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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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The post A New York celebration of Ladino aims to bust the myth that the Judeo-Spanish language is dead appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av
As we chant Lamentations on the floor, in the dark, on Wednesday night for Tisha B’Av, we will open with the word “eikha” — “how.”
That same word became the refrain of a recent eight day visit I made to Israel and the West Bank.
I traveled to Jerusalem for a week of immersive learning with 150 rabbis and cantors at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s annual Rabbinic Torah Seminar. But my learning wasn’t restricted to the beit midrash. I spent time with cousins finishing combat service; friends working late into the night in the Knesset before its dissolution; people working to build shared society in Haifa; and families grieving the loss of loved ones. And at every turn, I found myself asking “eikha.”
“Eikha” is more than a question. It is the sound made when the distance between what should be and what is becomes almost impossible to bear. Naming that distance is at the heart of Tisha B’Av — and, for me, at the heart of thinking honestly about Israel today. How will Israel move from this moment of profound moral and political fracture toward the future our prophets imagined?
On a visit to the West Bank with Rabbis for Human Rights, I connected with Israelis from across the country who had come to be a protective presence for Palestinians in Jenata, near the settler outpost of Havat Eitam. The Palestinians there face violence and intimidation in an area formally under Palestinian civil authority. We heard from a man whose brother had recently been killed by settlers, and we learned that their imam was jailed just that morning to prevent Friday prayers from moving forward as planned.
Then we were told to leave. The corner of the village we were visiting was declared a 24-hour closed military zone.
Next we traveled to Umm al-Khair, a Palestinian herding community where the Hathaleen family buried their son Awdah almost a year ago, after he was shot and killed by an Israeli settler who still walks free. Since his death, settlers have built caravans encroaching into the village, with some only a few meters from homes. This encroachment has triggered the declaration of another “closed military zone,” cutting the family off from their own bathroom and animals. They must use a neighbor’s bathroom and can only feed their animals when a soldier comes to allow it.
I asked a soldier standing guard that day whether any of it troubled him.
“Doesn’t Oct. 7 trouble you?” he replied.
I don’t know what that soldier has seen, or what he has lost. But I know his response took two griefs and set them against each other, as though one atrocity could justify another. “Eikha”: How do we nurse our deepest wounds without allowing them to justify our wounding others? How do we stay safe and moral?
This past Shabbat was Shabbat Hazon — the “Sabbath of Vision” — so named for the opening word of the Haftara, which describes Isaiah’s vision of a devastated but ultimately redeemed Jerusalem. That reading, in our current context, must push us — and, God willing, Israel’s next political leaders — to articulate compelling responses to the questions bearing down on Israeli society and on Judaism itself. To ask how we came to a point of such dire trouble, and realize a vision for redemption from it.
I keep thinking about the way slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin would remind his fellow captives, citing Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words, that if they could hold onto a “why,” they could endure any “how.”
Israel and the Jewish people have profound whys. We are meant to be, in the words of “Hatikvah,” “a free people in our own land.” And to be, in the words of the Torah, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
This Tisha B’Av, as we mourn the destruction that shattered Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago, we must also reckon honestly with the forms of inhumanity that threaten its moral future and physical safety today.
We must understand that our freedom, our holiness and our humanity are bound up in that of the Hathaleen family, and the besieged villagers of Jenata. During my visit, an Israeli cousin of mine acknowledged that everything I had seen in the West Bank was real and terrible — and that he didn’t want Palestinians living so close to Israel, out of fear of an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank. What I wish all of us could better understand: If Jewish freedom depends upon denying Palestinian freedom, then it is neither the freedom of “Hatikvah” nor the holiness the Torah demands. I also don’t think it will make us safe.
This is, I think, the particular question facing rabbis and Jewish communal leaders like me right now: how do we hold onto our right — our obligation — to name Israel’s failures honestly, as people bound to this place and this story, without having our words weaponized to delegitimize and demonize the entire project? My criticism of what I saw in Jenata and Umm al-Khair comes from love — the same love that makes looking away impossible. Learning how to hold both at once, unflinching criticism and unwavering commitment, may be the most urgent “eikha” of this particular moment.
After Tisha B’Av comes the Shivah d’Nehemta — the Seven Weeks of Consolation that carry us into Rosh Hashanah.
In those weeks, the questions of “eikha” don’t disappear. They deepen. These weeks lead us into Elul, a time of intense heshbon hanefesh — accounting of the soul. The pairing of consolation with accounting suggests that renewal comes not through answering our questions, but through finding the courage to keep asking them.
How do we protect ourselves without surrendering our humanity? How do we acknowledge our own suffering without turning it into permission to inflict suffering on others?
Those are Israel’s questions as they move toward their October elections. They are ours as well, as we navigate being Jews in this moment.
The post What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av appeared first on The Forward.
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To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con
Progressive Jewish groups across the country this week are using the fast day of Tisha B’av to protest national immigration policies, gathering outside ICE facilities, immigration courts,city halls and in San Diego’s case, culminating at a convention center. Tisha B’av protests are also planned in Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
Tisha B’av commemorates several Jewish national tragedies, including the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. Protest organizers connect the torment tied to the destruction and ensuing exile, recounted in the book of Lamentations, to the pain experienced by immigrant families today.
“We had our sacred spaces taken away from us and we became wanderers,” Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, leader of San Diego synagogue Dor Hadash and one of the protest organizers, said in an interview. “And what is happening to the people who are in our streets? They’ve already been made wanderers once — having to escape torture, persecution, degradation — and now we’re doing it to them again.”
The protesters in San Diego — representing Jewish groups, labor unions, left-wing political organizations and social justice nonprofits — will begin by reading from Lamentations outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, where immigrants are often detained following their hearings. They then will march to the San Diego Convention Center. They also plan to recite kaddish for people who have died in ICE custody or at ICE protests.
The immigration protests are part of a long history of Jewish groups using Tisha B’av as an opportunity to reflect on social ills. And while they will occur across the country, the protests are not nationally organized, according to their organizers. Instead, each one has a particular local resonance.
“San Diego is a border city,” Rothbaum said, “and the fact that we have a government that says the people born on this side of the border are more important, more precious, more sacred than people born on the other side of that border is blasphemy.”
Rothbaum’s involvement in Tisha B’av immigration actions dates back to the first Trump administration, when he was working in Massachusetts. A similar rally will unfold there this week outside New England’s ICE headquarters.
That event will include an Erev Tisha B’av program led by the state’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action.
Cindy Rowe, the alliance’s president and CEO, will also speak about Tisha B’av at a rally at Boston City Hall to protect the temporary protected status of Haitian immigrants, which expires Thursday. Massachusetts is home to roughly 45,000 Haitian immigrants whose legal status could be in jeopardy after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that President Trump has broad authority to deport them.
The expiration of Haitians’ temporary protected status on Tisha B’av was “a cruel twist of fate,” Rowe said.
Tisha B’av represents “a day of mourning for the destruction of communities, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now in our modern day,” Rowe said. “The destruction of our own community right in front of our eyes.”
More than a dozen Jewish groups — including several synagogues, a JCC and various social justice groups — are partnering with multifaith organizations and labor unions on a Thursday afternoon event in Los Angeles, which will include testimony from clergy who have witnessed the conditions of detention in ICE facilities.
These groups held a similar event last year, when the spectacle of immigration enforcement raids was winning daily headlines. The media focus has since dwindled, but ICE detentions continue apace, according to Brooke Wirtschafter, executive director of Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, a progressive group that focuses on local issues like housing and immigration.
“It is very much alive and real in Los Angeles in 2026,” Wirtschafter said. “If it is less dramatic than it was in 2025, it’s still very active, and so it’s important to us to continue to raise the issue.”
Likewise, a Jewish-themed immigration protest outside Comic-Con might feel dissonant to the traveling fans encountering it. Rothbaum wants it to turn heads.
“I hope when they come out and they see this group — and then they see Jews are part of this group — that they’ll think for a second before they go to the next thing, ‘Hey, what is my ethical obligation?’” Rothbaum said. “What are Americans’ ethical obligations to the people who come here, either escaping torment or looking for a better life?”
The post To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel alarmed by reports of a possible US-Saudi nuclear deal
(JTA) — A potential U.S. civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which The New York Times has reported could be announced by the Trump administration as early as Wednesday, is alarming some Israelis and Americans.
Critics are concerned that the deal, through which U.S. companies would help Saudi Arabia build civilian nuclear energy plants, could allow Saudi Arabia to eventually develop nuclear weapons. The proposed plants would have the capacity to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel without pervasive oversight.
The arrangement would also remove one of the key incentives to encourage Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. The Biden administration had been in the process of exchanging such nuclear access for Saudi acceptance of open ties with the Jewish state when the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, upended the efforts.
Now, a number of media outlets, including the Times and The Wall Street Journal, are reporting that President Donald Trump plans to move ahead with the civilian nuclear program without such strings attached, though a deal has not yet been publicly announced by the Trump administration or formally acknowledged by the Israeli government.
According to Reuters, the nuclear deal would be given to Congress for review but could only be blocked by a two-thirds majority.
When quizzed by Army Radio on the deal, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar said Israel has been clear with the United States about its red lines but would not say if such a deal crossed that line.
These are conversations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is having with security experts, he said.
Israeli opposition politicians were blunter about the potential danger. Former Israeli Defense Ministers Avigdor Liberman and Benny Gantz both warned a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal could spark a regional arms race.
That could happen because a nuclear Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, could spur its Shi’a rival, Iran, to take even more aggressive steps toward building a nuclear bomb. Iran already possesses enrichment capabilities, and the point of the current war launched by the United States and Israel is to keep it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Liberman, who heads Yisrael Beytenu, wrote on X that “a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia will end with nuclear weapons [production] and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”
Yair Golan, a former IDF major general who was a deputy chief of staff and now heads the opposition Democrat Party, said that the long desired Israeli-Saudi deal would have created important diplomatic ties and anchor a regional strategic alliance against Iran.
To give Saudi Arabia nuclear capabilities “without stringent monitoring requirements and without a framework of relations with Israel as a condition creates a dangerous reality for the State of Israel,” Golan wrote on X.
At the White House on Tuesday, Trump spoke broadly about other countries joining the Abraham Accords, the regional normalization agreements he brokered at the end of his first term in 2020, but did not mention Saudi Arabia.
The accords created a regional rubric under which Israel normalized ties with some Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden had sought to bring Saudi Arabia into the pact.
Tensions throughout the region following the Oct. 7 attack and the Gaza war, however, pushed Saudi-Israel normalization further out of reach. The Saudi demands for normalization sharpened in the subsequent years and include Palestinian statehood or, at the very least, progress toward that goal. The Netanyahu government has adamantly rejected such a condition in the wake of the attack and the Israeli public has increasingly opposed the concept as well.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died last week, was an ardent advocate for an Israeli-Saudi deal. He had pushed Trump not to make concessions to Saudi Arabia without the kingdom moving closer to Israel.
Graham had continued to work on normalization in the months leading up to his death. He told CBS News in June, “We’re going to try to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords to end the Arab-Israeli conflict in 2026.”
Dan Shapiro, who worked during the Biden administration as a senior adviser on Middle East regional integration for the State Department, said Wednesday that a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal would make such normalization more difficult.
The plan originally was for a civil nuclear energy agreement with sufficient safeguards against proliferation to be part of a package that would include normalization with Israel, he said.
“It appears that the Trump administration has given it away without normalization,” Shapiro told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Trump’s deal “seems to have abandoned a very important point of leverage to advance another important regional goal of the United States,” he said.
“This was supposed to be a major carrot for Saudi Arabia if they were to normalize with Israel, and now that carrot has been provided without it.”As a result, he said, “the whole incentive structure would have to be redone.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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