Ladino Flamenco

March 2, 2005 by Israelity · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General, Pop Culture

The first time I heard Yasmin Levy sing La Juderia*(audio link), I was blown away. Her voice is so powerful and emotive that it nearly made me cry. Go ahead – listen, and you’ll see what I mean.

Sounds like Spanish, right? Actually, it’s Ladino, or Judaeo-Spanish – the language once spoken by Sephardic Jews throughout North Africa, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. Israelis often call it “Spanyolit,” or simply “Sfaradit” (Spanish). My friend Avi grew up speaking the language with his grandmother, whose family has lived in Jerusalem since a couple of centuries after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Today Ladino is a dying language, like Yiddish. Unlike Yiddish, however, it doesn’t even have a core of ultra-Orthodox people who speak the language to their children, as the hasidim do. The only place I’ve heard the language spoken in Tel Aviv is among the Turkish shopkeepers on Florentine Street – the ones who sell spices, dried fruits, nuts and bourekas.

Levy, a Jerusalemite whose parents came from Turkey, has done something incredible with traditional Ladino songs – with her voice and her musical arrangements, she has stripped them of their sentimentality and made them sound raw and immediate. This year she was nominated for a BBC3 “World Music Award,” and she is gradually gaining the international acclaim she deserves for her gorgeous musical interpretations.

You can buy Yasmin Levy’s CDs online. She performs frequently abroad, but her next performance will be in Israel on March 8 at Tzavta in Tel Aviv.

*The Lioness pointed out in an email that the name of the song should be spelled Juderia, not Jude Ria. Juderia means Jewish Quarter. (I once saw an old sign in the old city of Rhodes that said Juderia. The Jews of Rhodes were, of course, all deported by the Nazis during the German occupation of Greece).

(Cross-posted at ontheface.)

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Saving the World

March 1, 2005 by Allison · 1 Comment
Filed under: General

I write a lot of stories for Israel 21c, and I don’t promote every single one. But ever since I interviewed Dr. Mickey Alkan, I really haven’t been able to stop thinking about him and what he has been doing in Botswana. I have such admiration and respect for people like him who have both the ability and motivation to literally go out into the jungle and try to save lives on a large scale, the way he is doing with AIDS in Africa. When you look at the frightening statistics in the story, it’s really not overdramatizing to say that the project he is part of is trying to rescue a whole continent.

It really inspires me to try to think of ways I can make the world a better place, and not just plod along every day in my own little world with my own little worries.

Something interesting he told me that didn’t make it into the story were his observations about the internal dynamics of Botswanan society — even though everyone is black, there are clear cultural castes and distinctions and blatant snobbery and discrimination. He said that when the bushmen came into the towns, that people turned up their noses just like they do in the Negev when Bedouin show up, claiming that they “smell.” Well, the bushmen and the Bedouin who are living in shacks and tents “smell” for the same exact reason — they cook their food on an open fire and they smell like smoke!

If the Alkan story makes you too serious and sad, and you need something fluffy, read the story we put up today on the babelicious Mrs. Israel who took the title of Mrs. World. (I couldn’t believe there still exists a beauty pageant that is Neanderthal enough to have subcategories like “Most Beautiful Legs.)”

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Fresh juice

March 1, 2005 by Israelity · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food, General

One of my favourite juice stands is this one, located on Ben Gurion Boulevard where it meets Dizengoff Street.
They make a great vegetable juice (carrots, beets, celery) spiked with fresh ginger, and I often stop by for my fix after yoga class on nearby Basel Square. But if you’re in the mood for something slightly less virtuous then there are all sorts of fruit shakes – like banana, guava and pineapple, or fresh dates and melon. And fresh citrus juice, of course. They’re open until 11.00 pm, Sunday through Thursday, and until sundown on Friday.
The sweet blonde guy on the right is the one who pulled me into a rain dance during the first rainfall last November. The day I shot this photo, though, he was rather less enthusiastic: it had been pouring for four days straight, and even he admitted that it was getting to be too much.