Presented by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz

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Vanessa Paloma Elbaz’s research focuses on the central role of Jewish women in Morocco in transmitting their heritage from generation to generation, with musical traditions being an essential part of this chain. The extensive oral history interviews Elbaz made while living in Morocco recorded many of the songs sung by Jewish women on the occasion of marriages, birth, bar mitzvah ceremonies, and other life cycle events, signifying the spiritual power that women have in their communities. Elbaz will share these songs, in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish, and explain the role that they play in carrying the culture and resilience of the communities in which they are sung.

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is a research associate at the Faculty of Music of the University of Cambridge. She earned her PhD from the Center for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies of Sorbonne Paris Cité University and was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow to Morocco. In 2014, she founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive to collect, digitize, classify, and analyze contemporary and historical sound recording of Moroccan Jews. Her newest project, drawn from interviews with Mme. Sultana Azeroual in Casablanca, may be found at yalalla.org.uk. She also has an international performance career as a singer of Moroccan Jewish repertoires and has been described as “a kind of one-woman roving museum of her own” by The New York Times.

Co-presented by JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.