In Honor of Professor Ephraim Isaac, an Ethiopian-Yemenite Jewish scholar, Founder of the Institute for Semitic Studies, 1st Professor/Co-Founder of Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies and namesake of AAAS’ Award for Excellence in African Studies, recipient of the Jewish Africa Conference’s “Moses, The African: Jewish Leadership Award,” speaker at the inaugural Combating Racism and Antisemitism Together: Shaping an Omni-American Future event, and Distinguished Member of the American Sephardi Federation’s Board of Directors, whose contributions to knowledge, understanding, peace, literacy, and love have touched millions of people. Harvard Divinity School, in recognition of Professor Isaac’s “almost absurd number of achievements” in the course of his sixty-year career, named him a Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Award Honoree in 2020 (click here to watch the online ceremony). To mark Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ 150th Anniversary, Professor Isaac and other graduates “whose work has had an outstanding influence on the world,” was featured in Colloquy (Summer 2022)
Click here to dedicate a future issue in honor or memory of a loved one
The American Sephardi Federation’s Sephardi Ideas Monthly is a continuing series of essays and interviews from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought and culture that is delivered to your inbox every month.
The December 2022 issue of Sephardi Ideas Monthly explores and celebrates a trailblazing cultural event recently held in Harlem that was informed by a distinctly Sephardi sensibility. In order, however, to appreciate the event’s Sephardi dimension, we need to begin with the event itself. As Karen Lerhman Bloch, editor of White Rose Magazine, wrote in her cover story for The Jewish Journal:
On Monday, November 28 in the middle of the Trump/Kanye/Fuentes storm, what felt like the beginning of a revolution took place at the historic Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. At the very least, it felt like the beginning of a path back to Martin Luther King’s colorblind dream.
What was the occasion?
The Omni-American Future Project — an initiative conceived by the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP), and the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) to restrengthen the bonds between the Black and Jewish communities — hosted its second annual awards ceremony, “Straight Ahead: An Omni-American Future, Fighting Bigotry Together.”
And as Bloch describes it:
… the entire evening felt like a beacon of light, of possibility — hope during a dark and chaotic moment.
(Photos Courtesy of New York Social Diary)
The evening began by reimagining the history of the Black American – Jewish American alliance against bigotry. Instead, however, of starting with the Civil Rights Movement and the friendship between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, as is conventionally done, the program revisited the historic Carnegie Hall concert of 1938 when Jewish Jazz bandleader and musician Benny Goodman shared the stage with Black American master musicians, such as Cootie Williams, Count Basie, Johnny Hodges, Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson and, in so doing, desegregated a major American cultural institution, ten years before Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball. In this context, Bloch quotes one of the evening’s co-hosts and the co-director of the Omni-American Future Project, the ASF’s Director of Publications, Aryeh Tepper (19:35 in the video):
What gave Benny Goodman the strength to desegregate the stage? Benny wanted the best. He wanted the best musicians… In other words, a shared love of human excellence gave Benny the wherewithal and strength to hit segregation upside the head. Jazz is, after all, heroic music. Go back and listen to ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ The generation that danced to that song defeated the Nazis.
The Black-Jewish alliance during the Civil Rights Movement was then Chapter Two, as Tepper delineates:
The same triumphant sense of life, what Ralph Ellison referred to as the ‘rock bottom sense of reality coupled with the sense of the possibility of rising above it,’ the sense of life that transforms obstacles into blessings and is blessedly free of resentment, that says yes to all of life, animated the Civil Rights Movement.
As for Chapter Three, Bloch felt it being written:
… that night in Harlem. Tepper suggested calling it ‘The Omni-American tradition as the cultural complement to the Civil Rights Movement.’
The Omni-American tradition gets its name from Albert Murray’s 1970s classic collection of essays, The Omni-Americans, and it’s constituted by the cultural, artistic and spiritual forms that grew out of Black American culture and that transmit a heroic sense of life while remaining receptive to human vitality, no matter the origin. To be clear, while the tradition was developed by Black Americans, anyone with humility can learn it. As Tepper explained:
The Civil Rights Movement taught us that when we judge, we should look at the individual and focus on the content of his or her character. From the beginning the Omni-American tradition has seen through race in order to celebrate human excellence, wherever it’s found.
Tepper shared hosting duties with Greg Thomas, writer, thinker, and the CEO and Co-Founder of the JLP, and music was provided and the atmosphere was enlivened by the Itamar Borochov Quartet. Speakers included David Bernstein, Clifford Thompson, Dr. Pamela Paresky, Ian Rowe, Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, and Roya Hakakian. The event concluded with an awards ceremony. The Omni-American Young Leaders Award was given to writer, host of the popular podcast “Conversations with Coleman,” and musical artist Coleman Hughes, while celebrated Harvard professor, political theorist, public intellectual, and Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics Danielle Allen received the Albert Murray Award for Omni-American Excellence. Last year’s award recipients were Representative Ritchie Torres and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Wynton Marsalis, respectively.
So what was the Greater Sephardi angle? First consider some of the participants and their contributions to the evening.
(Photos Courtesy of the Organizers)
The Iranian American Jewish poet, journalist, and writer Roya Hakakian (43:40 in the video), told a beautiful Persian-American story, tracing how, growing up in Iran, she imbibed the idea from the ruling regime that Harlem was the symbol of American “shame.” However, what she subsequently learned after emigrating to America, and what was being celebrated that evening, precisely in Harlem, was that Harlem was the place where “a deeper vision of America, Albert Murray’s Omni-American vision, was articulated and affirmed.” Murray, you see, lived and wrote in the heart of Harlem, on 132nd street.
The Director of the Sephardic Educational Center, teacher, writer and communal leader, R’Daniel Bouskila (1:06:50 in the video), read a poem, “Pas de Deux” (a “Dance for Two”) from Murray’s collection, Conjugations and Reiterations. Murray spoke French when stationed with the U.S. Military in Morocco during the 1950s, and R’ Bouskila comes from a French-speaking Moroccan-Algerian American-Jewish home. The body of “Pas de Deux” is the English-language “dancing of an attitude” that Bouskila read in the spirit of Murray’s declaration that “poetry… don’t mean a thing / minus that insouciant element / of swing.” R’ Bouskila explained to the mixed Black American – Jewish American audience that, coming from a traditional Sephardi home where spirituality is often articulated via texts composed by Sephardi poets with a distinct swing of their own, reading a poem can be a religious experience. Bouskila recited Murray with gusto and, when done, offered as a coda, “I feel like I was describing a Sephardi holiday service.”
Itamar Borochov is an Israel-born, Brooklyn-based and world-class jazz musician and bandleader who is musically bi-lingual and at home in be-bop and Eastern musical traditions. An old friend of the ASF and winner of the 2020 edition of the LetterOne Rising Stars Jazz Award, Borochov is known for playing “Sephardi Jazz,” using the music’s vocabulary to “elaborate, extend and refine,” to use Murray’s terms, sounds that he absorbed growing up in the Sephardi-Arab-Israeli port city of Jaffa and that link Manhattan jazz clubs to family traditions from Central Asia. At the event, Borochov not only played classic songs from the jazz tradition, he also shared his eastern infused and deeply swinging original tune “Bayyat Blues” (1:14:30), “bayyat” being the name of an eastern musical mode, or scale.
Greater Sephardi notables such as Prof. Ronnie Perelis, Ethiopian-Yemenite Prof. Ephraim Isaac, and Baghdad-born artist Oded Halahmy were in attendance, and if we’re looking for purely ethnic connections, David Bernstein is Iraqi-Jewish on his mother’s side.
But the event of course didn’t highlight purely ethnic connections. It was, after all, conceived to be a counter-statement to ethnic essentialism of any kind, offering instead the receptivity at the heart of the Omni-American cultural tradition as a cultural modus operandi. This orientation points to the deeper Sephardi dimension.
(Photos Courtesy of New York Social Diary)
What was the deeper Sephardi dimension of the evening? R’Bouskila also participated in the Omni-American Future Project’s inaugural event in 2021, and in his remarks during that event, Bouskila called it “super significant” that the American Sephardi Federation was facilitating the connection between the Jewish world and the Omni-American tradition “Super-significant,” but also entirely fitting, for as the first Sephardi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, R’ Bension Meir Hai Uziel, said in a passage that reflects the uncomplicated and self-confident Classical Sephardi approach to cultural exchange:
Each… nation which respects itself… desires to bring in all that is good and beautiful, that is helpful and glorious to their national [cultural] treasure.
(Hegyonei Uziel, vol. 2, p. 127; tr. R’Marc Angel)
And what was true of the first event remained true of the second. The way of Classical Sephardi Judaism is to be open and receptive to the best that is thought and said, “to receive,” as Maimonides wrote, “the truth from whomever who says it,” no matter the source. This culturally self-confident openness and receptivity was the deeper Sephardi contribution, which is to say, the particular Jewish cultural contribution, to the event.
Sephardi Ideas Monthly is very happy to share the Omni-American Future Project’s recent event with our readers. For those interested in seeing and reading for themselves, we share the following:
- Karen Bloch’s cover story for The Jewish Journal: “A Jazz Concert Relives a Dream”
- A YouTube video of the event itself: “Straight Ahead: An Omni-American Future, Fighting Bigotry Together”
- And Dr. Aryeh Tepper’s 10 November lecture, offered as part of the University of Arizona’s “Voices of Culture” series: “Equipment for Living: The Omni-American Tradition from Jean Toomer to Wynton Marsalis”
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The Monthly Sage החכם החודשי
Hacham Hisdai Almoshlino
(Scan courtesy of HeHaCham HaYomi)
The sage for the month of December, 2022, is Hakham Hisdai Almoshlino (1640-1728).
Born in 1640 in Tetuan, Morocco, young Hisdai learned Torah from Hakham Yitzhak Bibas and then served on the rabbinic court with R’ Bibas and Hakham David Hacohen. After Bibas and Hacohen passed away, Hakham Hisdai brought five of his students to join him on the court.
Hacham Hisdai was famous for his piety, and Jews and Muslims would come to receive his blessing. His son, Hakham Yitzhak Almoshlino, succeeded his father by eventually assuming the position of Chief Rabbi of Gibraltar.
Hakham Hisdai Almoshlino passed away on the 4th of Kislev, 5488 (1728). He authored two books: Mishmeret HaKodesh – explanations on RASHI’s commentary on the Torah; and Hessed El – sermons and commentary.
In the passage below from Hessed El, Hakham Hisdai teaches that one honors one’s parents when one lives with them and, so far from treating them like a burden, manages to honor them as well:
‘Visit your neighbor sparingly, lest he have his surfeit of you and loathe you.’ This means that one honors others more from afar than from nearby. The heart coarsens towards someone who is nearby and becomes a burden and bother, unlike someone distant, for whom the heart yearns and longs, and seeks to bestow kindliness. That is why King Solomon, may he rest in peace, wisely advises to ‘Visit your neighbor sparingly, lest he have his surfeit of you and loathe you.’ When a person, who has always lived with his father and mother, shares his home with them, they are likely to eventually become a burden. This is the meaning of the text, ‘When a person honors his father and mother, the Holy One, Blessed be He, says: I ascribe credit to them as if I dwelt between them and they honor Me as well’ – I know that you will always honor Me, but I do not commend you for this honor, since “From afar God is seen to me.’ Were I to dwell among you, you might not honor me. If you honor your father and mother, if they dwell among you, ‘I ascribe credit to them,’ despite My being distant, ‘as if I dwelt between them and they honor me as well.’ This is what is known as true honor. But if you do not honor your father and mother, despite your honoring Me, this is not honor; it is as though I would dwell among you as does your father, and you would not honor Me.
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From Generation to Generation: a Legacy of Faith and Tolerance
By David S. Malka
From Generation to Generation: a Legacy of Faith and Tolerance is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Shlomo Malka. It honors his memory as a Jewish scholar, a spiritual leader, and a great humanitarian.
David S. Malka is publishing this text as his personal contribution to legacy of Malka family, in the hope that this generation will re-discover their patriarch’s teaching and advance his message of faith and compassion on to the next generation.
From Generation to Generation: a Legacy of Faith and Tolerance is a message of love, tolerance, and pride in one’s heritage.
A Pizmonim: Sephardic-Hebrew Songs of the Middle East, Volume 1
By David Elihu Cohen
Pizmonim, a unity of poetry and song, have been an integral part of the Jewish People and may be traced in the Bible to the very beginning of our history.
The twelve selected Pizmonim contained in this booklet serve to perpetuate the Greater Sephardic culture and tradition of singing praise to the Lord on all joyous occasions.
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Upcoming Events or Opportunities
The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
Building your family tree with the Genie Milgrom databases
Join us as Genie Milgrom shows you the databases available and how to use them to build out your family tree and complete the application process.
Wednesday, 4 January 11:00AM EDT
(Complimentary RSVP)
Sign-up Now!
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
Las bases de datos de Genie Milgrom y la construcción de su árbol genealógico
Únase a nosotros mientras discutimos el proceso necesario para solicitar el Certificado de Herencia Sefardí. Le mostraremos las bases de datos disponibles y cómo usarlas para construir su árbol genealógico y completar el proceso de solicitud.
Miércoles, 4 Enero 1:00PM EDT
(RSVP gratis)
Regístrese Ahora!
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
A Yemenite Jerusalem Power Couple: The Story of Rabbi and Rabbanit Kapach
Join us for a movie and discussion!
A link to the film, Two Legacies three days before the program to watch at their leisure. Einat Kapach will join on Zoom to talk about making the movie, about her grandparents, their contributions to the Jewish world, and how we each gained from their legacy.
Wednesday, 11 January at 12:00PM EDT
(Tickets: $15)
Sign-up Now!
About the film:
Yosef and Bracha married when they were 12 in Sana`a, Yemen and lived together for close to 70 years. Yosef became absorbed in his books, while Bracha took care of the needy. Before he dies, Rabbi Yosef Kapach hands his granddaughter Einat, director of the film, a bundle of pages which uncover a secret he has kept close to his heart his entire life—the secret of the theological war that split the Yemenite Jewish community. The documents tell of his persecution as a young orphan by the Jews of Yemen, a persecution that continues until the day he dies in Israel. Having read these words, Einat sets out on a journey to understand why he chose her to pass on the legacy and how he managed to turn his life around from such a lonely point and to become a world-famous Jewish philosopher.
About the director:
Einat Kapach is a screenwriter and director who lives and creates in her native Jerusalem. A graduate of the Ma’aleh Film School with an MA from the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, Einat lectures on film and Jewish identity in different communities in Israel and abroad including small Jewish communities in the US and Africa. She directed the award-winning film Jephtah’s Daughterwhich played at numerous festivals around the world. She was a diarist in the film Peace Diarieswhich details the lives of Israelis and Palestinians over a six month period. Einat is frequently invited to lecture at various foundations and was a judge at the 2009 Jerusalem Film Festival. She recently directed the documentary film Two Legacies and her feature script At the End of a Long Daywon the Minister of Education’s award for Artists in the field of Jewish Culture.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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The Center for Hewish History with the American Sephardi Federation presents:
Citizen, Subject, National, Protégé
“In this talk, Jessica Marglin (University of Southern California) will trace the modern history of Jewish citizenship in North Africa and the Middle East, including nationality legislation; the abolition of dhimmi status; the status of Jews in European colonies; and their citizenship in independent nation-states.”
Thursday, 19 January at 7:00PM EDT
(Tickets: $8 general; $5 members, seniors, students)
Sign-up Now!
About the Speaker:
Jessica Marglin is Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean(Princeton University Press, 2022).
This lecture is part of the Sid Lapidus Lecture Series, programs created in partnership with the exhibition How Jews Became Citizens: Highlights from the Sid Lapidus Collection. Click here for information about the exhibit.
The exhibit and program have been made possible by the generous support of Sid and Ruth Lapidus, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
Warriors and Mystics
Iran’s Jewish community is one of the oldest diaspora communities in the world. But is there more to those 2700 years than Queen Esther and the Islamic Revolution? This talk examines the lesser-known parts of Iran’s Jewish History, a vast story of prophets, autonomous nations, divergent sects, epic poetry, and political intrigue. Through the music, languages, foods, writings, traditions, and stories of two millennia, along with their ties to neighboring and faraway communities, the Jews of Iran have forged a culture at once Persian and Jewish, with traditions and aesthetics uniquely their own. In this two-part series, we will explore notable personalities in this rich history, from over 1,500 years ago and more recently.
On Sundays
22 January at 12:00PM EDT
29 January at 12:00PM EDT
(Registration is required for each session; Tickets: $11)
Sign-up Now!
About the speaker:
Alan Niku is a filmmaker, writer, and scholar of Mizrahi culture from San Luis Obispo, California, based in Los Angeles. A native speaker of Persian, he spends his time learning related Jewish languages, deciphering Judeo-Persian manuscripts, and interviewing community members about their stories. He is also a musician and an amateur chef, teaches history and Jewish heritage at various levels, and seeks to educate the world about the underrepresented cultures of the Middle East through his writing and films.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
1925-1979:
How Iran’s Jews Flourished & Helped Iran Prosper
Join story-breaking Iranian American journalist Karmel Melamed for a look at how the Jews or Iran were at the forefront of arts, academia, international trade, industry, technology, medicine, and engineering before the Islamist revolution and persecution under the Khomeinist regime.
Monday, 23 January at 12:00PM EDT
(Tickets: $10)
Sign-up Now!
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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The American Sephardi Federation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, the Sephardic Foundation on Aging, and Shearith Israel League Foundation proudly present:
Kontar i Kantar:
The 6th Annual New York Ladino Day
Curated by Jane Mushabac and Bryan Kirschen
Featuring:
Tony- and Grammy-nominated Broadway star Shoshana Bean
A conversation with Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
Judith Cohen, Sing Me a Story, on Sephardic Romansas
Musical Finale, Susana Behar and guitarist Michel Gonzalez
In-Person! Also on Zoom
Sunday, 29 January at 2:00PM EDT
(Early Bird Tickets are $20)
Sign-up Now!
Sign-up for Zoom Now!
Ladino is a bridge to many cultures. A variety of Spanish, it has absorbed words from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, French, Greek, and Portuguese. The mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, Ladino became the home language of Sephardim worldwide. While the number of Ladino speakers has sharply declined, distinguished Ladino Day programs like ours celebrate and preserve a vibrant language and heritage. These programs are, as Aviya Kushner has written in the Forward, “Why Ladino Will Rise Again.”
Since 2013, Ladino Day programs have been held around the world to honor Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish. January 29th marks New York’s 6th Annual Ladino Day hosted by the American Sephardi Federation.
© Rhodes, mid-19th century Sephardi & Romaniot Jewish Costumes in Greece & Turkey. 16 watercolours by Nicholas Stavroulakis published by the Association of the Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens, 1986.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
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ASF Broome & Allen & ADL Collaborative for Change Fellow Isaac de Castro presents:
Entre Diasporas: Telling the Latin-American Jewish story. Contando la historia judía latinoamericana
Tell your story. Cuenta tu historia.
We’re looking for first-generation Latino Jews in the United States who immigrated because of political and social turmoil. Jews of Sephardic descent from Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela that now reside in the Miami area will be given priority, but others are welcome to apply as well.
Fill out this form to be considered as an interviewee for this project. After you’ve submitted, we will be in touch promptly to set up a preliminary phone call.
Click here for more information.