Christopher B. Silver

Christopher Benno Silver is an American academic of modern history, curator and writer based in Canada. He is known for his publications on the 20th-century cultural history of the Maghreb countries Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, with a focus on Jewish-Muslim relations through music.

Life and career

Early life, higher education and academic career Silver grew up in Los Angeles in a Jewish family. His introduction to the music industry came through his father, Roy Silver. Although not a musician himself, Roy Silver managed the careers of artists including Bob Dylan, Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, among others.

He received his B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. He continued for his M.A. in 2014 and his PhD. in 2017 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Following his C.Phil. thesis of 2015, he published his book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa in 2022. According to the publishers it is "the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia", providing insight into Jewish-Muslim relations through music. As of 2026 Silver is associate professor in Jewish history and culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal. His subjects of interest are modern Jewish history, the history of 20th-century North Africa and the Middle East, as well as popular culture and music. His 2022 book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa has been noted for its methodological approach of treating sound recordings as historical sources. As mentioned in a scholarly review, Silver used records as primary evidence for historical analysis rather than viewing them solely as musical artifacts. Silver's archival research, including the collection and digitization of historical recordings and collaboration with descendants of performers, explores themes of memory and loss alongside the histories of music and politics. Following an interdisciplinary approach to the fields of North African history, Jewish and Islamic studies as well as sound studies, this research is not primarily based on official and academic documents or elite narratives, but through "music that moved across borders, communities, and decades." Gharamophone also has published the digital album Glimpses of North Africa's Musical Past: 1930-1956 with songs by Jewish North African musicians for free streaming. Until 2017, Silver also published his blog Jewish Maghrib Jukebox, covering his special area of interest in Jewish musicians and the music industry in the Maghreb.

Awards and recognition

L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), (2023) Certificate of Merit for the 2023 Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections

Selected publications

Reception The book Recording History was peer-reviewed in journals including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Canadian Jewish Studies and Musica Judaica Online Reviews. The latter noted that Silver realized the importance of popular, aural and mass culture in understanding the MENA region. The Journal of North African Studies named the book "a landmark in the study of the musical cultures of North Africa", and the Tamazgha Studies Journal remarked on the book's "unique corpus of shellac records, forgotten archives, and a decade of ethnographic and archival research", calling it "a compelling narrative that fuses microhistory with broader regional analysis."

Silver's work has also been presented in specialized and general newsmedia, including the Holocaust Enyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Times of Israel, the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, Qantara.de, the New Books Network, History Today, the Jewish Review of Books, Rebooting Jewish Life, and Jadaliyya, as well as in various podcasts.