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These Jewish artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university
(JTA) — The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings. Usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew.
The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — do not ask what the lyrics mean. They listen. They feel something, and it’s the feeling that eventually leads to learning.
“Seeing me perform live reveals a common ground, the desire we all share to understand our origins, a search for the lost voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam said in an interview. “The fact that I am singing not in English but in an African language resonates with the students and helps propel them on their own quest.”
The scene has become familiar at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic historically Black university, where Elkayam and her partner in life and art, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the past two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, memory, diaspora and interfaith exchange, grew out of an initiative to increase understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It is now one of the most sought-after electives on campus, recommended by students by word of mouth.
It is an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been shaped by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose creative lives have long resisted fixed categories. Yet Xavier has become a place where their music, pedagogy and personal histories suddenly make sense together.
It is also the place where they now face a crossroads.
After two years of teaching, performing and building cultural bridges in New Orleans, the private funding that brought them to Xavier has ended. The university wants them to stay. But whether they can remains uncertain, a predicament reflecting a wider strain on the institution itself.
Xavier University is facing significant financial uncertainty, underscored by recent layoffs even as it received a major gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that offered partial relief. At the same time, moves by the Trump administration to cut or reshape federal higher-education programs have disrupted key funding streams the university relies on, adding to the instability.
For Elkayam and Cohen, who have spent their careers moving along what they call the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis,” the question is no longer how to live between places, but whether that in-between can become a home.
Long before New Orleans entered the picture, Elkayam and Cohen were already artists of transit and connection.
Elkayam, 45, rose to prominence in Israel, Europe and Morocco for her reinterpretations of North African Jewish music, not as preservation, but as reinvention. Born in Netivot, on Israel’s geographic and social periphery, she grew up acutely aware of the ruptures many Mizrahi Jews feel: the distance from ancestral languages, sounds and stories. Her work has become a way to address that loss, offering a path back to connection beyond nostalgia.
Drawing on Andalusian, Amazigh (Berber) and Jewish liturgical traditions, she folds in elements of jazz, rock and contemporary performance art. Her sensibility is evident in projects like “Hilula,” a multidisciplinary opera blending drag, Torah study and live music, and “Arénas,” a collaboration built around archival recordings of women from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains who passed through a transit camp in Marseille on their way to Israel.
Cohen, 43, has worked in music, cinema and visual installation, often in collaboration with artists from Morocco. He recently explored memory and ritual across Judaism, Christianity and Islam through a ceiling installation for the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem weaving together the elements from all three faiths.
Together, the couple built ambitious, research-driven projects that blurred the line between scholarship and performance. Their collaborators included towering figures of North African Jewish music — among them the Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni — as well as Moroccan Muslim artists and Gnawa masters.
“We’re not interested in freezing the past,” Cohen said. “We’re interested in what happens when you improvise inside it.”
That ethos drew the attention of scholars such as Chris Silver, a professor at McGill University who studies North African music and Jewish-Muslim history. Silver describes their approach as not merely performing an inherited repertoire, but actively shaping how the past is understood and carried forward.
“As a scholar focused on the relationship of music to history, I marvel at what sometimes feels like their historiographical approach, in which their music builds on a well-known and lesser-known past, is in dialogue with the contemporary, and is future-oriented, contributing to and shaping the sounds of the possible and what may yet be,” Silver said.
For Flo Low, the founder of Bamah, the nonprofit that brought the couple to Xavier University two years ago, the future Silver describes crystallized in a single moment.
Low, an American Jew who has lived in Israel, first saw Elkayam perform in Jerusalem in 2018, at an outdoor concert beneath the walls of the Old City. She expected virtuosity. What she did not expect, she said, was what happened next.
“Neta started singing in Moroccan Arabic,” Low recalled, “and thousands of people in the audience were singing along with her. Her music is allowing so many people in the Jewish world to reconnect with their Jewish roots through their music.”
For Low, who had been working to build cultural exchange programs between Israeli artists and American institutions, the scene was revelatory.
“I knew at that moment that I wanted to bring Neta and her partner Amit to the United States,” Low said. “If they could inspire me and thousands of others in a single performance, I could only imagine what they might do with a full semester, or even a full academic year, with students.”
Still, it would take several years, and an unexpected chain of events in New Orleans, before the partnership materialized.
The road to Xavier began with Kanye West, the musician who now goes by Ye.
In late 2022, as antisemitic rhetoric surged into mainstream discourse — fueled in part by Ye’s public outbursts — students at Xavier were finding themselves caught in a confusing digital and social crossfire.
“My freshman honors students were hearing a lot of people in their lives say that ‘Kanye has a point,’ and they wanted to know, as students at a historically Black university, ‘What is our response?’” recalled Shearon Roberts, a professor and associate dean at Xavier. “They realized: we don’t actually know Jewish people. Many students had never met a Jew at all.”
Roberts saw an opportunity for a different kind of education. “How about we start there?” she told them.
A small group of Xavier students launched an initiative that set out to address antisemitism and anti-Black racism together, rather than as separate problems.
They partnered with local Jewish organizations and faculty mentors, built relationships with students at nearby Tulane University, known for its high concentrations of Jewish students, and began hosting dialogues that emphasized shared histories of exclusion and violence — alongside the tensions and misunderstandings between the two communities. The students designed workshops, social media campaigns and campus events focused on media literacy and the warning signs of radicalization.
“We wanted to tackle that problem in our community,” Aarinii Parms-Green, one of the Xavier students, who graduated last month. “We saw it rising with Kanye West, Whoopi Goldberg, Kyrie Irving and other figures saying things like, ‘Black people are the real Jews’ or ‘Jews people control the media.’”
Parms-Green said the students were inspired by the history of Jewish-Black solidarity, from the civil rights movement to the Jewish academics fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s who found refuge at HBCUs.
Their project eventually won a national Department of Homeland Security award for innovative anti-extremism programming. (The federal program behind the award was shut down by the Trump administration earlier this year.)
The win led to a trip to Israel for the students and when they returned they wanted to sustain the connection, especially to Israel’s racially and ethnically diverse culture.
“The project started as a way to give back, to bring Black and Jewish students together and counter hate, and it just took off,” Parms-Green said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, the work felt only more urgent.
“Instead of rushing to blame, people on campus asked questions,” Parms-Green said. “They wanted context. We didn’t see protests — there was more curiosity than anything.”
While it’s true that Xavier has not been a central hotspot of campus unrest around the war in Gaza, the atmosphere has not been entirely tranquil either. In June 2024, administrators canceled a commencement address by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield after students organized a petition and raised objections over her role in U.S. policy backing Israel in the Gaza war.
Still, just as the Xavier students were looking for ways to engage with Israelis, Elkayam and Cohen were searching for a way to stay abroad, wary of returning to a country in turmoil.
They had landed in Morocco two days before Oct. 7, planning on little more than a week of concerts and screenings. The documentary they were showing, directed by a local Muslim filmmaker and titled “In Your Eyes I See My Country,” follows the two as they travel through Morocco, searching for traces of the Jewish world their families left behind, a world that once numbered about a quarter million people and has dwindled to only a few thousand.
On Oct. 6, they gathered to celebrate at Hachkar’s home with a mostly Muslim circle of friends where they recited the Jewish blessing over wine that marks the start of the Sabbath, and sang, and shared stories late into the night. The next morning, they woke to the news.
With two young children and a single suitcase, they faced a choice.
“We quickly understood the insanity that was coming to Israel and decided to stay,” Cohen said.
Their outlook proved to be a premonition of how many Israelis would come to feel over the next two years, as more than 69,000 residents left Israel in 2025 alone, contributing to sustained negative migration and one of the largest modern spikes in emigration from the country.
For Elkayam and Cohen, the decision was about preserving relationships and the ability to think, mourn and speak honestly, especially given how unpopular their left-wing views have become in Israel after Oct. 7.
“It might sound weird but we felt safer in a sense in Morocco, to be among our friends and accepted with our complexities, where we can talk about different narratives at once.” Cohen said. “In Israel, inside the family, you can’t always speak freely. I don’t want to fight with my dad about politics. I am not going to let it happen.”
After three months, living in friends’ homes and watching events unfold from a painful distance, Bamah brought the couple to Xavier University.
At Xavier, Elkayam and Cohen were not treated like visiting artists passing through. They were, as Roberts, their host and champion on campus, put it, “part of the university’s extended family.”
“They are a model for what it looks like to have members of the Jewish diaspora — Israeli citizens, artists, educators — serve, teach and mentor at a historically Black university,” she said. “And they’ve always led with their artistry first. When you connect with people through art, through beauty, everything opens up in a different way.”
Roberts continued, “If I brought someone who was like a Jewish studies expert or political or sociology expert, and they’re lecturing to these students about complex issues connected to Jewish identity, African American identity, Jewish or African diasporic identities, it might get lost in translation. But when Neta and Amit say, ‘All right, grab an instrument. Let’s sing, let’s improvise,’ they’re all speaking one language, even though they don’t speak the same language.”
The warm embrace the couple has found at Xavier, including from Muslim faculty, comes at a moment when many Israeli academics report feeling the opposite: isolated, targeted, and professionally vulnerable on American campuses amid the Gaza war.
For Roberts, it’s no surprise that a historically Black university would be different. HBCUs, she says, know how to practice inclusion because they were founded as an answer to racial exclusion. “By nature, we welcome before we turn away,” she said.
At the same time, Elkayam and Cohen’s particular outlook and style have helped them avoid the kinds of conflicts and tensions Israelis have faced at other universities. By their own account and that of supporters like Roberts, their work is deeply political, but because they communicate through their art, it is harder to flatten them into a caricature or cast them as political adversaries.
Their success at navigating an era prone to strife isn’t confined to Xavier or New Orleans.
In August, Elkayam and Cohen traveled to Flint, Michigan, where they appeared on stage with their New Orleans band alongside musicians from the National Arab Orchestra, in a concert co-presented by Bamah and the Flint Jewish Federation.
Titled “Songs of Our Mothers,” the program represented a rare collaboration in a moment when Israeli artists often face boycotts. The evening unfolded quietly, without protest and without political interference.
At Xavier, each semester culminates in a public showcase of student work, where projects ranging from short films to musical performances and research presentations are shared with classmates, faculty and community members.
“One student told me he would have never been able to voice how I feel on an artistic level with the class,” Parms-Green said. “He left that class feeling more confident, his ability to kind of just put himself out there.”
For all their travel, Elkayam and Cohen have begun to lay down something like roots in New Orleans. They built a band with local musicians, adapting their repertoire of Moroccan Jewish songs to the rhythms of the city, letting brass and jazz sensibilities seep into the arrangements. They were struck by how New Orleans’ second-line parades echoed Morocco’s street rituals, where music spills into public space and celebration becomes something the whole neighborhood moves through together.
“It’s like when I went to Morocco for the first time and was totally shocked,” Elkayam said. “You see music inside people’s homes, art inside people’s homes. Suddenly all the hierarchies in your head collapse — what’s ‘folklore,’ what’s ‘high art,’ what’s ‘low.’ We came back from Morocco as different people, it blew our minds. And it’s the same here, discovering America — the non-stereotypical America, the one they don’t market to you.”
Last year, they brought to New Orleans one of the figures who helped unlock their Moroccan heritage: Reuven Abergel, a founder of Israel’s Black Panthers.
The movement, started by Mizrahi Jews in the 1970s, intentionally borrowed its name and tactics from the American Black Panther Party to protest the systemic discrimination and domination of Israeli society by Ashkenazi elites. A longtime mentor and friend to Elkayam and Cogen, Abergel met with the students at Xavier, creating a bridge between two distinct histories of marginalization and resistance. Cohen filmed the visit for an ongoing documentary about Abergel’s life, capturing the moment where the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis” met the American South.
Cohen also helped create a digital exhibition marking 100 years of The Louisiana Weekly, the city’s historic Black newspaper, helping research its archives and design the site. The work pulled him into the civic memory of the place, into conversations about race, migration and culture that felt familiar and new at once.
At home, the process has been quieter and more complicated. In our conversation, Elkayam described feeling like an immigrant for the first time, even as her children, almost without noticing, were becoming New Orleanians. They now speak mostly English to their parents. They know the songs, the parades, the small neighborhood rituals. “They’re really from here,” she said. “They grew up inside the parades. For them, this is how you celebrate.”
The couple are also seeing transformation in themselves. The war, the distance, the months in Morocco and now New Orleans have left them feeling untethered from the national identities they had once inhabited. They miss Jerusalem and the community that formed around them there. They also recognize the relief in being in a place where they are not required to perform loyalty, and where it is possible to hold grief and criticism in the same breath.
“We don’t feel Israeli in the rooted sense of the word,” Cohen said. “What matters to us now is not the place, it’s the people.”
They have begun to think of themselves as Jews in the diaspora — not as a temporary condition but as a way of moving through the world.
What happens next is unclear. They are currently in the United States on J-1 visiting scholar visas sponsored by Xavier University, but the university cannot offer enough funding to hire them as full-time instructors. Without outside support to replace the now-expired Bamah grant, they risk losing their visas and their right to stay in the country.
For now, they keep teaching, composing and building relationships, unsure how long New Orleans will remain home.
“I really feel like a Jewish migrant right now, in the most basic sense of the word,” Cohen said.
Elkayam offered a caveat. She has come to see their time abroad as a fragile privilege — a brief chance to heal while others, especially Mizrahim without the means to leave, remain stuck.
Grateful yet uneasy, she misses the heavy responsibility she once carried in Jerusalem: showing up for her community, helping hold its history, telling stories that might otherwise disappear. From New Orleans, she allows herself to rest, even as she knows the future is uncertain.
“Maybe, God willing, we’ll be able to continue here,” she said, “because yeah, I don’t always miss that role.”
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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
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This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most Jew-ish team
Cape Verde, an island nation of about 530,000 people off the coast of Africa, shocked soccer fans around the globe by holding Spain without a goal in their debut World Cup match this week. But Carol Castiel saw it coming.
For the better part of four decades, Castiel has been working to document and preserve the island nation’s rich but little-known Sephardic heritage. And while there are no known practicing Jews in Cape Verde today, Castiel said connection to Jewish identity remains in the country and in its soccer team.
The proof, she said, was in the team’s first result.
Cape Verde’s stout defense — led by 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha’s seven saves — shut out the team FIFA ranked second-best in the world, and a country whose GDP is 600 times greater than its own. Cape Verde, ranked 67th, didn’t buckle as Spain fired shot after shot on the goal. The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.
“In the face of hardship, they just keep going, and they find ways,” Castiel said. “They’re the underdog.”
But there was also a Jewish genealogical connection on the Cape Verde team sheet: Reserve forward Gilson Benchimol’s surname dates back some 150 years to Sephardic Jews on the island.
The 2026 World Cup’s biggest upset to date has put the spotlight on the 10-island archipelago about 350 miles west of Senegal. Castiel, an American Jew and ex-journalist who is obtaining citizenship in Cape Verde, is also hoping it brings attention to her effort to preserve Jewish memory there.
An island nation’s Jewish roots
Jewish life on Cape Verde dates back to the 16th century, when the Portuguese Inquisition caused Jewish converts to Christianity — known then as “New Christians” — to emigrate en masse from the Iberian peninsula. (The Portuguese Inquisition started a couple decades after the Spanish Inquisition.)
The islands were far from the center of the Inquisition, perhaps allowing some of the exiled to resume practicing Judaism in secret. They also offered New Christians the chance to pursue commercial opportunities in international trade. These New Christians lived under surveillance even in Cape Verde, though, and one of the islands had a Jewish ghetto in the 16th century.
That first wave of migrants eventually assimilated through marriage or out-migrated, and the archipelago’s Jewish footprint largely disappeared. Some historians suggest that last names on the island related to trees and animals, like Carvalho (oak) or Pinto (chick), hint at possible Jewish ancestry. (Some Sephardic Jews and conversos adopted or were assigned last names during the Inquisition.)
Cape Verde became a popular Jewish destination again in the second half of the 19th century, after the Inquisition ended. The territory was still a Portuguese colony with a powerful grip on transatlantic trade, and Jewish emigres — many from the northern Morocco city of Tetouan — found success in agriculture and international shipping.
“They were key to the economy in those days,” Castiel said.
Some of the primary exports from that era, like coffee and rum, continue today. (The islands were also a hub of slave trade, and historians believe New Christians were among the slave traders.)
Few in number and mostly male, the latter wave of Jewish immigrants also married out of the religion, Castiel said, and their descendants today are Catholic. But their Jewish surnames remain prevalent on the islands. Castiel said names like Cohen and Levy, as well as variations on common Sephardic names like Ohayon and Benchimol, show that “the blood of Jews is running through the veins of a lot of people there.”
Castiel said she did not believe the national team’s Benchimol — who plays professionally for the Russian club Akron Tolyatti — identifies as Jewish. (The Forward has reached out to the player for comment.)
Though the Cape Verdeans with common Jewish surnames don’t tend to identify as Jewish, many embrace their Jewish ancestry.
One of them is Jose Levy. His great-grandfather, Fortunato Levy, emigrated from Morocco in the late 19th century and started a business doing sea-transportation around the islands. His father worked for the Portuguese government until Cape Verde won independence in 1975.
Levy, who worked for the United Nations before retiring recently, said many Jewish Cape Verde families returned to Portugal after independence. But to this day, many of his friends in Praia — the Cape Verde capital, where he lives — have Jewish names.
“Neither me nor my father were directly exposed to Jewish religion,” Levy, 68, said in an interview. “But our grandparents and great-grandparents were proud Jews, and they made a great contribution to what Cape Verde is now.”
Historic preservation
There are no known synagogues on the islands — even historic ones — and Cape Verde is one of the rare places in the world without a Chabad. But there are at least four small Jewish cemeteries spread across three islands, Castiel said. Modeled after Moroccan cemeteries, each has white horizontal stones with inscriptions in Hebrew and Portuguese — but they were overgrown, eroding or otherwise disarrayed when Castiel first visited.
“In Judaism, the most important thing is to create burial grounds to rest the souls,” Castiel said. “In that regard, these Jews did that. It’s just that they couldn’t sustain it.”
The nonprofit she founded in 2007, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, aims to restore the sites and expand the documentation and of Jewish life on the island through research, oral history and tourism. In 2018, the nonprofit installed a series of plaques to commemorate the 19th-century Jewish settlers interred at the cemeteries.
According to Castiel, the nonprofit’s primary funder is Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, whose Jewish historic preservation efforts in Morocco — the ancestral homeland of many Cape Verde migrants — are well-documented. Levy sits on the board.
“We carry the last name, but the religion aspect was not transferred, so we are Catholic,” Levy said. “But we are very proud of our Jewish ancestors.”
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