WINTER 2022
Beyond the Line
Shany Dvora
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 Glossary of Sephardic Queerness
Nesi Altaras
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
Maya Yadid and Kristina Schmidt
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.
(S)wordplay
Mirushe Zylali
The history of the seipa, a sword-shaped protective amulet worn by Kurdish Jews, can help us better understand how to care for one another and build trust across communal divisions in the face of illness and collective hardship.
Genizah Zine
C. L. K.
my ancestors stare at me every morning as I drink my coffee, their eastern eyes boring into my americano. ink markings of husbands and wives caught in perpetuity and trapped under glass sheets in a moment of peak performance, which they all dressed for the same way, despite the whole East / West thing that sets them apart.
Mashhadi in Morningside Heights
Esther Amini
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.
Moris Farhi’s Rose-Tinted Turkishness
Matt Hanson
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.
Rendered in Ice
Kaitlin Banafsheha
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.
Acknowledgments
Sophie Levy and Evan Mateen