Alon Tam is a social historian of modern Egypt, and of its Jewish community. He has written about the social and political history of Cairo's coffeehouses, about Cairo's Jews and their place in its urban history, as well as on such topics that range from the Jewish press in Tangier, Morocco, to Blackface in Egyptian theater. Tam received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Penn, Columbia University, Tel Aviv University, and the University of California in Los Angeles.