Mar 23 • Book talk and launch Golden Threads – Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

ArteEast and Storm Books are thrilled to present a book launch of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Golden Threads, published by Ayin Press, followed by a conversation between Azoulay and playwright Michael Zalta and Hadar Cohen.

Golden Threads is a beautifully illustrated tale of traditional crafts and communal power. It draws on a series of inspiring historical episodes in Fès, when Jewish and Muslim artisans organized together against the introduction of a new machine that threatened to replace their manual labor and compromise their cherished way of life. A book for both middle grade readers and for adults reading aloud to younger children, Golden Threads will take people of all ages on a journey into the multi-faith world of Morocco’s craftspeople, inspiring generative conversations about art, labor, community, and technology for years to come.

GOLDEN THREADS synopsis
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.

Bios
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).

Azoulay wrote her first children's book, 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. Golden Threads draws from research Azoulay conducted for The Jewelers of the Umma: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024). She lives in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Michael Zalta is a queer Syrian-American Jewish playwright, researcher, and arts facilitator. He is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he created a concentration in Media Theory, Arab Cultural Studies, Playwriting, and Human Rights practice

Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic and artist whose work focuses on multi-religious spirituality, politics, social issues, and community building. She is the founder of Malchut, a spiritual skill-building school teaching Jewish mysticism and direct experience of God. She teaches and consults in a variety of settings and formats, from one-on-one coaching to online group classes and in-person retreats.  Her podcast, Hadar’s Web, features community conversations on spirituality, healing, justice, and art. Hadar is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran.

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SUNDAY MARCH 23
5PM
Limited seated capacity
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Tickets $5
The price of the ticket can be used as a credit toward any purchase at Storm Books (valid day of event).

Limited seat capacity
Kindly RSVP