Beyond the Line
In Shany Dvora’s graphic works, dark eyes and placid faces peer out from behind languid, spliced calligraphic forms. They exude a sense of determination to continue to see and be seen, to continue to speak and be spoken.
Ladin٥: a Sephardic Glossary of Queerness
2021 saw rising hostility against queer identities in Turkey, bringing the topic to the fore in discussions about its fraught language politics. By uncovering a largely undocumented Ladino vocabulary, Altaras sheds light on historical gender politics in Sephardic Turkey, and offers a means of building toward a Ladino without lexical limits.
A Tribute to Leah
A dinner commemorating the life of Yadid’s grandmother prompts a series of reflections about the enduring vivacity of her spirit and the power of food as a tool for active remembrance.
Moris Farhi’s Rose-Tinted Turkishness
The Turkish writer Moris Farhi was an embodiment of a regional pluralism that the Republic would seek to cover under the blanket of nationalism. His faults as a starry-eyed representative of Turkish-Jewish unity expose the potency of the Jewish voice, and its silence, in Turkey.
Mashhadi in Morningside Heights
The daughter of immigrants from Mashhad’s crypto-Jewish community, Amini recounts her endeavor to move into the student dorms at Barnard College amid a retaliatory hunger strike at home and antiwar protests on campus.
Rendered in Ice
Banafsheha digitally manipulates a series of photos sent to her by her grandmother, toying with physical and impalpable notions of preservation in a tenderly awkward fight against time.