In the second half of the twentieth century, approximately twenty thousand Jews emigrated from North Africa to Canada. Most of them were from Morocco, and most settled in and around Montreal. Yolande Cohen, a historian at the Université du Québec à Montréal and herself a Moroccan Jewish immigrant to Canada (via France), has spent much of her career collecting and analyzing narratives of this migration—its motivations, its traumas, its memories.

Cohen is the author of two new books, Moroccan Jews in France and Canada, and Migrations postcoloniales des Juifs du Maroc: Vers le Canada et la France, both published in 2025, and she joins the show to discuss not only the difficult histories she traces in her work but also the ways in which those histories have been received, challenged, and often ignored by Canada's Moroccan Jewish community.