Cynthia Kaplan Shamash’s The Strangers We Became tells the story of her “journey from childhood in Iraq to adulthood as a practicing dentist in New York,” with pit-stops in Turkey, Israel, the Netherlands, and England. Read in light of today’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis, Shamash’s memoir is a reminder that the region’s contemporary decline into brutal intolerance can be traced back to the mid-20th century attacks on the region’s Jews.
Israeli musician Shlomo Bar began championing Eastern music as high art in the 1970’s. In the process, Bar composed a number of songs that have become Israeli classics, including his recollection of life in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains: “Etslaynu be’Kefar Todrah” (“By Us, in the Village of Todrah”).
Judeo-Persian artist Shulamit Nazarian (Photo courtesy of Farhang Foundation)
Painting by Persian-Jewish women in the United States has become “a distinct part of the many-faceted community.” Why do so many Persian-Jewish women paint? Two possible reasons: 1.) painting was a kind of liberation “from the rigid life of the Persian-Jewish community,” and 2.) they are channeling to the canvas an existing Persian-Jewish love of art, from “the design of homes, architecture … (to) poetry, books, (and) drawing.”
What was Sephardi life like in the Ottoman Empire? Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 is a study of the various dimensions of Ladino-speaking Jewry, including “everyday life, violence and societal transformation, movements and ideologies, World War II, the diaspora and émigré circles, and the emergence of Sephardi studies.” The book shines a light on “Sephardi Jewish engagement with the modern world,” such as “an editorial in 1900 condemn[ing] Jewish women for singing in cafés on the Sabbath,” and, “in 1904 a Sephardic lawyer writ[ing] of his hostility to the notion that the Jews should reconcile with Spain.”
Sephardi Lives Co-Editor Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Photo courtesy ofUCLA)
12 November at 7PM at The Center for Jewish History 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY
Cynthia Kaplan Shamash’s coming of age was profoundly shaped by the experience of exile. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the front door was sealed with wax. Hear the author talk about her memoir, The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq’s Last Jews, part of ASF’s Jews of Iraq Series.
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The American Sephardi Federation's Sephardi House is located at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St., New York, New York, 10011).