The picnic blanket is lumpy, the ants bite, and the food is sandy: but you see so much more when you’re eating on the ground. The picnic and the portable camera came of age together in late and post-Ottoman society, and “vernacular” picnic photographs are a ubiquitous feature of the Sephardic photo album. This essay converses with the children, women, men, and objects that appear in these images, considering how Sephardic Jews relaxed and ate in nature at a time when so much was shifting around them. It also asks whether the scattered, globally diasporic, family-owned archive of the Sephardic photo album can be united to restore a lived, dusty, lusty image of late and post-Ottoman Jewish life.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. The recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Jewish Book Awards, Stein is the author and editor of ten books, many of them award-winning. Her most recent books include Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022) and Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (FSG/Macmillan, 2019), which was named a Best Book of 2019 by The Economist and an Editor’s Choice Book by the New York Times Book Review.

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