The Music of Morocco’s Jewish Women

June 21 2022

For centuries, the Jews of Morocco were confined to Jewish quarters, where they cultivated a unique musical culture—especially the women among them. Moroccan-Jewish “romances,” as their songs were called, often reflected family histories that included being driven out of Spain. Aida Alami writes:

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, an American scholar of Judeo-Spanish music at Cambridge University, has spent the last fifteen years collecting and archiving the voices of aging Jews in Morocco. To date she has inventoried over 2,000 entries (mostly recordings, and some photos and videos); a pilot of the archive is available online. Paloma Elbaz has family roots that date back five generations in Morocco.

“If we think we have no written texts from the women, we are wrong,” she said. “Some archives were sitting in Spain and nobody was paying attention to them.”

“It’s about learning how to read them,” she added. “They sent all kinds of messages. If they were sad about something, they would sing some of these songs to pass a message on to their husbands.”

Read more at New York Times

More about: Jewish music, Moroccan Jewry, Sephardim, Spanish Expulsion

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict