Devin Naar (University of Washington, Seattle) Presents: A Jewish Language for All Occasions: Ladino Culture and Its Innovations

While Yiddish expressions pepper American English and great Yiddish novels are celebrated still today, comparatively little is known about Ladino and the cultural world it shaped from 1492 until World War II in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. While spoken today by relatively few people in the United States, Europe, and Israel, Ladino (also known as Judezmo and Judeo-Spanish) melded Jewish, Iberian, and eastern Mediterranean cultures to produce a new and vibrant language that permeated every aspect of Jewish life in Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. This lecture delves into the defining features of the Ladino language as a source of Sephardic resilience and adaptation after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula through the creation of serious and humorous Ladino folk culture, and the production of key works of Ladino literature, both religious and secular.
 

Bio: Devin E. Naar is an associate professor of History and Jewish Studies and chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. His first book, published by Stanford University Press, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, won a 2016 National Jewish Book Award and the prize for best book from the Modern Greek Studies Association. His current book project explores the history of Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire in the United States during the twentieth century.

Cosponsors: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Department of History, Institute for Global Studies, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies, University of St. Thomas