Beginning in 2012, I found an international community of historians and artists and cultural critics at the Glycines, a study center and residency run by the Catholic Diocese of Algiers. American researchers in particular who could no longer travel safely to the Middle East were turning to North Africa-and there were a lot of them. But as far as the cultural life of Algeria went, things weren’t so bad: there were international colloquiums, independent publishers, cultural visas, thriving scholarship. This was in 2017, two years before the end of the twenty-year regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been disabled by a stroke in 2013 and disappeared from public view. That’s all.” Constantine was different, he said, more conservative, less secular than Algiers. As I was leaving Algiers for Constantine, an hour east by plane, my friend Djamel, a taxi driver, fixer, and social critic, warned me not to tell anyone there that I was Jewish: “Just say you’re American.
