing jokes on a nosy photographer, and watching her parents as they spin delicate threads made of gold at their jewelry workshop each day. Life in Rachelle’s neighborhood, the mellah, is busy, nourishing, and filled with magic. But rumors of a machine (or is it a monster?) coming from across the sea threaten to change the mellah and the lives of its craftspeople forever. Banding together with her grandmother, her parents, and the other jewelry makers, Rachelle and four of her friends work together to put a stop to the machine’s arrival—but only time will tell if they can save the vibrant world of the mellah and its beautiful golden threads for good.

Golden Threads is illustrated by Hagar Ophir and designed by Haitham Haddad.

About The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World
Jewelry-making was a profession that marked the Algerian Jews’ place in the world they shared in the ummah, the borderless community of Muslims. The objects they crafted continue to unsettle the clear-cut separation of Jews from Muslims and of Jews from Algeria. In this jewelry and in the history of those who made, wore, and sold it, Azoulay finds a path to inhabit the Jewish Muslim World and revive the wisdom of her ancestors.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a filmmaker, curator, and professor at Brown University, where she teaches political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture. She is the author of many books, including Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Her film trilogy, Unlearning Imperial Plunder, consists of Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder I (2019), The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023), and Alf layla wa layla (One Thousand and One Nights, 2025).

Beya Othmani is an art curator from Algeria and Tunisia. Her most recent curatorial projects include the three-part exhibition series "Cantando Bajito" at the Ford Foundation Gallery, NYC (2024), "Aracanes" at rizhome Gallery, Algiers (2024) and the Ljubljana 35th Graphic Arts Biennial (2023). Previously, she took part in the curatorial teams of various projects with sonsbeek20→24 (2020), the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale (2019), and the Dak’Art 13 Biennial (2018), among others, and was a curatorial assistant at the Berlin-based art space, SAVVY Contemporary. Her projects explored feminist modes of creative resistance, post-colonial histories of print-making, and the construction of racial identities in the arts in colonial and post-colonial Africa, along with other themes. Currently, she is the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Fellow for Africa at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where she conducts research, plans programs, and serves as co-editor of the online platform post.moma.org.