We are pleased to announce the launch of the Music Room, which will begin to function on September 22nd, 2026. During the past two years, Bookhouse has become home to students and the public for classes, seminars, roundtables, concerts, and…
Zack Youcha is the founder and Executive Director of Music is Culture (MiC), a nonprofit organization that sponsors, promotes, and publishes community-based music preservation efforts around the world. When he is not at MiC, Zack doubles as a writer, translator,…
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,…
Growing up, Zack Youcha inherited a special gift from his grandfather: an awe for technology and the world of sound recording. As many in his generation, Youcha’s grandfather recorded all sorts of things: conversations at the dinner table, holiday prayers,…
This summer, Elya Assayag has been a fellow at Bookhouse and produced a catalog of the American Sephardi Federation's textile collection. She was assisted by and trained Michael Fulgencio, who interns at CPL from CCNY, and Naila Hassan, a former…
We are delighted to repost this interview conducted by our friend and colleague Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the NYPL Dorot Jewish Division. This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New…
My time with Elya and Michael cataloging and archiving textiles that were donated to The American Sephardic Federation went nothing like I imagined. Elya’s specialty as a textile researcher is embroidery which is something that has always visually interested me…
The textile I have chosen for one of my favorite textiles is one donated and belonging in the Lenore Hazan Levy collection and its origins could be from Castoria, Rhodes and or Salonika. This textile is one of the first…
Mostafa Hussein, Princeton University Press, 2025 In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism challenges the…
Helen Pfeifer, Princeton University Press, 2022 Historians have typically linked Ottoman imperial cohesion in the sixteenth century to the bureaucracy or the sultan’s court. In Empire of Salons, Helen Pfeifer points instead to a critical but overlooked factor: gentlemanly salons. Pfeifer…