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A New York celebration of Ladino aims to bust the myth that the Judeo-Spanish language is dead
(New York Jewish Week) — The sixth annual New York Ladino Day — which aims to celebrate and elevate Ladino culture in New York and throughout the world — will take place this Sunday at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan.
For the first time since the pandemic, the program will be conducted in person, though a livestream option is also available. This year’s theme is “Kontar i Kantar” — “Storytelling and Singing” — and will include a performance from Tony- and Grammy-nominated Broadway singer Shoshana Bean and a conversation with Michael Frank, author of “One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World,” as well as additional music-oriented speakers and performances.
“Music is certainly one of the domains in which the language is doing well and generating new interest and new music,” said Bryan Kirschen, a professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Binghamton University and one of the event’s organizers. (Kirschen was one of the New York Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36” in 2017.)
Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, was once the primary language spoken by Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. After the Jews’ expulsion in 1492, they brought language with them throughout the Ottoman Empire — Turkey, North Africa and the Balkans. Today, the estimated number of Ladino speakers around the world — mostly Sephardic Jews — ranges between 60,000 to 300,000, from fluent speakers to descendants who are familiar with some words.
Sephardic Jews were the first Jewish immigrants in New York, founding Congregation Shearith Israel in 1654, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. (It’s still in operation today at 2 West 70th St., where it has been since 1897.) Sephardic Jews remained the only active Jewish community in New York until the wave of German Jewish immigration in the early 19th century, followed by the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews that began at the tail-end of the 19th century.
Soon enough, Ashkenazi Jews quickly outnumbered New York’s Sephardic community, though Sephardic and Ladino culture continues to thrive today. Today, the main hubs for Sephardic and Ladino culture and education are the American Sephardi Federation and the Kehilla Kedosha Synagogue and Museum, a Greek Romaniote synagogue on the Lower East Side, said Kirschen, and there are large Sephardic synagogues in Canarsie, Brooklyn and Forest Hills, Queens that still conduct services in Ladino.
Ladino, said Kirschen, remains “a very living, in some ways thriving language, interestingly enough, particularly since the pandemic.”
Ahead of Sunday’s celebration — which is co-curated by Jane Mushabac, a professor emerita of English at City University of New York and a Ladino scholar and writer — the New York Jewish Week caught up with Kirschen to discuss the program, his personal interest in Ladino, and how Ashkenazi Jews can help uplift Ladino language and culture.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kirschen, far left, leads a panel discussion during the 2020 New York Ladino Day celebration. (Courtesy Bryan Kirschen)
New York Jewish Week: How did you become interested in Ladino culture? Are you from a Sephardic family?
I’m from an Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking family. So I’m not Sephardic. But for the past 15 years or so, I’ve been doing my best to learn as much about and embrace Sephardic culture as I can, and learn as much as I can about Ladino as well. My own interest stems from learning languages — I’m a Spanish professor at Binghamton University and I have also studied Hebrew for numerous years. So when I first came across Ladino as this Judeo-Spanish language, it interested me for a number of reasons. Once I started to meet actual speakers, it became so much more than just about the language — it became about celebrating and promoting the culture, the history, the connections, of course the food and the music.
What is the origin story of New York Ladino Day?
The idea of Ladino Day came about in 2013 — to have a day when communities around the world would celebrate all that remains. Originally, the day was selected to be during Hanukkah. But because there is no real central organization that governs the language — though there are different institutions, particularly in Israel, that try to foster the language and help promote it — Ladino Day grew in many different directions.
These days, some communities celebrate in January, some in February, some still in December. The National Authority of Ladino in Israel has their own International Day of Ladino in March. But the important thing is that communities all around the world are committed to celebrating it in their own ways.
As far as New York goes, the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan started holding a Ladino Day six years ago under the direction of my collaborator, Jane Mushabac, who is Sephardic from a Ladino-speaking family. I had been separately organizing Judeo-Spanish celebrations at a synagogue in Forest Hills, Queens, so the following year we joined forces and started co-curating the program together and have been doing that ever since.
The theme for this year’s program is “Kontar i Kantar.” How is this year’s theme different from years’ past?
Last year, we did “Salud y Vida,” which is a common expression for “health and life” and which was fitting for the time. Like most of the world, we had to pivot for the last two years and hold the program online. That afforded different opportunities — we were able to bring in speakers from around the world in a way that was much more doable, and we were able to open up our program to the world. Normally, we like to focus on New York talent and language, but the previous few years doing online events we were featuring different voices from the Sephardic world, so many new connections were made.
Because of that experience, this year’s program will be back in person at the Center for Jewish History, but with a hybrid option. The theme is “Kontar i Kantar,” “Storytelling and Singing.” It will both acknowledge how important music has been to Ladino, and celebrate how, in recent years, there have been so many initiatives for people to get together to share their stories in or about Ladino and to sing in Ladino.
Most Jews in New York have an Ashkenazi background. What role or responsibility do you think Ashkenazi Jews have in honoring and preserving Ladino culture?
Yes, the numbers [of Ashkenazi versus Sephardi Jews] don’t match up. Still, Sephardim from Turkey and areas of the former Ottoman Empire brought tens of thousands of Sephardic, Ladino-speaking Jews to New York City at the start of the 20th century, but as a minority — as a minority within the Jews, as a minority-speaking language, etc. So as someone who is Ashkenazi, I understand the enormous responsibility that I have to represent this language in a positive and genuine way to others and to work with and uplift speakers of Ladino.
Like Yiddish, thousands upon thousands of Ladino speakers were killed in the Holocaust, and those who didn’t experience the same fate often gave up their Ladino to assimilate. So many speakers today, who are typically in their 70s, 80s or 90s — or maybe younger generations who know some words here and there like foods, terms of kin — haven’t historically been so proud of using their Ladino. So aside from research and teaching, I’m really passionate about encouraging speakers and semi-speakers to use their language and to take pride in their language and ideally, to give them a platform to do so.
Bonus question: What are some common misconceptions about Ladino?
Ladino is not a dead language — that’s something I’m very vocal about. There are all sorts of ways to classify and categorize languages, but as long as they are living, breathing, speakers and semi-speakers, the language is living. So Ladino is a living language, despite all the obstacles. There are speakers and there are amazing resources out there willing to share their language and their story with people.
“Kontar i Kantar: The 6th Annual New York Ladino Day” will take place at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St.) on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. A livestream option is available. Buy tickets and find more information here.
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Antisemitism in Healthcare Is a Public Health Crisis — and Must Be Treated as One
Illustrative: Medical staff work at the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) ward at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, in Jerusalem January 31, 2022. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While healthcare providers pledge to “do no harm,” that oath is being violated as antisemitism seeps into the very spaces meant to embody compassion and healing. This was the warning issued by Dr. Jacqueline Hart, who organized a medical conference on this issue, and emphasized that antisemitism in medicine endangers both patients and practitioners.
At the conference, titled “Addressing Antisemitism in Healthcare,” a Jewish medical student described classmates who erased her from social media groups when they learned she was Jewish, and chalked the names of Hamas “martyrs” (those who brutally murdered Jewish men, women, and children) outside the school on the anniversary of October 7.
Other Jewish medical students were labeled “colonizers,” “oppressors,” and “bloodthirsty Zionists” by their peers. A genetic counselor who petitioned to stop her professional association from platforming a speaker with a history of antisemitic rhetoric received death threats from colleagues, and had to walk into work with a police escort. One Jewish resident recalled a patient who sneered, “I don’t trust the Jew to treat me,” while the supervising physician said nothing.
Jewish patients within the mental health sphere are experiencing what’s known as traumatic invalidation — the denial or dismissal of one’s pain, experience, and humanity. Research shows that when people are silenced, minimized, or erased in this way, the psychological impact can be as damaging as other recognized traumas, leaving deep scars of mistrust, hypervigilance, and isolation.
And when bias permeates hospitals and clinics, everyone is at risk. Patients hesitate to disclose important personal information, practitioners experience significant harm, and the public’s faith in medicine erodes.
For these reasons, antisemitism in healthcare must be treated as a public-health crisis.
A National Call to Action
America’s great medical hubs — Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, and others — have long set the pace for clinical innovation and high-quality care. Now they must lead again. Public and private leaders within healthcare must mobilize around confronting antisemitism head-on.
For example, longitudinal studies should be funded and conducted on the impact of antisemitism on patient outcomes, workforce retention, and mental health, and to develop antisemitism-reduction interventions — just as we do for smoking cessation or infection control.
Policies and practices that illuminate and address the issue must be implemented, including adding antisemitism metrics to existing patient-safety and employee-climate surveys; requiring academic medical centers and health systems to track and publicly report antisemitic incidents; and posting a Patients’ Bill of Rights that explicitly guarantees a care environment free from discrimination.
Healthcare facilities should review their dress codes and revise policies to prohibit staff from wearing political attire that could intimidate patients or colleagues. This will help to ensure that treatment environments remain safe and welcoming for all.
Mandatory training and education are needed, including integrating antisemitism education into cultural-competence curricula for students, residents, and continuing medical education for practicing clinicians.
Facilities should create anonymous reporting hotlines — either individually or collectively — where patients and workers can report antisemitic or other bias-related incidents without fear of retaliation, and facilities should also ensure there are penalties for retaliation.
Mental health services must be available for patients and health care workers who experience discriminatory treatment. Further, regulations should be reviewed and revised to guarantee that clinical environments remain free from antisemitic bias and other forms of hate.
Finally, medical schools’ LCME accreditation and hospital Joint Commission status should be made dependent on having an antisemitism-prevention program or training requirement.
Medicine’s social contract is built on safety, dignity, and trust. When Jewish clinicians who report antisemitism are told to “keep politics out of the hospital,” or Jewish patients fear revealing their identity, that contract is broken. The cure is neither complicated nor optional: study the problem, implement interventions, train the workforce, and enforce standards — just as we have done with other threats to public health.
What’s at stake is not only the well-being of Jewish patients and professionals, but the integrity of our healthcare system itself.
Sara A. Colb is the Director of Advocacy for ADL’s National Affairs division. Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern is the Director of Trauma Training and Services at Parents for Peace and a Lecturer in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where she supervises psychology interns and psychiatry residents.
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Dublin City Council Withdraws Proposal to Rename Park Honoring Former Israeli President Chaim Herzog
A plaque on a stone reads ‘Herzog Park’ commemorating Chaim Herzog as the Dublin City Council has prepared a motion to rename ‘Herzog Park’ to ‘Hind Rajab Park,’ Nov. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne
The city council in Dublin, Ireland on Sunday withdrew plans to discuss a proposal that would change the name of a park honoring former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, after the body faced heavy criticism from government officials in Ireland, the US, and Israel, as well as from members of Ireland’s Jewish community.
The Dublin City Council was set to vote on Monday on a motion to rename Herzog Park in Rathgar, in south Dublin. The park was named after the Belfast-born and Dublin-raised former president of Israel in 1995. Late Sunday, Dublin City Council Chief Executive Richard Shakespeare said he proposed to withdraw the motion from Monday’s agenda and recommended that the issue should be referred back to the commemorations and naming committee because correct legislative procedures were not followed. He apologized for “administrative oversight.”
Herzog was the son of the chief rabbi of Ireland and was educated at Wesley College in Dublin. He was Israel’s sixth president, from 1983 to 1993, and died in Tel Aviv in 1997. His older son, Michael, recently ended his term as Israeli ambassador to the US, while his younger son, Isaac, is the current president of Israel.
Herzog Park is located in an area that is the center for Jewish life in Dublin, and it is also close to the only Jewish school in the country, Stratford College. The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI) has its home base in Herzog House, which is located next to the park and Jewish school.
In June, a motion was submitted by Sinn Féin councillor Kourtney Kenny to rename the park Hind Rajab Park to commemorate a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car that had allegedly come under fire by Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip in January 2024 and was later found dead. Israel claimed its military troops were not in the area at the time.
Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said earlier on Sunday that the motion to rename Herzog Park should be “withdrawn in its entirety and not proceeded with.” He also called the proposal “a denial of our history … and will without any doubt be seen as antisemitic.”
“The proposal would erase the distinctive and rich contribution to Irish life of the Jewish community over many decades, including actual participation in the Irish War of Independence and the emerging State,” he explained. “It is overtly divisive and wrong. Our Irish Jewish community’s contribution to our country’s evolution in its many forms should always be cherished and generously acknowledged.” The prime minister added that the “motion must be withdrawn and I will ask Dublin City Council to seriously reflect on the implications of this move.”
Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Simon Harris called the proposal “wrong” and “offensive” in a statement on X. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said removing Herzog’s name from the park would be “a shameful erasure of Irish-Jewish history and would send a painful message of isolation to a minority already experiencing rising hostilities.”
The proposal was additionally condemned by Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Helen McEntee; US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, US Sen. Lindsey Graham, Ireland’s former Minister of Justice Alan Shatter, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, JRCI Chairman Maurice Cohen, the European Jewish Congress, and several others. Herzog’s son and Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, said renaming the park would be “a shameful and disgraceful move.”
The backlash came amid deteriorating Irish-Israeli relations.
Ireland has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel on the international stage since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, leading the Jewish state to shutter its embassy in Dublin.
Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, a decision that Israel described as a “reward for terrorism.”
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Greta Thunberg, UN’s Francesca Albanese Embrace Hamas Terrorist in New Mural Shown in Milan
Greta Thunberg and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese in an embrace with a Hamas terrorist in the artwork “Human Shields” by AleXsandro Palombo. Photo: Provided
A mural depicting Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, embracing a Hamas terrorist was displayed Friday morning in central Milan at the epicenter of a major anti-Israel demonstration that took place in the area.
The mural “Human Shields,” by Italian pop artist and activist AleXsandro Palombo, was unveiled in Piazza XXIV Maggio in the heart of Milan. The artwork had previously been displayed in front of Termini Station, Rome’s biggest train station, but was vandalized within hours by pro-Palestinian activists.
The title of the artwork references the common practice by Hamas terrorists to use civilians in the Gaza Strip as human shields by hiding themselves and their weapons in residential areas, homes, schools, and hospitals. The title of the mural is also a reference to how public figures can be used as “ideological tools within global narrative conflicts,” Palombo’s team said.
Over the weekend, Thunberg and Albanese joined the thousands of people who participated in nationwide anti-Israel marches across Italy. They led protests in Genoa on Friday and then in Rome on Sunday.
Both Albanese and Thunberg have falsely accused Israel of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has been accused of downplaying the massacre of Israelis during the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as accepting funds from a pro-Hamas lobbying group. Thunberg joined two anti-Israel “freedom flotilla” attempts to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza in both June and October.
Palombo’s team said returning the mural to public display after it was vandalized was a sign of resistance and an opportunity to reflect “on the extremist drift within activism and on those who resort to violence and censorship to silence art and impose a one-sided narrative.” Palombo chose to place the mural at the center of the pro-Palestinian gathering in Milan to emphasize “the value of art as a space for dialogue and exchange.”
“The work raises awareness about the risk that activism, immersed in a polarized media environment, may be exploited and transformed into a vehicle for radicalization,” read a description from the artwork shared with The Algemeiner. “[It] underscores the fragility of contemporary activism, exposed to communicative chaos and media opportunism, to the point of becoming a megaphone for propaganda and a fundamentalist rhetoric capable of destabilizing democracies and altering international discourse.”
Several of Palombo’s murals in Italy that commemorate either Holocaust survivors or victims and survivors of the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, have been vandalized.