"Sephardic Music from Morocco to Quebec and the Amazon" by Judith Cohen

Songs of the Sephardic diaspora are often divided into two main geographical and musical areas: Morocco and former Ottoman lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Dr. Cohen will focus mostly on Sephardic songs from the lesser-known Moroccan repertoire, and their music communities in Morocco, Québec and the Brazilian Amazon, drawing on her years of intensive research and fieldwork, with both recorded and live musical examples.

Judith Cohen is a Canadian ethnomusicologist , medievalist, singer and storyteller, who focuses as both a scholar and a performer on Sephardic music and music of the Sephardic diaspora from the Balkans to her native Québec. She has conducted fieldwork among Sephardim of North America and around the Mediterranean, and explored music among Crypto-Jews in rural Portugal; in recent years, she has extended this fieldwork to Brazil. Based in Toronto, she teaches part-time at York University and is the consultant for the Alan Lomax Spain 1952 collection.

This talk is a part of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas Lecture Series.

Lunch provided for those who RSVP by Friday, November 7

Sponsored by: Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Host or Publisher Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies