Special Lucette Lagnado, A”H, Memorial Edition

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12 July 2019

In Memory of Lucette Lagnado, A”H, recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, her first of two memoirs on her family's Egyptian-Jewish experience and emigration to the United States; avenging and award-winning investigative reporter for The Village Voice, NY Post, Forward; and, since 1996, The Wall Street Journal; dear friend and passionate supporter of The American Sephardi Federation, researcher (including for her forthcoming book) in the ASF’s National Sephardic Library & Archives, and frequent speaker and guest at the ASF’s programs; and proud Sephardic woman and member of the Manhattan Sephardic Congregation. Lagnado will be sorely missed by her family, friends, and many admirers.

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“There Were Once Jews Here”
By Lucette Lagnado, Tablet

After Israel triumphed against all odds in the Six-Day War, Arab rejectionists responded by taking revenge on the Jews still living in their midst. From Algeria to Iraq and points in between, local Jews were blamed for events which they had nothing to do with: “Even in those countries that were, as some of us like to say, ‘nice to the Jews’… there were terrifying demonstrations and expressions of hatred and venom.”

Bat Mitzvah Procession, Alexandria, Egypt, 1950s
(Photo courtesy of Diarna: The Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life)

Feature: Lucette Lagnado and Matti Friedman at The Center for Jewish History

Lucette Lagnado in conversation with Matti Friedman, Paul S. And Sylvia Steinberg Great Hall, The Center for Jewish History, 12 March 2019
(Photo courtesy of The Center for Jewish History)

In this fascinating conversation at The Center for Jewish History from March, 2019, two of the great journalists of our time, the recently deceased Lucette Lagnado, A"H, and Matti Friedman, both of whom composed searching and illuminating books on Sephardim and the Sephardi experience, discuss their careers in journalism, the process of research and writing, and Matti's new book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.

As Lagnado says to Friedman during the conversation, “what is really wondrous about what you have done...” is to bring attention to “the enormous Arab Jewish [*] population in Israel, which we have tended to see... through very clichéd terms... and we, and I speak as an Egyptian-Jew, were always kind of relegated. And here, in this book you have created an amazing oeuvre about us.”

The same could be said, in broad terms, for Lagnado’s memoirs, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World and The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn, as well as her reportage.

*By which she means Sephardim, amongst whom are, in her definition, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.

This program was presented by The Center for Jewish History with the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, and Jewish Book Council

Bonus Feature: Recording of HaTikvah from 1930s Tunisia

ASF’s “We Were Neighbors: Remembering Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Communities” began with this recording of HaTikvah from Tunisia. Shown here: Lucette Lagnado, ASF President David E.R. Dangoor, ASF Executive Director Jason Guberman, and André Aciman, Paul S. And Sylvia Steinberg Great Hall, The Center for Jewish History, 30 November 2016
(Photo courtesy of Chrystie Sherman)
Click here to see additional photos

Jews played an important role in the North African music industry during the first half of the 20th century. They recorded in a number of languages, including Hebrew, as a 1932 Tunisian recording of what would become Israel’s national anthem, HaTikvah, attests. What’s most remarkable, however, “is just how uncontroversial the release of Hatikvah in North Africa was at the beginning of the 20th century.” See: “Hatikvah in Tunis: A Rare 1930s Recording Surfaces” by Chris Silver, Jewish Maghrib Jukebox.

El Ghriba Synagogue, Djerba, Tunisia
(Photo courtesy of Diarna: The Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life)

“The Last of the Arab Jews”
By Lucette Lagnado, Wall Street Journal

The Jewish community of Djerba, Tunisia, is growing in size, an accomplishment community members ascribe to the protection of the government, and God. But the community’s deeply-rooted traditionalism is now facing a new challenge: a push from within for women’s education.

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American Sephardi Federation Presents:

The Marriage of Figaro
Adapted and directed by David Serero

Monday, 15 July at 8:00PM
Thursday, 18 July at 8:00PM
Sunday, 21 July at 6:00PM
Closing Night; Followed by After Party

Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City

Please register here

The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro) is a comic opera that pits the philander Count Almaviva against his wily valet, Figaro (David Serero), and his wise fiancée Susanna. Love, humility, and forgiveness triumph in harmonious song. Music by Mozart. Italian libretto by Lorenzo di Ponte, a Sephardi playwright in Italy.

The American Sephardi Federation and The Sousa Mendes Foundation present:

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Jewish Refugees She Saved: The Story of the S. S. Quanza
The New York première of the documentary film, Nobody Wants Us, 2019

Sunday, 11 August at 2:00PM

Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City

General admission: $20
Sponsor ticket: $120 includes VIP luncheon at 12:30 PM.
$100 of this ticket price is tax-deductible.
Money raised will help bring the film and educational materials into schools throughout the United States.

Please RSVP here
or call: 1.800.838.3006

Synopsis:
In 1940, a ship called the S.S. Quanza left the port of Lisbon carrying several hundred Jewish refugees, most of whom held Sousa Mendes visas to freedom. But events went terribly wrong, and the passengers became trapped on the ship because no country would take them in. Nobody Wants Us tells the gripping true story of how Eleanor Roosevelt herself stepped in to save the passengers on board because of her moral conviction that they were not undesirables (as the US State Department labeled them) but rather were future patriotic Americans. This is an episode in American history that everyone needs to know.

Program:
The film, which is 35 minutes in length, will be introduced by the filmmaker Laura Seltzer-Duny and followed by a panel discussion moderated by Michael Dobbs of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, author of The Unwanted.

Other participants will include:
Blanche Wiesen Cook, the leading world expert on Eleanor Roosevelt and the author of her three-volume biography.

Annette Lachmann, who was a passenger on the Quanza in 1940.

Kathleen Rand, whose father, Wolf Rand, was the passenger who successfully filed suit against the shipping company, forcing the vessel to remain in port until the conflict was resolved.

Stephen Morewitz, the leading world expert on the Quanza story, whose grandparents Norfolk, Virginia law firm of Morewitz & Morewitz was hired by Wolf Rand and successfully litigated the case.

Significance of the story:
According to Michael Dobbs, The Quanza incident is a timely reminder that individuals make a difference. Without visas supplied by the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, many of the Jewish passengers on board the Quanza might well have been stranded in Nazi-occupied Europe. Without the legal brilliance of a maritime lawyer named Jacob Morewitz, the ship would have been obliged to sail back to Europe. Without the intervention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the passengers would not have been permitted to land. It took three people, from entirely different backgrounds, to save dozens of lives that might otherwise have been lost.

The American Sephardi Federation & Consulate General of Spain at New York present:

Visados para la Libertad (Visas for Freedom)

On view until August

Center for Jewish History
15 W 16th Street
New York City

“The history of the Holocaust is not merely one of villains and their victims. There were also those who did not want to stand idly by in the face of tragedy; driven by their conscience, they decided to take action. Among these are the heroes, those who risked, or even sacrificed, their own lives to save others. However, there is also another group of individuals, whose actions behind the scenes, albeit more modest, are no less deserving of remembrance and tribute. They took advantage of the scope of Influence offered by their position or profession to protect and help, as far as was at all possible, Jews condemned to extermination in Europe.”

Embracing the Rituals of a Moroccan Wedding

A Joan Roth Photographic Journey, which opened on 17 June as part of The Morocco Conference (Uncommon Commonalities: Jews and Muslims of Morocco), continues in the
Leon Levy Gallery

On view until September

Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York City

About the Photographer
In addition to Morocco, Joan Roth traveled to Ethiopia before Operation Moses and again afterwards, Yemen, Bukhara, India, Israel, and photographed extensively in the United States. Her photographs of Jewish women are published, exhibited, and collected by museums and collectors worldwide. Some of Joan’s photographs are published in the book: Jewish Women: A world of Tradition and Change (Jolen Press, 1995).

Gloria Steinem has written the following appreciation: “Joan Roth has looked at the Jewish world as if women mattered, and therefore as if everyone mattered. Across all the boundaries of geography and language, there is not only a common world of belief, but a common world of women. We see into its intimacy through her eyes.”

Roth richly depicts the personal and historical dimensions of these women as they preserve and adapt centuries-old traditions amid varied cultural surroundings. The effect, in the words of Rocky Mountain art critic Mary Voltz Chandler, “is like opening a jewelry box filled with so many secrets women know but never told each other.”

Donate now and your tax-deductible contribution will help ASF preserve and promote the Greater Sephardi history, traditions, and culture as an integral part of the Jewish experience!

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The American Sephardi Federation is located at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th Street, New York, New York, 10011).

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