More in ‘Sephardic music’

Wandering about an exhibition of illustrated Sephardic proverbs at the Center for Jewish History, killing time before a Sephardic Music Festival concert, I couldn’t help but view the physical separation between the museum’s Sephardic and Ashkenazi exhibits as a metaphor for the Jewish community at large: a house divided, as it were, between its Sephardic ...

There’s a strange phenomenon among people who become Orthodox—they seem to enter a time warp. Their clothes, their colloquialisms, even their musical choices become frozen in a single moment, like Rip Van Winkle or Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Every time they talk about bands or movies or commercial jingles, they’re back at ...

Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles
Nearly twenty years ago, musicians Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles formed Elysian Fields—a rock group whose noir-infused songs are utterly seductive and hypnotic.
Elysian Fields is still going strong, but in 2001 Oren and Jennifer took on a new project—digging up old melodies and lyrics from the Sephardic world of ...

Growing up in the Bosnian village of Vlasenica, Flory Jagoda spent her afternoons and evenings singing with her family—everyone sang, her grandmother, her aunts, uncles and cousins. Though they’d lived in the Balkans for centuries, their songs were in Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, passed down from the time of her ancestors’ expulsion from Spain.
World War II ...

In the late 1980s, klezmer music was making a comeback in the United States, but also on the festival circuit in Europe. It even caught on in Italy, which struck Francesco Spagnolo as strange; klezmer had nothing to do with Italian Jewish culture, a venerable and singular blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influences.
Back in Italy, ...