Jen Richler: Hi, it’s Jen Richler, here with another episode of Can We Talk? First, I want to tell you about another podcast I think you’ll really like. It’s called Chutzpod!...get it? As in chutzpah, but a podcast. It’s hosted by the nationally-known rabbi, Shira Stutman, and Hanna Rosin, a veteran public radio journalist and host of Radio Atlantic. Each week Rabbi Shira and Hanna answer YOUR questions through a Jewish lens. Is it OK to spoil your grandchildren? What do you do when your family is fighting about Israel? And are throuples kosher? Get the answers to those questions and more on Chutzpod! Real life, lived better.

Now, onto the show.

[theme music plays]

Jen: Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

[theme music fades]

[Tape of presenter from Ladino talk show]

Jen: That’s Liliana Benveniste on her Ladino talk show, “Enkontros de Alhad,” or “Sunday Meetings.” Every week for the past three years, viewers from all over the world have tuned in to the livestream to hear conversations about Ladino, in Ladino.

[Tape of presenter speaking in Ladino]

Jen: Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, was the language spoken by Sephardic Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal. When Jews were expelled from those countries in 1492, they took their language with them as they migrated to places like Turkey, Greece and North Africa, and their Ladino was influenced by the native languages of their new homes. At its peak, Ladino had several hundred thousand native Ladino speakers worldwide. The language started to decline at the turn of the 20th century, as people started emigrating. But the real turning point was the Holocaust, when the Nazis destroyed most Ladino-speaking communities. Today, there are barely 60,000 native speakers, a number low enough to make Ladino a UNESCO endangered language. 

But in the past few years, Ladino has been making a comeback. There have always been communities of Ladino speakers, including a virtual one called Ladinokomunita, an online discussion group that started in 1999 and has 1,500 members. But what really jumpstarted Ladino’s resurgence was the Covid pandemic, when people were stuck at home looking for things to do and people to connect with. Hundreds of people joined online classes in Ladino conversation, language for heritage learners, and solitreo, the Sephardic Hebrew script used to write in Ladino. 

The sudden enthusiasm got the attention of people working to promote Ladino—like Hannah Pressman.

Hannah Pressman: If there's hundreds of people clamoring to take a one-hour Zoom class on a Tuesday night, like, that to me doesn't sound like a dying language. That sounds like that there's a community of people who are connected and who are engaged and who are motivated to keep learning.

[theme music plays]

Jen: In this episode of Can We Talk?, we’re exploring Ladino’s comeback among young Jews in the US. We’ll hear more from Hannah Pressman about the reasons for the recent surge in interest, her own reasons for learning Ladino, and her favorite Ladino saying. But first, we’ll hear from two Ladino enthusiasts about why they were drawn to the language.

[theme music fades]

Naomi Spector: My name is Naomi Spector, and I live in Boston, Massachusetts, and, um, I am a Jewish teacher and an herbalist and I am 34 years old. I am half Sephardi and half Ashkenazi. My mother's family—that's my Sephardi side—are among the Sephardi Jews who actually remained in Spain after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. And they stayed and they converted to Catholicism, but they continued to secretly practice Judaism in spite of the danger. I've been studying Ladino informally for the past, um, four or five years, more or less, as part of my research, because I'm very interested in Jewish plant traditions and how my ancestors healed themselves with plants, and the folk remedies and traditions that they enjoyed involving different forms of plants. And, um, through that work and through that research, I became really interested in Ladino and I actually started reading and researching Sephardi folk remedies and even translating them, with the help of my mother, from Ladino to English.

Jen: I'm curious if you have any thoughts about why there's been this renewed interest in Ladino.

Naomi: I think that there is a growing interest among young people in reclaiming our ancestral folk traditions, right? And especially in the aspects of Judaism that have to do with the home and the customs and the traditions of ordinary people in their homes, right? As opposed to just, like, the more synagogue-oriented or the more, like, official knowledge that is more often transmitted. Um, so everything from, you know, folk magic spells or folk protection and amulets to food and herbalism and medicine and stories and songs, like all of that, and folk sayings. Like, there's so much culture and so many values that are passed down through those things.

Jen: Naomi recently started a Ladino club that meets in person once a month. So far, it’s been mostly people in their 20s and 30s, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, and also some non-Jews who are curious about the language.

Naomi: One or two of us will bring a text or something to share or a song. We all have a lot of knowledge, but we don't all have the same knowledge. And so we're able to learn from each other. Um, so we've learned a few Sephardi folk songs. I actually sang a couple, and then we read the lyrics together and discussed those.

Jen: Um, could I put you completely on the spot and have you sing a line or a verse of a Ladino folk song?

Naomi: Sure, I'd be honored. Okay. Um, so this is “The Rose Blooms.” [sings verse in Ladino]

La rosa enflorece en el mes de May. Mi alma se escurece sufriendo del amor. Mi alma se escurece sufriendo del amor.

Jen: That's so great! And it's even got a flower. So it's so apropos.

Naomi: [laughs]

Jen: I love it.

[harp melody of “La Rosa Enflorece”]

Nesi Altaras: My name is Nesi Altaras, and I'm a PhD student at Stanford, um, focused on the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I am from Turkey. I was born and raised in Istanbul.

Jen: Nesi grew up speaking Turkish, but has many relatives who are native Ladino speakers. He decided he wanted to learn it, too. As a college student, he first brushed up on his Spanish and then jumped into reading El Amaneser, a Ladino newspaper that comes out of Istanbul, and the only one still in print. Whenever he read, he had his Ladino Turkish dictionary at the ready.

Nesi: And thankfully I have grandparents who are native speakers who are still alive. So I was able to ask them, uh, when I understood all the words but not the meaning of a sentence, which happened quite often at first, and then less and less. And once I was improving, I was also able to start speaking with my grandparents.

Jen: Nesi has also studied Rashi script. That’s the Hebrew font in which Ladino books were traditionally printed until the 1940s, when it became more common for Ladino to be written with the Roman alphabet. Now he can read older texts, which is helpful for his graduate research. He’s also an occasional host and guest on “Enkontros de Alhad,” the weekly talk show you heard at the start of the episode.

Nesi: When I've done, like, workshops or reading groups or events, most of the people who come are young American Jews, um, not all of whom are Sephardic—some of them are… A lot of people who identify as trans or nonbinary, um, so there's definitely been a lot of times where we've had to think about non-gendered versions of the language. Generally I would say it’s people who want an alternative way to engage with their Jewish identity. Something that is, you know, not the average way to be Jewish is to speak Ladino, to learn Ladino. Um, it's far out of the mainstream of US Jewish life. And I think that has been something of a draw for a lot of people.

Jen: Some people talk about what’s happening with Ladino as a revival. Nesi doesn’t like that word, because it suggests Ladino is on the brink of death.

Nesi: I think Ladino has a life, uh, already. It still lives in its sayings and its food words and swear words. Um, but by incorporating more and more domains, more and more areas of life, we could revivify it in different areas. So it's not that we're pulling back the language from death. Um, but it's that we're putting it into new places. And I think that's a less hopeless way of thinking about language, because realistically, there will never be a critical mass of Jews who speak Ladino at home ever again. That's not in the cards. And that's okay. We can use the language and enjoy it when it fits our needs.

[harp melody plays]

Hannah Pressman: My name is Hannah Pressman. I'm 44 years old and I live in Seattle, Washington. I am what people might call "Ashkephardic"—I am part Ashkenazi on my dad's side and Sephardic on my mom's side. So I'm learning Ladino because it's part of my family's heritage and my family's story.

Jen: Like many Sephardic Jews after the expulsion from Spain, Hannah’s relatives ended up on the island of Rhodes, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. At its height, the Jewish population of Rhodes was about 6,000. In the 1920s and 30s, many Jews left, looking for better economic opportunities. Her great-grandmother, Estrella, moved to colonial Rhodesia, what’s now Zimbabwe, to marry a Turkish businessman. So did several other relatives. Another branch of the family immigrated from Rhodes to Seattle, just like Leni LaMarche in our last episode.

Jen: What’s it been like for you to learn this language that’s such an important part of your family’s story?

Hannah: Yes, you hear a big, deep breath, and I will try not to cry. A lot of stuff, when you're talking about Sephardic heritage, you know, people call it the lacrimose history. It's very sad. There's a lot of loss. There's a lot of grief about this community, about the Rhodes community specifically.

Jen: The Nazis occupied Rhodes in September 1943. In July 1944, the Jews of Rhodes were deported to Auschwitz. Hannah's great-great-grandmother Rivca was among them. She was killed on the day she arrived there. Only 150 people survived out of a community of more than 1,600.

Hannah: So that history kind of lies behind and informs the way that I approach Ladino, which, you know, on the one hand it's this celebration, it's a reclamation, it's something that's so meaningful and joyful. On the other hand, it's an elegy, it's an act of commemoration, right? So it has lots of emotions for me.

Jen: Before Hannah became a devoted Ladino student, she helped promote the language through her work with the HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, an organization that highlights the diversity of Jewish languages. She’d dabbled in learning Ladino herself, but like many people, she only got serious about it during the pandemic, when she had a lot more time. She started taking intensive Ladino classes, learning solitreo, and tuning into "Enkontros de Alhad." It wasn’t long before she became co-director of the newly formed American Ladino League.

Lots of other things started happening in the Ladino world at around the same time, including intergenerational conversation clubs meeting up everywhere from Los Angeles to Palm Beach, Florida.

Hannah: What's really exciting is that there's a new group of high school clubs called Bivas, and this is also supported by the Sephardic Brotherhood. They have clubs around the country, they're growing in numbers, and they just had a Shabbaton to get together, learn Ladino songs, and learn about Sephardic culture all together. This is the next generation, which is so crucial if you're talking about language transmission.

We're also seeing an increased interest in academic Ladino studies. We might be at a point right now in Ladino studies where Yiddish studies was 40 years ago. I feel like if we play our cards right, we could nurture a generation of Ladino scholars and hopefully end up in a place where no one would think to call Ladino a dying language because there's just too much evidence to the contrary.

People get really hung up on the numbers. How many native speakers are there? How many people are fluent in the US globally? Give us numbers, give us statistics. The numbers are one measure, but it's not the whole story. We're not trying to get everyone to be a native speaker, to raise their kids a hundred percent in Ladino, right? That's just not realistic. But what is realistic is to say that anyone is a potential speaker of Ladino. People who are connected with the language, who are engaging with it, they're part of the Ladino community.

Jen: Can we talk a little bit about women's role in preserving and transmitting Ladino?

Hannah: Absolutely. I've heard from so many people that I've interviewed that they have memories of women in their home speaking Ladino, particularly when they're together as a group making these extremely elaborate pastries and delicacies for a kiddush or a special occasion. Just that association of warmth—like literally the warmth, because the oven's on and they're cooking, but they're chatting and chattering in Ladino, and just that association of community, but particularly that intimacy of that domestic, maternal feeling that they associate with Ladino.

Sephardic culture is conservative with a small c. Men are the leaders, men are the rabbis, men give the divrei Torah, but so much of the culture and the songs and this connection to languages is transmitted by women. We want to platform and amplify women's voices especially—women as teachers, women as leaders—and to offer that space for people who identify as women, who identify as nonbinary, that this is a place where they feel welcome and heard and can lead. As far as my own research goes, I mean, that's something that I feel very privileged to do, is to uplift the voices of the women in my family.

Jen: One of those women is her great-great-grandmother, Rivca. Hannah has learned about Rivca’s life through a collection of letters that she wrote in the 1940s to her children, who had all left Rhodes for Africa. She’s incorporating those letters into a memoir about her family’s story.

Hannah: I'm giving Rivca a voice that she didn't have because she was a mother in her community. She was raising eight children. She lived the life that, traditionally, women had in Sephardic communities in the nineteenth, twentieth century. She was in the home. I want her and other Sephardic women who have been marginalized, intentionally or unintentionally, in their own communities to have space to speak, and I'm hoping to let their voices be heard.

[harp melody plays]

Jen: Ladino is known for its colorful sayings, or refranes. So I asked Naomi, Nesi, and Hannah for their favorites.

Naomi: Al ajo ke se le vaiga. That means, "May it go to the garlic." Garlic is considered to be spiritually protective and to neutralize the evil eye. Let the negative energy go to the garlic and be neutralized by it.

Nesi: Se alevantaron los pipinos i aharvaron el bahchevan. That means, "The cucumbers rose up and they beat up the gardener." This saying means that people who don't know stuff are telling the people who know stuff how to do it. If I was trying to teach my grandmother how to make the food that she usually makes, she would tell me, like—you could even just say the first part, you know, like, "The cucumbers have risen up!"

Jen: [laughs]

Hannah: Segun el tiempo, se abolta la vela. I just love the sort of internal poetry of that—it has a nice rhythm. And what it means is, "According to the weather, shift your sail." There are a couple of reasons why I love that. One, I like that it's ocean-themed. So much of Sephardic history is about journeys by boat from one place to another, whether they're fleeing or immigrating or chasing a new opportunity. And then also, the more existential aspect of this expression: Shift your sail according to the weather. We have to be adaptable. I find that very applicable, particularly when thinking about strategies for Ladino in the twenty-first century. There are challenges facing the language, but every challenge is an opportunity, and we can shift our sail. I feel very privileged to be on the boat, so to speak, and involved in these different initiatives to help build community and preserve the language. This language means so much to so many people, so if I can do a little bit to carry it forward into the future, I'm very happy.

[harp melody plays]

Jen: That was Hannah Pressman. You also heard from Naomi Spector and Nesi Altaras. Special thanks to Bryan Kirschen and Rachel Amado Bortnick, co-directors of the American Ladino League, for answering my many questions. You can learn more about the American Ladino League at americanladinoleague.org. And if you’re interested in learning Ladino or learning about Ladino, there are links to lots of great resources in our show notes at jwa.org/canwetalk. There, you can also see a copy of a letter Hannah’s great-great-grandmother Rivca sent to her children. And for even more Ladino, check out our “Ode to Ladino” episode, about one woman’s mission to keep Ladino alive in Turkey.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You’re now listening to "La Rosa Enflorece," arranged for the harp by Barbara Ann Fackler. You can find us at jwa.org/canwetalk or on your favorite podcast app, and you can sign up to get our monthly newsletter at jwa.org/signup. I’m Jen Richler, until next time!