Sigal Nagar-Ron (Sapir Academic College) and Netta Amar-Shiff (Mizrahi Civic Collective)

The Many Souths of the World: Mizrahi Women and the Transformation of Israeli Society

In the first meeting with two of the founding members of the Mizrahi Civic Collective, Sigal Nagar-Ron explained how the Mizrahi feminist standpoint recognizes the diversity of women’s vulnerabilities and therefore the different systems of oppression they may be subjected to. She referred to the Southeast perspective as one that takes the experiences of populations such as Mizrahi women and turns them into sources of knowledge, recognizing their insights into the society they live in, while demanding a fairer distribution of resources, both material and symbolic. She reminded us that the production of non-hegemonical knowledge has to do with the presence of academics that come from the margins of society. In that same meeting, Netta Amar-Shiff spoke about the Mizrahi and feminist approach as having the potential to rearticulate identity in a shared land and presented the Mizrahi voice as an internal critique that had the uncomfortable function of reminding Israel of its internal inequality. The Mizrahi standpoint has a liberatory potential because of its ability to force the Jewish society to look inwards and see what is hindering peace and justice. She finally presented the concept of mutual rescue of Palestinians and Israelis as a paradigm that would substitute the present one, which is that of mutual destruction.

Susan Sered (Suffolk University) and Heftsi Cohen-Montagu (Beit Midrash Arevot)

Caring Experts: Sephardi/MizrahiWomen in Entwined Worlds

In the second meeting, Susan Star Sered and Heftsi Cohen-Montagu had a dialogue about the ethical paradigm that may be learned from the historical experience of Mizrahi women. Susan Starr Sered spoke about her seminal work on Kurdish women in Jerusalem. She put the ethics of caring for other people at the center of her research, in a time when caring for others was considered a lower level of moral development than more ideological or theoretical principles, in the line of Carol Gilligan’s critique of the prejudices behind research on moral development among children. Starr Sered emphasized the centrality of healing in the moral and ritual world of these women, together with their assumption of responsibility for others. Despite the abuse and neglect that many of the Kurdish women in her research had endured, they managed to become giving mothers, responsible for the healing of those around them, instead of repeating the cycle of trauma, as it tends to be so common in other social contexts. It was through these ethics of care that they managed to move on in life and create a different reality for others. Heftsi Cohen-Montagu spoke about her own experience as leader and member of the Sephardi egalitarian congregation Degel Yehuda and the Mizrahi feminist Beit Midrash Arevot. She spoke about the importance of living with tensions and contradictions, an ability that is at the core of a feminism that also speaks the language of tradition. She referred to the ethics of arevut or mutual responsibility as a way to confront social conflicts that bind us all together. Finally, she explained how studying the female traditions of the Sephardi world is key to an intergenerational transmission that not only preserves a past but also speaks to our present and future. Our ability to connect with female traditions as well as with the suffering of our mothers and foremothers restores our relationship with that chain of mothers and it is from that restored relationship that we validate our experiences today and enrich the Jewish story 

Neta Elkayam (artist and musician)

Arénas - Music Remembers What History Forgets

In this closing session of the 2024 Sephardi Modernities Seminar Series, artist and musician Neta Elkayam presented her ongoing work on the Arenas project, developed with Amit Hai Cohen. Moving between performance, archival research, and personal reflection, Elkayam explored a collection of 1964 recordings made by Issachar Ben-Ami at the Arenas transit camp near Marseille, where many Jewish migrants from North Africa passed on their way to Israel. For Elkayam, the recordings opened a path back to the voices of Moroccan Jewish women from the Atlas region, whose songs, languages, and ways of singing had often been marginalized or forgotten.

The session reflected on music not simply as heritage to be preserved, but as a living practice that can be continued, reworked, and brought back into women’s lives. Elkayam described how these songs accompanied birth, mourning, work, pilgrimage, and everyday life, and how their repetitive, collective forms created a kind of female sonic space. Through her own artistic interventions, she transforms fragments of archival songs into contemporary compositions, combining Moroccan Jewish, Amazigh, Arabic, electronic, visual, and performative elements. The session thus presented music as a way of repairing broken chains of transmission, reconnecting with mothers and grandmothers, and imagining new forms of Sephardi/Mizrahi feminist creativity.