7 Aug

Sephardi/Mizrahi Therapy

0 Culture History

JL;DR SUMMARY Arielle Angel, Devin Naar, Laura Elkeslassy, and Oren Yirmiya explore the complexities of Sephardi and Mizrahi identity in the shadow of historical erasure and ongoing geopolitical struggles. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

JL;DR members get full summaries and key points of all podcast episodes in the archive, including this one. Donate & listen smarter »

Places mentioned

Brooklyn, New York, United States

"Her latest project, Ya Gorbati, Divas in Exile, unearths the music and stories of Judeo-Arabic divas from mid-century North Africa. She's a community leader with the egalitarian Sephardi Mizrahi Kehila in Brooklyn."

Seattle, Washington, United States

"Devin Nahr is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies and Chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle."

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

"Oren Yirmiah is a scholar of modern Hebrew literature with a special focus on poetry, and Mizrahi studies. He will join the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor this fall semester."

Baltimore, Maryland, United States

"And some of them I was like, I'm staying super far away from this. I don't actually want to go do it. And a mutual friend of ours said, you should talk to Oren about this. And Oren quickly said, well, you know, disavowal is also a form of, what exactly did you say? Disavowing it is also sort of affirming a connection to it. Right. And so that reopened this question for me and Oren. I recently attended a Shabbat Siyum, which was a Kabbalah service that Laura led. With a group of students from the local Sephardi Mizrahi egalitarian Kehillah that she leads. And, you know, we've just been continuing these conversations. So I'm really excited to have you all here. And Laura, of course, also performed at the JVP conference and it was sort of rapturous for all involved."

Salonika, Central Macedonia, Greece

"As some listeners might know, on my father's side, I came from Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors from what was before the war, the great Sephardic Jewish city of Salonika."

Marrakech, Morocco

"And as I digged more into it, I realized that the first edition of that book was published by my grandfather, Ephraim El-Keslassi, who had a print shop in Marrakech."

Jerusalem, Israel

"I was studying Maqamat, music theory in Jerusalem."

Miami, Florida, United States

"For me, for example, I grew up in Miami. It's a very Mizrahi community, and a lot of my friends were Mizrahim."

Seville, Andalusia, Spain

"The only thing that was left was a cemetery, which was destroyed into a parking in 1992. And then she said, we're going to go down to the parking lot now, and you're going to be able to see the last tomb that remains. And we literally went down a parking and saw a tomb there in front of a BMW. And I was so shocked. I couldn't believe my eyes."

New Jersey, United States

"Well, I didn't feel growing up that the connection was that distant for me, because I grew up in New Jersey with my grandfather, my nono from Salonika."

Washington DC, United States

"And then recently at the JVP conference, which Oren and Laura and I all were at in Baltimore, there was another kind of opportunity to have this conversation. There's a lot of Sephardi Mizrahi organizing, Aswana organizing, I guess people are calling it now."

Cairo Item ID	58839
Cairo Source ID	14
Retrieved	2025-08-08 05:30:18 UTC
Curated	2025-08-08 06:05:15 UTC

Sephardi/Mizrahi Therapy

Tags

Places mentioned