BOOKHOUSE

During the past two years, Bookhouse has become home to students and the public for classes, seminars, roundtables, concerts, and film screenings dedicated to the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean and former Ottoman lands. Inspired by our Board member and Auschwitz survivor Stella Levi, we have set up a Diwan room for poetry readings, a bookstore specializing in Sephardic and Italian history, and a fully functioning print shop where a group of young artists print in Hebrew, Ladino, English, Judeo-Arabic, and many other hybrid and transitional languages.

This fall, we would like to join forces with Zack Youcha and Daniel Elias to set up the Music Room, a space dedicated to Sephardic, Mediterranean, and Ottoman music that will function as a preservation lab for the American Sephardi Federation, music classes, and workshops on Jewish liturgy and poetry.

Daniel Elias

Daniel Elias is a founding member of the Elias Ladino Ensemble. The grandson of Rabbi David Elias Cassorla and the son of Joe Elias, he has been performing Ladino music since 1977. Dan learned the Sephardic repertoire from his grandparents, father, and residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged.

He is one of the few modern Sephardi performers to learn this music through the oral tradition. In 1991, Dan led the Elias Ladino Ensemble as it toured Spain at the invitation of the Spanish government in recognition of the 500th Anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews.

In 2023, Dan brought the Ladino Ensemble to Bitola (Monastir), North Macedonia, playing the songs of his Monastirli ancestors 80 years after the Holocaust in Macedonia. He attended Binghamton University, where he studied Greek clarinet and won a concerto competition. Dan has been a licensed attorney for over forty years.

The Ottoman Catalogue is a curated section of our Bookstore featuring English-language classics and new scholarship on Ottoman history and culture. It explores the impact of nationalism on the Ottoman Empire, the consequences of its decline and dissolution for Europe, and the histories of peoples, lands, religions, and their books before the concept of “the Middle East” emerged as a political and geographical term.

Following two decades of research, programming, and publishing on the history of nationalism, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, Centro Primo Levi moved its attention to the period before 1922, exploring the stories, ideas, exchanges, and transformations that occurred over six centuries of Ottoman rule.

The era that ushered in the rise of the workers movement, totalitarianiasm, the Spanish Civil War, the fall of three empires, the shaping of modern nation-states, and the establishment of an economy based on industrial and scientific growth, banking, and warfare, also brought to an end cultures, concepts of time, language, and rituals that today’s observers often struggle to appreciate.

Much of this history has attracted modest attention from American and English-language scholarship. However, over the past few years, there has been an increase in original and translated research and publications, showcasing this period from various angles and perspectives. As the “Middle East” storms into our societies, challenging the vocabulary of public life, as well as its ethical and epistemological paradigms, we feel that attempting to move our gaze back into this past may help us refine our sensibility and interpretational tools.