Marriage strategies in North African Jewish families and the romanticizing of the old Jewish quarters of Paris and Rome will be the focus of two free lectures presented under the auspices of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University.

On Sunday, September 24, scholar Joelle Bahloul, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, will be speaking on "Espousing French Culture: The Challenge of Assimilation among North African Jewish Women in Contemporary France." The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. at Temple Emanu-EI, 14450 West Ten Mile Road, Oak Park. This program, the George M. and Pearl A. Zeltzer Lecture on Women and Judaism, is cosponsored with Temple Emanu-EI. It will be followed by a reception. A second lecture entitled "Romancing the Stones: Rediscovering Jewish Identity in the Old Jewish Quarters of Paris and Rome" and will be held at 3 p.m. in the Polish Room, Manoogian Hall, on the Wayne State campus. The lecture is cosponsored with the Department of Anthropology.

Professor Bahloul has done extensive research on Jewish minorities in Western Europe and North Africa, gender, the family, Jews in the city, and collective memory and oral history. Her last book, The Architecture of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1996), is a study of these major aspects of Jewish identity among North African Jews who immigrated to France in the 1960s.

Both lectures are open to the public. For more information and reservations, please call the Cohn Haddow Center at (313j 577-2679 by Thursday, September 21.