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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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Trump administration drops demand that Penn turn over list of Jewish employees
(JTA) — The Trump administration has withdrawn a controversial demand for the University of Pennsylvania to produce a list of Jewish employees as part of a larger investigation into alleged employment discrimination at the Ivy League university.
The withdrawal ends a round of lawsuits over the legality of such a demand, which alarmed Jewish groups on campus and beyond.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is overseeing the probe, did not explain its decision to drop the subpoena in its Thursday court filing. A representative for the agency declined further comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In its own statement, Penn, which had been engaged in a legal back-and-forth over the school’s refusal to compile such a list, said it had “protected its employees’ rights.” The school had shared the names of Jewish staff who had consented to the probe, but resisted sharing the names of all Jewish staff.
“Penn remains committed to fighting antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, to ensure everyone it serves can learn, work, and thrive,” a university spokesperson said.
The unusual demand, first made in November, came as the Trump administration has aggressively targeted a handful of elite schools accused of failing to curb antisemitism on campus. Most of the time, its intervention has come through the education and health and human services departments, which have cited civil rights violations in seeking to yank billions of dollars in federal funding.
But the EEOC has gotten involved, too, arguing that Penn, in particular, had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli employees from discrimination. Its case against Penn originated in 2023, and its subpoena had included demands to reveal members of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.” The subpoena also targeted the school’s Jewish studies personnel.
Jewish groups, including Penn Hillel, had argued against the demand, as did free-speech organizations. In an email, Penn Hillel’s director, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg, told JTA the organization welcomed the news.
“Over the past year, I have spoken with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the University of Pennsylvania regarding this issue. Every single person expressed objections to the EEOC’s attempt to compel the University to surrender data on Jewish identity and affiliation,” Greenberg said.
He continued, “While many in our community share Penn Hillel’s conviction that campus antisemitism requires urgent, sustained action, demanding ‘lists of Jews’ was a fundamentally incorrect and inappropriate way to address it.”
Earlier this year the agency chair, Andrea Lucas, defended the list-of-Jews demand during an antisemitism conference at Harvard. Lucas told the roomful of Jewish professionals that her office needed the list to identify “potential victims,” including as a means of distributing potential payouts.
(L-r) Andrea Lucas, chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, speaks with Brandeis Center founder Kenneth Marcus at an antisemitism conference held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2026. (Dillon Meyer Media)
“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf,” Lucas said at the time.
A federal judge had ruled in March that the request was reasonable, dismissing efforts by Penn and Jewish groups to declare the ruling unconstitutional. However, the judge delayed the deadline by which Penn would have been forced to comply, giving the university more time to appeal.
The EEOC’s larger antisemitism inquiry into Penn continues.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austrian town turns Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to keep neo-Nazis at bay
(JTA) — How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock, of course.
That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done — but the officers are not providing surveillance. Instead, they will be on site as part of their regular duties, because Hitler’s first home has become a police station.
After years of discussion, planning and construction, the new police station on a corner near Braunau’s town square opened July 22, in the house where the future Nazi dictator was born in 1889 and spent the first few months of his life.
The building looks different, and there will now be surveillance cameras out front. The city’s aim was “to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a recent tour.
At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner emphasized that today’s police are “the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press reported.
Some 50 local and district police officers will be stationed at the new site. And there will also reportedly be a police training program on issues related to human rights.
“They will probably also do antisemitism training. And I think that’s a good thing,” Hannah Lessing, who was on the expert commission to decide what should be done with the property, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. Lessing, who co-chairs the Austrian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, was opposed to tearing down the building:
Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, Austria, as seen on Jan. 15, 2015, as the Austrian government considered forcing a sale to prevent the site’s misuse. A commemorative plaque denouncing fascism was preserved during a later renovation into a police station. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
“I don’t like historical cancellation. But we should use it for something,” she said. “A museum was for me not a good idea, because it would attract automatically people who are probably Hitler fans.”
Thomas Ulmer is a retired officer with the Stuttgart police who fought to turn a former Gestapo headquarters in his German city into a place of remembrance. He said the new site could benefit the officers who are stationed there.
“It’s very important to convey the memory and the history to young people, to young police trainees,” he said.
Today — as an activist in the VelsPol advocacy organization for queer staff in the police and justice system — Ulmer brings police recruits to the Hotel Silber Memorial and Learning Center, where they learn how police were co-opted into the Nazi machine.
Recently, he helped design an exhibit in another former Hitler dwelling that became a police station: a nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The exhibit, which spanned 100 years of history, included the years in which Hitler’s popularity grew after the Beer Hall Putsch, his attempted coup in 1923.
The Munich station’s head, Andreas Franken, doesn’t hide the building’s history, Ulmer said. In his office, Franken even has the famous photo of the American war photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub.
“When people come to him, whether they’re new police officers or just other people, they always ask him about this picture, and then he can tell the story of the building again,” Ulmer said.
Back in Braunau, the new police station “will continue to be known as ‘Hitler’s birthplace’ and will attract visitors accordingly,” laments Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, who had opposed the plan back in 2023. In his documentary, “Who’s afraid of Braunau?”, he claimed that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born.
“It used to be a modest house, but now the Austrian government has turned it into a monument,” he said in an email to the JTA. “We probably need a different generation — one that isn’t afraid of the truth and has the courage to truly come to terms with the past. I hope that generation will emerge.”
A swastika flag flies outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria, around 1933. (Imagno/Getty Images)
Also disappointed is California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors. He was originally in favor of turning the site into a “House of Responsibility.” That plan is still alive, with another local site in mind. The city did “their best to come up with a result that’s acceptable to everybody,” he said. “And now it’s a done deal, so I think we just have to move on.”
The building where Hitler was born dates back to the early to mid-19th century and sits, along with some other structures, on about three quarters of an acre. It has been privately owned, and over the years has housed a school and a branch of a disability support organization.
In 1989, a memorial stone taken from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp was erected in front of the house, and inscribed with a warning “Never again fascism.” Noticeable visits by neo-Nazis declined since then, Cary Lowe told JTA.
“Yes, they still get the occasional individual that wants to carry out a pilgrimage or do a photo op or something in front of the house,” he said. “But it’s on a much smaller scale.”
Braunau’s mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, stands outside the renovated police station in Hitler’s birthplace, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, the city of Braunau expropriated the vacant property and organized an expert commission to debate possible uses, or even demolition. Suggestions ranged from the serious — a museum — to the wild: An Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Luegers, a devoted antisemite, be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
But that was not to be. After deciding on the police station option, renovation began. Even then, the idea that Hitler fanatics might seek relics led the city to grind down all the construction rubble and bury it in a secret location.
Lessing hopes that the new police station will reach the younger generation, with lessons of the past accessible in Braunau without having to journey to concentration camp sites in the region.
“We didn’t need another museum,” she said. “We have Mauthausen for that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Stabbing of Jewish man in Manhattan prompts calls for Mamdani to turn down temperature
The stabbing of two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday — one of whom was wearing a kippah on his way home from a Tisha B’Av service at a modern Orthodox shul — has intensified New Yorkers’ fears of being visibly Jewish in public, leaders and community members said.
“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said at a press conference Friday near the location of the stabbing. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public. Synagogues preparing for Shabbat are wondering whether they can afford additional security.”
Police said on Thursday afternoon, the suspect — identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales — stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife before approaching a Jewish man and stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver. Authorities said he yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack. Both victims are expected to recover.
Morales is expected to face charges on Friday. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement Thursday that while the attacker did not have a known history of mental health issues, “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack as “horrifying” and wrote on X that “these hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.”
At Friday’s press conference, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she was having conversations with her daughter about whether it was safe to wear a Jewish star and with her sons about whether they should wear yarmulkes.
“How can this be normal?” Menin said. “We have to change what is happening in our city.”
But even as New York Attorney General Letitia James urged people not to “assign any particular outcome to this investigation,” adding she did not want to “draw any conclusions,” some leaders were quick to link the attack to a rising political temperature.
Some directly expressed their anger with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who on Wednesday issued a video address conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Unable to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The UJA-Federation of New York and Orthodox Union said at the time that the mayor’s words put Jews in greater danger.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, wrote in an open letter addressed to Mamdani that “you promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”
Mamdani was not at the press conference, and organizers did not answer a question about whether he had been invited.
“His words have profound, real-world consequence on us,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the crowd. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequence for the Jews of New York. He must stop. He must stop.”
Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center — where the victim had attended a Tisha B’Av service before he was stabbed — also expressed disappointment at Mamdani’s remarks.
“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside of my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak,” Levine said. “The police were there to protect him. Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”
“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate, but every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine at Friday’s press conference cast the attack as part of a broader trend of rising attacks on Jewish New Yorkers, citing 178 acts of antisemitic hate crimes in the first six months of this year.
Menin pointed to the dozens of swastikas painted on a playground at a Brooklyn playground earlier this year and swastikas spray painted on homes and a synagogue in Queens last month. On Wednesday, a Jewish man was shoved to the ground in Brooklyn, with the attacker making antisemitic remarks, leaving the victim with back and hip injuries.
Thursday’s attacks were just the latest in a series of crimes targeting the Jewish community, they said.
Rabbi Mark Wildes of the Manhattan Jewish Experience told the Forward he was teaching his weekly class when the attacks occurred nearby.
“It literally happened on my block,” he said. “Two of my kids were out and about, and this guy was still at large before they had caught him.” Wildes, whose children are visibly Jewish, said he and his wife immediately tried to get them home. “We were saying, ‘Where are they? Get them inside.’”
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