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A Brazilian, Moroccan and Israeli singer brings her unique North African sound to NYC
(New York Jewish Week) — Though she grew up in Israel, Tamar Bloch’s childhood was a mishmash of cultures. With a Moroccan mother and Brazilian father, Bloch often heard Portuguese and Arabic alongside Hebrew, and felt connected with the music from all three cultures.
It wasn’t until she was in her early 20s, however, that Bloch discovered the language and culture of “Haketia,” a Romance language once spoken by Sephardic Jews in North Africa. Haketia has elements of Darija (Moroccan Arabic), Spanish and Ladino.
“I was hooked immediately,” Bloch, 33, told the New York Jewish Week. She could only find ethnographic recordings of Haketian songs at the Israel State Archives and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which she painstakingly transcribed and re-recorded herself — becoming the first modern artist to record an album in Haketia.
Over the last decade, Bloch — who goes by the stage name Lala Tamar; Lala is a Moroccan honorific meaning “Lady” or “Miss” — has traveled the world touring her music, working with bands and promoting the language and sound of Haketia.
This weekend, Bloch is traveling to New York from her home in Essouria, Morocco to perform several concerts at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The New York Jewish Week caught up with her to talk about her performances in the United States and what Haketia means to her.
New York Jewish Week: How did you become aware of Haketía and then decide to pursue it in your music?
Bloch: I did not know it as a kid. I grew up with a mom who did speak Darija, which is Moroccan Arabic, which integrated and mixed inside Haketia, and with a dad who was born in Brazil, so there was Portuguese and a lot of Latin music in the house.
So I grew up with the basics of Haketia at home — the words and the Latin languages and the Arabic languages surrounding me. But I never really spoke it because they were speaking it with the older generations, with my grandparents and not with us, the kids.
When I grew up a bit I fell in love with Moroccan music. I happened to hear Haketia music. Immediately, I was hooked. For me, it was a very condensed cultural combination of my background, of the way I grew up. Not only literally, with the words and the language, but also musically because it has this combination of Spanish and Andalusian music and North African music. It’s all fused together in Haketia. I decided that I needed to investigate and to search for more of this music. These songs were never really recorded in an artistically contemporary way. If anything, they were recorded for the sake of preservation as a part of ethnographic research for universities. But it was not out there as music for everybody. I felt that this music deserves to be heard and to be served to everybody. It doesn’t have to be a part of a long forgotten tradition that’s lost in the archives.
What has been like the most meaningful part of the last decade of bringing Haketia back into the modern world and of touring your music around the globe?
I think that the biggest moment was when I got into the playlist of Galgalatz in Israel, which is one of the country’s most popular radio stations. One of the singles got into a playlist, and it was the first time that Haketia was played on contemporary, popular radio. That was really exciting. Also when we released our album. Even though it was in the middle of COVID, so it did not get any of the attention we were expecting for it, it was still exciting to to release an album in this in this lost language, and to hear people play it at parties and to have people sending me videos in restaurants. It’s always exciting to hear it.
I didn’t feel like I had a mission to make Haketia or this music more mainstream. It just happened because I felt that this music was relevant for me. I felt very much connected to it in a way that made me just release it as if there was nothing different about it, as if I would be singing anything else.
Why did you decide to move to Morocco from Israel during the pandemic?
I started performing in Morocco and realized that it’s always been the source of my inspiration, the fountain of my creation. At one of the festivals that I did there, I met Maalem (Master) Seddik, a Muslim musician that teaches Gnawa, a specific style of religious Moroccan music that I was fascinated by and, also, I was fascinated by the connection with the Jewish history in Morocco. I was waiting for the opportunity to go and study with him and then COVID struck and I had no job, of course.
Also, my inspiration and everything in my life that I create comes from Morocco. (During the 18th and 19th centuries, Jews made up nearly half of the population of Essouira — then called Mogador.) So when I was not singing I felt that my fountain was being dried out, so I already had this dream of going to study with him and I managed to find a way to get into Morocco which was really complicated at the time. He [Seddik] was waiting for me and welcomed me in. I started studying with him and he really adopted me, almost as a daughter, cooking for me, making me all these Jewish foods that he knows how to make from his neighbors and all his Jewish friends, and I just stayed. I have a lot of followers and an audience in Morocco as well as a lot of musicians that I work with so for me, it really felt like home from the beginning.
How does it feel to be performing in New York for the first time?
I have been doing online shows for Lincoln Center, but I’ve never performed physically in New York. It’s really exciting. I can’t describe how blissful we feel to come all this way. It’s a really big honor for my band’s first live performance in the United States to be at Lincoln Center.
I can only imagine how it will be because I don’t know. I can say I perform around the world, more than in Israel these past few years. I feel that this music has something that just can reach people from whatever background they come from. I hope that’s going to be the case as well, here in New York and New Yorkers are very open minded, very aware of what’s happening around the globe culturally.
Lala Tamar will perform a series of five concerts between May 5-7 at Lincoln Center for Performing Arts (113 West 60th St.). To find concert times and purchase tickets (choose-what-you-pay), visit their website.
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The post A Brazilian, Moroccan and Israeli singer brings her unique North African sound to NYC appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish
Many people today prize the Yiddish of native speakers who grew up in Eastern Europe before World War II, viewing it as a mark of linguistic authenticity.
As a language of daily life that millions of Jews spoke in a range of regional dialects, Yiddish had, over the centuries, become enriched with many words and idioms that were unique to a specific location.
More than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, very few of those speakers are still around. As a result, the Yiddish they spoke is deemed precious. Thanks to a new online resource, in which dozens of Holocaust survivors talk about their lives before, during and after the war, anyone can now hear the language of that bygone era.
There are already a number of resources that document the Yiddish of these native speakers. Among the earliest examples are 28 audio recordings made by David Boder, a psychologist who traveled from the United States to Europe in 1946 to interview Holocaust survivors. He asked them about their wartime experiences in nine different languages, including Yiddish.
Another valuable source for hearing native Yiddish speakers is the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). In the late 1950s, linguist Uriel Weinreich launched this project, based at Columbia University, to study Yiddish dialects and folklore. Weinreich and his colleagues taped responses from over 600 European-born Yiddish speakers to a detailed survey of their language, with over 3,000 individual questions, as in, for example: “What games did you play as a child?”
One of the largest number of recordings of these Yiddish speakers can be found in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), launched in 1994. Based at the University of Southern California, the VHA holds almost 50,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Among these recordings, which were conducted in 32 different languages, are more than 600 entirely or partially in Yiddish. Until recently, only people who had access to the VHA, mostly through university libraries, were able to listen to this trove of Yiddish speakers as they relate their life histories. Thanks to a new online resource, known as the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), anyone can now hear these interviews.
The CSYE is the brainchild of Yiddish sociolinguist Isaac Bleaman who first worked with the VHA’s Yiddish interviews for his doctoral dissertation, where he compared the Yiddish spoken in the 2010s by Hasidim and Yiddishists. Through these recordings, Bleaman was able to explore how these two contemporary forms of Yiddish developed.
After joining the faculty at Berkeley, Bleaman sought a way to make the VHA’s Yiddish interviews more accessible to both linguists and students learning the language. Eventually, he received permission from the Shoah Foundation to use some 200 of its Yiddish videos for this purpose, and in 2022 he was awarded a multiyear grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the CSYE.
Creating this online resource entails manually transcribing the interviews, which are rendered both in transliteration and in the Yiddish alphabet. This is a painstaking process that relies on skilled speakers of Yiddish as well as other languages that the survivors may have included in the interviews. The transcripts, when synced with the videos, enable users of the CSYE to search the interviews for specific terms and topics.
A database on the CSYE lists each survivor’s name, city of birth, gender, age and dialect of Yiddish (Central, Northeastern, or Southeastern). The website also features an interactive map, showing the location of each survivor’s hometown, grouped by dialect. A different map shows where the VHA interviews were recorded in the 1990s. Ranging across Europe, the Americas, Australia and Israel, they reflect the scope of the postwar Yiddish-speaking diaspora.
In this Yiddish interview, for example, Holocaust survivor Lazar Milamed talks about his childhood in a Ukrainian village, his experiences under the Nazis and his post-war life in Brooklyn.
The CSYE also offers an interactive page that enables users to generate their own word maps to explore the geographic range of words or patterns of speech.
To demonstrate how the CSYE can be used for linguistic research and for language learning, the website provides instruction on pronunciation, as well as examples of the East European Yiddish dialects (for example, which of the interviewees said nit for the word “not” vs. those who said nisht). To date, 171 interviews, totaling more than 300 hours, have been transcribed. When this process is completed, the CSYE explains on its website, it will provide public access to “the most extensive source of conversational Yiddish ever compiled,” which will “bring the voices and narratives of native Yiddish speakers into the classroom.”
For the Yiddish student, teacher and researcher, or anyone else who loves the language, the CSYE is an extraordinary resource. Listening to survivors recount their life histories is compelling, both for the experiences they recall and for the cherished language in which they speak.
The post Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Says US May Strike Iran Again but That Tehran Wants Deal
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may need to strike Iran again and that he had been an hour away from ordering an attack before postponing it.
Trump made the comments a day after saying he had paused a planned resumption of hostilities following a new proposal by Tehran to end the US-Israeli war.
“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Iran‘s leaders are begging for a deal, he said, adding that a new US attack would happen in coming days if no agreement was reached.
The United States has been struggling to end the war it began with Israel nearly three months ago. Trump has previously said that a deal with Tehran was close, and similarly threatened heavy strikes on Iran if it did not reach an accord.
The US president is under intense political pressure at home to reach an accord that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for global supplies of oil and other commodities. Gas prices remain high and Trump‘s approval rating has plummeted as congressional elections loom in November.
Oil prices settled lower on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made a lot of progress in talks and neither side wanted to see a resumption of the military campaign. “We’re in a pretty good spot here,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing, Vance acknowledged difficulties in negotiating with a fractured Iranian leadership. “It’s not sometimes totally clear what the negotiating position of the team is,” he said, so the US is trying to make its own red lines clear.
He also said one objective of Trump‘s policy is to prevent a nuclear arms race from spreading in the region.
IRAN PROMISES RESPONSE TO ANY NEW ATTACK
In Tehran, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said on X that pausing an attack was due to Trump‘s realization that any move against Iran would mean “facing a decisive military response.”
Iranian state media said Tehran‘s latest peace proposal involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of US forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the US-Israeli attacks.
Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, release of frozen funds, and an end to the US marine blockade, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi as cited by IRNA news agency.
The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran‘s previous offer, which Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
BOTH SIDES ‘CHANGING GOALPOSTS,’ SAYS PAKISTANI SOURCE
Reuters could not determine whether military preparations had been made for strikes that would mark a renewal of the war Trump started in late February.
Trump said on Monday that Washington would be satisfied if it could reach an agreement that prevented Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the Iranian proposal with Washington.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding, “We don’t have much time.”
CEASEFIRE MOSTLY HOLDING
The US-Israeli bombing killed thousands of people in Iran before it was suspended in a ceasefire in early April. Israel has killed thousands more and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in Lebanon, which it invaded in pursuit of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iranian strikes on Israel and neighboring Gulf states have killed dozens of people.
The Iran ceasefire has mostly held, although drones have lately been launched from Iraq towards Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, apparently by Iran and its allies.
The US seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing three US officials. The tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil, the report said.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they launched the war to curb Iran‘s support for regional militias, dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its missile capabilities, and create conditions for Iranians to topple their rulers.
But the war has yet to deprive Iran of its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium or its ability to threaten neighbors with missiles, drones, and proxy militias.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership, which had faced a mass uprising at the start of the year, withstood the superpower onslaught with no sign of organized opposition.
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Somaliland Says It Will Open an Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel to Reciprocate
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar meets with Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Somaliland, a self-declared republic in East Africa, will set up an embassy in Jerusalem soon, its ambassador said on Tuesday, after Israel became the first country to formally recognize it as an independent and sovereign state.
In turn, Israel is expected to set up an embassy in Somaliland‘s capital Hargeisa, Ambassador Mohamed Hagi said in a post on X.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Michael Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state in December, a move Somalia rejected and termed a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty.
Over the years, Somalia has rallied international actors against any country recognizing Somaliland.
The former British protectorate hopes that recognition by Israel will encourage other nations to follow suit, increasing its diplomatic heft and access to international markets.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem would be another significant step in strengthening relations with Somaliland. Once opened, the Somaliland embassy would be the eighth embassy in Jerusalem, he said.
Most countries maintain their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv, although the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a small number of other countries have also established embassies there.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its capital. However, Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, where the holiest sites in Judaism are located, as the capital of a future state.