Queer Yiddish Camp & Rad Yiddish Present a PANEL DISCUSSION on RECLAIMING DIASPORIC JEWISH LANGUAGES!

-ABOUT-

Join us for an exciting afternoon of learning about Judeo-Arabic and Ladino language projects! Nesi Altaras will moderate a conversational-style discussion between daph bendavid ouyoussef, Iris Fellous, and Yinnon Sanders - all organizers and community leaders working on bringing Judeo-Arabic and/or Ladino language literacy to their communities through various initiatives. A Q&A with the audience will follow the moderated discussion.

-BACKGROUND-

As organizations committed to radical social change within and outside of Yiddish culture, Queer Yiddish Camp and Rad Yiddish know that cross-cultural solidarity is a cornerstone of how we as Yiddishists show up in the world. Even as a marginalized Jewish language with a history of state suppression, Yiddish still continues to be more funded and resourced that other marginalized Jewish languages. We believe that uplifting Yiddish as a diasporic language cannot happen in a vacuum and that our cultural celebration and creation must happen alongside the uplifting of languages like Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Judeo-Tajik and many many more!

-PANELIST BIOS-

daph bendavid ouyoussef (they/them) is a gender/queer educator, organizer, and artist of Arab and Eastern European lineage, born and raised in so-called Montreal, Quebec. They wrestle with grief, prayer, language and ancestry while building diasporic Jewish community, and lead prayers in the musical liturgical lineage of their Palestinian/Moroccan/Algerian ancestors. Some of daph's work can be viewed at https://snap.as/daphbdvy, and https://soundcloud.com/daphbdvy. daph's favourite Jewish ancestral language they don't yet know is Tiberian Judeo-Arabic, a fusion of Moroccan and Palestinian dialects by the Jews of Tabbariyeh.

Iris / Reine Ruby is a French-Tunisian-Algerian organizer, singer, curator and teacher based in Paris. She's been engaged in reclaiming her Maghrebi Jewish heritage through culture, spirituality and language for over 10 years, and has founded the "DecolonizeJewish" Tumblr and Instagram accounts that document Jewish histories, memories and identities from the colonized world. She teaches a free weekly online Arabic class for descendants of Jewish Arabic-speaking ancestors who were not able to transmit their language to the following generations due to the historical traumas of exile, assimilation, colonialisms and nationalisms. Using music, film and linguistics, she seeks to build healing communities to share and reimagine the possibility of  Arab Jewish, African Jewish and Amazigh Jewish existence.

Nesi Altaras is a PhD student in History at Stanford University. He works on the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire. He has published on topics like the citizenship restitutions of Portugal and Spain to Sephardic Jews and the migration of Jews in the Ottoman-Iranian borderland. He is passionate about carrying Ladino into 21st century life.

Yinnon Sanders is a software engineer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He grew up singing songs in Ladino at home and in the synagogue, and began learning to speak Ladino in 2020. He recently helped start a meetup for people in the Boston area interested in Ladino. This summer, he participated in a program at Hebrew University that taught research methods dealing with Ladino texts as well as interviews with native speakers.

-ACCESS-

This event will be CART captioned and ASL interpreted. Please be in touch with us about any access requests at least 10 days before the event so we can do our best to meet you needs! Email us at info [at] queeryiddish.camp