Echoes of Our Ancestors: The Legacy of Sephardi Sounds
with Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz
Like language, food and history, sound is a key catalyst of cultural transmission: “sontinuity,” as Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz calls it.
In this talk, she will explore how sound has helped maintain the political, economic and social histories of Sephardi communities from the 15th-century expulsion into the modern era.
A renowned performer and scholar, she will use voices, music and instruments to demonstrate sound’s power to pass along culture and will discuss how 16th-century printed songbooks, orally transmitted musical memories, print media and early recordings helped establish the sonic archive of Sephardi selfhood.
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz explores how tradition has been transmitted in the Sephardic diaspora. An internationally renowned performer of Sephardi repertoires, she is Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and founder/director of KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive. Her full biography appears here.
ABOUT THE SPANISH JEWISH EXPERIENCE SERIES
For two millennia, Spanish Jewry swung on a pendulum from the heights of tolerance during the “Golden Age” — when Jews flourished as philosophers and poets, physicians, mathematicians and traders — to the depths and degradations of forced conversion, the Inquisition and expulsion.
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center is proud to present a five-part lecture series illuminating the complexities of Sepharad, as Iberia is called in Hebrew, and to discover the rich legacy of Jewish Spain through the lenses of art, architecture, music and the modern diasporic experience.
We will meet ordinary Spanish Jews who struggled with the ever-changing realties, as well as some of Judaism’s most revered thinkers and writers: the physician/rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or Rambam; the virtuosic poet Yehuda Halevi; and the biblical scholar and philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra.
Delivered by leading professors of Sephardic studies from across the US and the Atlantic, each lecture stands on its own. You are welcome and encouraged to attend any or all.