Emmanuelle Chriqui on Speaking Up Against Antisemitism in Hollywood: Maybe One Day I Can Play a ‘Complex and Fierce’ Jewish Woman
variety.comEmmanuelle Chriqui I was born in Montreal and raised in Toronto to a traditional French, Jewish and Moroccan family. My parents emigrated from Morocco with my older brother in tow in the mid- to late- 1960s.
As with so many immigrant stories, they came with very little and built a life for themselves that enabled my siblings and me to want for nothing.
My parents left Morocco because it became unsafe for Jews, a place my family had lived for hundreds of years. Jews lived in Morocco since 70 CE, after they fled there once the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews were exiled from their homeland.
A second wave emigrated to Morocco with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal starting in the late 1400s. Throughout the centuries, the Jews of Morocco faced periods of prosperity mixed with periods of severe persecution and pogroms, such as the Bloody Days of Fes in 1912, where 50 Jews were killed, and hundreds of their homes and shops were destroyed and damaged.
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