New York's Sephardic Cafes: Communal, Musical, Culinary, and Political Hubs in the Early Twentieth Century

As many as fifty thousand Jews from the lands of the former Ottoman Empire came to the United States in the decades surrounding World War I. Due to their small numbers, origins in a Muslim society, speaking a language like Spanish (namely, Ladino), while expressing their Judaism in ways distinct from the masses of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews, Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire were not readily recognized as fellow Jews and did not fit the broader American racial and ethnic categorization schemas. The cafe — or kavané — became a key site where these newcomers could seek comfort in a familiar environment, consume foods and listen to music that tied them to the Eastern Mediterranean, and develop their own culture, political visions, and communal institutions as they navigated the newfound and alienating world of the United States.

About the speaker

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: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for Global Studies, Department of History, Immigration History Research Center, Religious Studies Program, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies