Mr. Suhail Gharaibeh

Professional Background

Suhail Gharaibeh is a doctoral student of history at Columbia University. He holds a master's degree in history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, as well as a master's degree in history and literature from Columbia University. He earned his bachelor's degree in history from New York University, where his senior thesis on urbanism in Paris and Algiers during the Second French Empire received multiple awards. Additionally, he served as an editor of NYU’s undergraduate history journal and student newspaper. 

Mr. Gharaibeh’s current research focuses on the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust in France and French North Africa. He has worked extensively in archives in Paris, including the municipal archives, the Archives of the Prefecture of Police, and at the Mémorial de la Shoah. His work approaches the racialization of Jews from a social and spatial perspective, interrogating how antisemitic discourses and acts of violence “mark” people, buildings, objects, and sites as Jewish in urban space. 

Mr. Gharaibeh’s research also examines Jews’ experiences of and responses to persecution and genocide, including Jewish testimonial practices during and after World War II. His microhistorical research draws upon archival documentation in French, German, English, Italian, and Spanish, including newspapers, photographs, police files, written and oral testimonies, and list materials and prisoner files from prisons and camps. 

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow, Suhail Gharaibeh will conduct research on the social dynamics of migration, displacement, and deportation across the Mediterranean among Jewish persecutees from French North Africa during World War II. 

Mr. Gharaibeh’s research investigates how the Vichy regime extended its policies of racial and political persecution to colonial North Africa, and the social and political realities that shaped the experiences of North African Jews in the metropole during the Holocaust. By questioning the mass movement of individuals, families, and groups across the Mediterranean, he questions what these shifts reveal about the position of Maghrebi Jews in the social geography of the genocide.

This fellowship allows Mr. Gharaibeh access to the Museum’s extensive records on metropolitan France and colonial North Africa, as well as the records of the International Tracing Service Digital Archive, which attest to the wartime and postwar fates of Maghrebi Jews. Additionally, he plans to consult the Museum’s extensive collections of written and oral testimonies, which contain crucial details about the microsocial dynamics of persecution. 

Residency Period: June 1, 2025–August 31, 2025