Boum is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a historical bent concerned with the social and cultural representation of and political discourse about religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (2013) and the co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Morocco (2006) and the Concise History of the Middle East (2015). He is currently working on an ethnographic and historically grounded project on the monarchy, Jews and Holocaust politics in Morocco, 1930s-Present.