Many of these opportunities are streamed through Zoom. All 91̽��faculty, staff, and students have access to��.��

Gospel Choir

December 6, 7:30 PM |

Phyllis Byrdwell, School of Music alumni and��Minister of Music at Mount Zion Baptist Church of Seattle��leads the 100-voice gospel choir in songs of praise, jubilation, and other expressions of the Gospel tradition.

$10 |

Storytelling Across Millenia

December 7, 5:00 PM | Online

91̽��Alumni Book Club is currently reading “Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr, a story that weaves together three tales — one in historic Constantinople, one in present day Idaho and one in the future with a character who has never been to Earth. What connects them? The shared (albeit fictional) classic story of Aethon. Join 91̽��Classics Professor��Chris Waldo��in a conversation about studying Classics in 2021. How are these stories and cultures still relevant today? What makes us come back to these tales for generations?

No spoilers! You don’t need to have finished��Cloud Cuckoo Land��to participate in this event.

Free | Register & More info

Modern Music Ensemble��

December 6, 7:30 PM |

The 91̽�� Modern Music Ensemble (Cristina Valdés, director) performs��music by Louis Andriessen, Sylvano Bussotti, Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski, and Julis Eastman.

Free |

Women, Gender & Inclusion in Sports: A Historical Perspective

December 8, 3:00 PM��|

Book Publication Celebration & Discussion with Professor Kemi Adeyemi in Conversation with Professor Chandan Reddy

December 8, 4:00 – 5:30 PM |

Join the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies for a celebration and discussion of Professor Kemi Adeyemi’s new book, Queer Night Life. Professor Chandan Reddy and Prof. Adeyemi will discuss two readings: Queer Nightlife Introduction and Ms. Briq House in Her Own Words.

“Queer Night Life,” a collection of essays and interviews celebrating the expressive possibilities of a world after dark. The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. “Queer Nightlife” joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color and extending the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists.

Free |

Ethnomusicology Visiting Artist Concert: Benjamin Hunter and students:��African American Roots Music

December 11, 7:30 PM |

Autumn Quarter Ethnomusicology Visiting Artist Benjamin Hunter and students present an end-of-quarter performance.

Benjamin is an award winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, community activist, social entrepreneur, and educator.�� Benjamin’s work explores the intersections of music & art, community, policy, and culture.

Free |

Ladino Day:��Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States

December 12, 10:00 AM |

In the 91̽��’s 9th annual Ladino Day celebration, editors of the new book “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States” discuss the book project, alongside presentations from three contributors to the volume.

To commemorate Ladino Day 2021, join us for an interdisciplinary conversation with��Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano��(University of Pennsylvania) and��Kerem Tınaz��(Koç University), the editors of this book, and with��Hannah S. Pressman��(Director of Education and Engagement, Jewish Languages Project),��Maureen Jackson��(independent scholar), and��Laurent Mignon��(University of Oxford), three of the contributors, as they discuss important artifacts and their impact on Ottoman and Jewish history.

Free |

Looking for more?

Check out UWAA’s Stronger Together web page for��more digital engagement opportunities.

Sephardic Studies chair Devin Naar speaks at Holocaust commemoration event

, 91̽��professor of history and Jewish studies and chair of the Jackson School’s Sephardic Studies Program, delivered a keynote address for Sephardic Heritage International DC’s third annual , held virtually on Jan. 28.

The event, sponsored by U.S. , a Democrat from Maryland, had the theme of “Refugees of the Holocaust.” The featured speaker was , CEO of the pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer, who told of his Sephardic Jewish family’s Holocaust survival; his parents were among the few Jews to survive the Nazi onslaught on Thessaloniki, Greece.

Naar spoke of Claire Barkey Flash, author of the 2016 memoir “A Hug From Afar: One Family’s Dramatic Journey Through Three Continents to Escape the Holocaust.” The Barkey family emigrated from the Mediterranean island of Rhodes to Tangier, and finally to the United States. Naar, who is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, wrote a foreword for the book.

is a nonprofit that celebrates Sephardic culture and raises awareness of the histories of underrepresented Jewish communities. Watch a of the event.

* * *

Melia Watras releases new album, ‘Firefly Songs’

Violist, composer and music professor put out a new album in January. “,” with14 of Watras’ compositions played with the ensemble Frequency and other guests, was released by Seattle-based Planet M Records.

Album notes say the compositions “are a reflection on stories, artistic influences and people that are interconnected points of light from her own personal folklore.” Watras composed the music, for various instruments and voices, from 2015 to 2018.

Members of Frequency are Watras, viola and voice; Michael Jinsoo Lim, violin and voice; and Sæunn Thorsteinsdottir, cello. Also on the album are the voices of Catherine Connors and Vina Vu Valdés, as well as excerpts of recorded viola lessons given by Atar Arad. Watras is the Adelaide D. Currie Cole Endowed Professor, viola.

Watch a video of the album.

* * *

Ted Poor’s ‘You Already Know’ noted among best local albums of 2020

An album by , assistant professor in the 91̽��School of Music, was named on The Seattle Times list of the . Poor’s “” was released in March.

The Times asked 15 music critics to submit their top 10 for 2020 and then combined the results. “You Already Know” tied for No. 19 on the list. Though COVID prevented an in-person album release, the Times wrote, “this beautifully austere duo set with Seattle-reared sax man Andrew D’Angelo … hardly went unnoticed.”

Many of these online opportunities are streamed through Zoom. All 91̽��faculty, staff, and students have access to��.��

The Converso’s Return: Dalia Kandiyoti in Conversation with Devin E. Naar

January 14, 5:00 – 6:00 PM |

Critical Issues Lecture Series:��Skawennati

January 15, 12:00 PM |

Drop-in Session: Steadying the Heart & Mind with Yoga

January 11, 6:00 – 7:00 PM |

UWAA Events Calendar

Online

The�� 91̽��Alumni Association��events calendar is an excellent resource for finding upcoming events from entities all over the UW.��

Upcoming events on the calendar:

• : January 13, 4:00 – 5:00 PM
• : January 22, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
• Short Talks: Home: January 28,��6:30 PM

The Henry Art Gallery’s Virtual Collections

Looking for more?

Check out UWAA’s Stronger Together web page for��more digital engagement opportunities.

Many of these online opportunities are streamed through Zoom. All 91̽��faculty, staff, and students have access to��.��

Ladino Day 2020 — Revolutionizing Ladino: From the Printing Press to the Smartphone

December 6, 10:00 – 11:30 AM |

Commemorating the Centennial of the Negro Leagues: Racial Justice, Professional Baseball, and American Society

December 2, 3:30 – 5:00 PM |

Confronting Systemic Racism in Communication Sciences and Academia

December 3, 12:00 – 1:00 PM |

Round Table Discussion 3: What Is the Human, Anyway?

Looking for more?

Check out UWAA’s Stronger Together web page for��more digital engagement opportunities.

Shuyi Chen elected to national board for atmospheric research

, 91̽��professor of atmospheric sciences, has been elected one of to the board of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the group that manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The corporation, or , is a nonprofit consortium of 120 North American universities focused on research and training in atmospheric sciences and related Earth system sciences. Its 18 board members serve three-year terms. The new trustees were announced on Oct. 26.

Chen is a meteorologist whose research involves observing how the atmosphere and ocean interact with hurricanes and typhoons in tropical areas, and the use of mathematical models to predict weather patterns.

Joining Chen as a new board trustee is a former director of the National Science Foundation. Others are from the Georgia Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Colorado Foundation.

* * *

David Crouse story wins award from literary journal

91̽��English professor won the 2019 from the online literary journal for a story titled “Sixty Eight to Seventy.” The prize was announced earlier this year.

The publication, founded in 2015, sponsors annual contests for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography. Crouse’s story will appear in an upcoming issue. He also has new stories coming in the journals and .

Crouse is the author of two collections of short fiction: “” in 2005 and “” in 2008. He is at work on a collection of Alaska-themed stories, which will include “Sixty Eight to Seventy.”

One online reviewer wrote that Crouse’s writing “has a cool, measured urgency to it that invites his readers not to miss the most delicate flickers of language as he describes his characters’ often confused or detached states of mind.”

* * *

Devin Naar does research for PBS show ‘Finding Your Roots’

, 91̽��professor of history and Jewish studies and chair of the Jackson School’s Sephardic Studies Program, conducted research for a recent episode of the PBS program “,” hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The program, which aired Oct. 13 on PBS, features Gates talking with fashion designer Diane von ��ü�����ٱ�Բ������, whose mother was a Sephardic Jew from Salonica and survivor of the Auschwitz death camp.

Naar, author of the 2018 book “,” did extensive research on von ��ü�����ٱ�Բ������‘s family and is noted in the credits of the episode. In 2016 he did similar research, and was featured, in TLC’s “Who Do You Think You Are.”

The Department of English has introduced its new , a series of podcasts and YouTube videos in which 91̽��humanities faculty discuss their research and teaching — “including the ways our work contributes to how we experience and seek to understand this time of global crisis.” Each presentation is available in both podcast and YouTube video formats.

In the first of so far, associate professor describes “what studying literature in what’s called ‘the environmental humanities’ teaches us about collectivity during events from Cyclone Amphan to COVID-19.” was a powerful tropical cyclone that caused damage in Eastern India in May.

The second episode features , senior lecturer and associate director of writing programs, on the topic, “What Asian American Studies, Literature and Art Teach Us During COVID-19.” Liu also discusses anti-racist pedagogical practices.

The third episode features associate professor on “Queer Care and Trans Literature During COVID-19.”��With a focus on promoting a “politics of care,” key texts she covers in the talk include “” by Imogen Binnie to “,” by Kai Cheng Thom.

Public scholarship project director for the podcast/video series is lecturer and project manager is Jake Huebsch, coordinator of the department’s Expository Writing Program.

In other podcast news:

Sephardic Studies chair Devin Naar visits two podcasts

, 91̽��professor of history and Jewish studies and chair of the Jackson School’s Sephardic Studies Program, was a guest on two podcasts in recently.

In May Naar discussed the history and cultural legacy of the Ladino language on a about Near Eastern history, language and culture produced by Foreigncy.US. He described the growing , in the Jackson School’s , gathering and digitizing documents pertaining to the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean world.

Naar also was a guest in September on a podcast called “Then and Now,” produced by the University of California, Los Angles, Center for History and Policy. The episode was titled “.” Naar discussed the topic from the perspective of Sephardic Jewish history.

“He challenges the imposed racial categorization of Jews in the United States, discusses the erasure and exclusion of Sephardic and Mizrahi identity in mainstream Jewish institutions,” program notes say, “and proposes a historical reclamation of Sephardic identity and a radical reimagining of community spaces.” This podcast was released on Sept. 8.

, 91̽�� professor of international studies and history, is featured in “,” a new documentary film about descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions discovering their Sephardic Jewish heritage.

Several years in the making, “Children of the Inquisition,” directed by , will premiere at 1 p.m. March 24, at the AMC Pacific Place 11 in Seattle, followed by a talk with Naar and the director. The event is part of the annual , which runs March 23-31 and April 6-7 at several venues.

The documentary also features New York Times journalist , neuroscientist and others as they trace their families’ histories across continents and centuries.

“Most of the figures featured tell the story of the hidden Jewish roots in their families as their ancestors were forced to conceal their Jewish origins under threat of denunciation and punishment by the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, which were also active in the Americas,” said Naar. “The film follows several such individuals as they rediscover their Jewish roots and the varying paths that they take with that new knowledge.”

Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and chair of the UW’s , and is affiliated with the , also in the Jackson School.

He deepened his knowledge of through years of research before his 2012 arrival at the UW. As a child he heard his grandfather use phrases of , the now near-dead language spoken by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. In time, he learned the Ladino language so he could better understand his own family’s history.

Naar said his ancestors lived “outwardly” as conversos — or Jewish converts to Christianity — until the 1530s, when family members escaped the Inquisition and settled in the Ottoman Empire, in today’s Greece.

While others in the film learned about their long-ago Jewish family roots, Naar’s experience was different. He’d always assumed that his ancestors had been Jewish, but learned that “for two generations or so, many centuries ago, they were forced to live as Christians and only later formally readopted Judaism in the Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire.”

The production crew filmed Naar in his Thomson Hall office, in the history department talking with graduate students in Sephardic studies, and at his home, where he told his family’s story. They also filmed at The Summit, a Jewish retirement home in Seattle where a number of members of the Sephardic community attend a weekly language group they call The Ladineros.

This is not the first film to call upon Naar’s talents and background; he appeared briefly in the 2008 documentary “” and was a guest in 2016 on the television show “Who Do You Think You Are?” where he helped young TV star Lea Michele learn about her Sephardic family history. Among director Lovett’s previous projects is the 2010 documentary “Going Blind,” about vision loss.

Stories of people rediscovering their Sephardic Jewish roots, Naar said, “are part of a broader story about the fate of Jews and their descendants in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, including in the United States.

“It is a story not only of genealogy, memory and forgetting, but also of race and empire.”

###

For more information, contact Naar at 206-616-6202 or denaar@uw.edu.

is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies in the — part of the 91̽��’s — and an associate professor in the Department of History. He is the author of “,” published in September by Stanford University Press.

“Jewish Salonica”
book launch
7 – 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3
Prof. Naar will explore the fate of Salonica’s Jews and offer behind-the-scenes insight into how he uncovered the previously lost sources necessary to tell the story.
91̽��Tower Auditorium
4333 Brooklyn Ave. NE
Presented by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Sephardic Studies Program.
Registration and more information .

What is the book about?

A few years ago, The New York Times ran a about the city of Salonica (also known as Thessaloniki), the subject of my book. The headline read: “Greek youth remake the ‘Seattle of the Balkans.’” What makes a relatively obscure city on the Aegean coast in northern Greece seem like Seattle? The article explains that Salonica’s “growing appeal as a youthful city with an intriguing multiethnic history and an arty counterculture is turning it into something of a Seattle of the Balkans.” Suddenly, a place so distant strikes very close to home for us at the 91̽��.

My book is preoccupied with the “intriguing multiethnic history” that once characterized Salonica but was radically transformed and ultimately erased due to the pressures and upheavals of the 20th century: war, population movements, imperial collapse, rising nationalism, urbanization, and, ultimately, genocide.

The book tells this story from the perspective of Salonica’s Jews. Part of the predominantly Muslim Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries and now part of predominantly Orthodox Christian Greece, Salonica was long-defined by one of its more unusual features: Until the start of the 20th century, half of its multiethnic population was composed of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino)-speaking Sephardic Jews. Expelled from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean, settling in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and continuing to speak their language and practice their religion. The imprint of Jews on Salonica became so significant that, into the twentieth century, the markets closed every Saturday in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. For Jews in Salonica, their city became the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.”

The book charts how the end of the Ottoman Empire and the incorporation of Salonica into Greece impacted the city’s Jews. It was a challenging transition. As an important part of a multicultural empire, Jews in Salonica suddenly became a minority in Greece: they observed a different religion and spoke a different language from the majority of the country’s citizens. The book focuses on the strategies that the city’s Jews developed to bridge the gap between their Ottoman past and their Greek future, to figure out ways for them to be Jews while also becoming Greeks. Would such a transformation even be possible?

As a clue as to how the story ends, one of the features that makes Salonica today a “youthful city,” as The New York Times suggests, is that it is home to the largest university in Greece and the Balkans. What is lesser known — often taboo to discuss — is that nearly all of the campus was built atop Salonica’s vast Jewish cemetery, which was once the largest Jewish burial ground in Europe. Destroyed at the initiative of the local authorities, but under the cover of the Nazi occupation during World War II, the cemetery and its disappearance from the urban fabric—with few traces left behind—symbolize the fate of Salonica’s Jews and their erasure from the city’s public memory.

How did Jews in Salonica try to bridge the gap between the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece?

One of the ways that Salonican Jewish leaders sought to re-anchor themselves in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and in the new context of Greece was to emphasize their connection to their city and their status as Salonicans. Rather than tying themselves to a country or a religion, these Jewish leaders saw their primarily connection as being to their city. Even if their new neighbors did not see them as members of the Greek nation, Jews’ longstanding roots in the city could not be refuted — or at least they hoped. They even proposed transforming Salonica into an independent city-state as an alternative to continued imperial control or the incorporation of the city into a new nation.

Although the plan for the city-state failed, Salonica’s Jewish leaders continued to believe that by seeing themselves as fundamentally Salonican, they could also become legitimate members of the national community. The experiment — both in local Salonican patriotism and in transforming the last generation of Ottoman Jews into Greek Jews — was ultimately cut short by the Holocaust, during which the Nazis tragically deported the city’s nearly 50,000 Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

What was the research process like for the book?

In conducting my research, I felt like I was living out a historian’s fantasy: the discovery of a dusty trove of previously unstudied archival documents in some obscure basement. That’s literally what happened.

The research for this book took more than a decade, required travel to six countries, and knowledge of six languages. As I wanted to tell the story of Salonica’s Jews through their own voices, I needed access to local sources written by Jews themselves. Until recently, the limited but growing scholarship about Salonica has relied on sources from outsiders, like foreign travelers or European consuls. Since the city had experienced such devastation as a result of fires, wars, and the deportation of the Salonica’s Jews, access to local sources was not easily attained.

During the Second World War, the Nazis had confiscated the libraries and archives of the Jewish community of Salonica. ��It was long thought that these records had all been destroyed. But, sleuthing in American military records, I discovered that much of the archive had been preserved and dispersed across the globe. After the war, the Soviets found some of the archives and deposited them in Moscow. Only after the collapse of the USSR did their existence become known. Other materials, found by the Americans in Germany at the end of World War II, wound up in New York and another section was returned to Greece. Some of that material was later sent to Jerusalem for safekeeping. In Salonica itself, in 2005, I miraculously found another portion of those returned archives in the basement of an old Jewish communal building, transferred them to the , and spent a year organizing and studying them.

In combination with local newspapers preserved abroad, the thousands of documents from the scattered archives of the Jewish community of Salonica became the primary sources through which I tried to restore the long-forgotten voices of Salonica’s Jews and to tell their story through their own words.

This scholarly work was also a personal project in many ways – could you tell about that?

My paternal grandfather was born in Salonica and immigrated to the United States in 1924. His brother, who stayed in Greece, was ultimately deported with his wife and two children to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 along with the vast majority of Salonica’s Jews. Their world always intrigued me: enchanting stories recalling interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews; the question of whether our family were “Spanish Jews” or “Greek Jews” or something else; and the tragic fate of the relatives who perished in the Nazi camps. I decided at a certain point that I wanted to know more and was surprised to discover how little information was available. The quest to address that absence and to understand the world from which my family came inspired my career as a historian and the subject of my book.

As the first person in my immediate family to step foot in Salonica since 1924 — I first visited in 2004 — I experienced powerful, but mixed, emotions. “Returning” to my family’s city — a city where my ancestors lived for four centuries — I found few traces of their longstanding presence. When I enrolled in Greek language classes at the university, I could not help but lament the fact that generations of my own ancestors had been buried under the campus — beneath the very classroom in which I sat. Their eternal resting place had been destroyed and their very existence was unknown to my classmates. At the same time, I made many dear friends and found many allies in my pursuit of the city’s history. Salonica has changed since I began my research: now, certain segments of society are more interested in the city’s “intriguing multiethnic history” and are reclaiming it as their own.

When I arrived in Seattle in 2011, I was pleasantly surprised to encounter echoes of the world of Jewish Salonica in the Pacific Northwest. Among the many communities that comprise Seattle’s diverse population is one of the country’s largest contingents of Sephardic Jews. A handful of these families come from Salonica — primarily Auschwitz survivors and their descendants. Many have shared their memories with me and participate in our .

I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that one the most important figures in the history of the Seattle Sephardic community was from Salonica. He was a journalist, poet, and educator. His great-granddaughter became a student of mine at 91̽��and dedicated more than three years of independent studies with me to uncover the writings of her great-grandfather, translate them into English, write her own original Judeo-Spanish poems, and compile a marvelous . How fitting: echoes of the “intriguing multiethnic history” of the Seattle of the Balkans continue to resonate in Seattle itself.

###

For more information, contact Naar at 206-616-6202 or denaar@uw.edu.

Naar composed the foreword for “ by Claire Barkey Flash, and arranged for the Sephardic Studies Program to digitize the archives on which the book is based. Flash’s daughter Cynthia, a 91̽��alumna, edited the book and published it in February with the Bellevue-based Flash Media Services. Naar discussed this extraordinary book and the wartime experiences of Sephardic Jews with 91̽��Today.

What is the story told, through letters and documents, in “A Hug from Afar”?������

The story highlights the voice and tenacious drive of one young woman —�� Claire Barkey — and her attempts to ensure her family’s safety and survival during World War II. What is unusual about Barkey is that she is a Sephardic Jew from the island of Rhodes.

This means that her ancestors had been living in Spain until 1492, at which point King Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews residing in their kingdom. Many fled across the Mediterranean Sea to what was then the Ottoman Empire, which included the island of Rhodes after 1522. Until the 20^th century, descendants of those Jews from Spain, known as Sephardic Jews, continued to speak a language based on medieval Spanish, known as (or Judeo-Spanish) — a language now nearing extinction.

Born on Rhodes after the island came under Italian rule in 1911, Barkey began composing letters in Ladino at age 9, in 1930, to her uncle, who had immigrated to Seattle. What begin as the musings of a young girl about her family and daily life in her tight-knit community turn more tense and urgent as the burdensome impact of the Great Depression grows, the desire of young Jews on her island to emigrate increases, and the hardening of fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Mussolini in the lead-up to war leave their mark.

Through the correspondence that Barkey maintained with her uncle, Raphael Capelouto, and through her uncle’s generosity and via petitions to American Congress, the family was ultimately able to escape Rhodes and spend the years of World War II in a refugee camp in Tangier, Morocco, before eventually being reunited in Seattle.

The letters are significant not only because they document the life of one young Jewish woman and her family’s harrowing experiences of the Second World War, but also because they provide specific insight into the world of Sephardic Jews, whom we hear less about in connection to the Holocaust, and because they were penned in the flowing Sephardic Jewish vernacular, Ladino, which few people continue to speak today and even fewer write. Kudos to Claire’s daughter Cynthia for putting the project together, and to Claire’s brother Morris for his expert translations into English.

How does this family’s story relate to the larger experience of Sephardic Jews during World War II?

The experiences of Sephardic Jews tend not to be part of our popular understandings of the war and the Holocaust. Typical narratives tend to focus on the experiences of Jews in western, central and eastern Europe — Ashkenazi Jews in Germany, Hungary, Poland, etc.

The experiences of those Jews in southeastern Europe, along the Mediterranean Sea, often fail to be incorporated into the stories we tell about this dark chapter in human history. But it is true that the Nazi occupation forces extended their reach far into the region, occupying Greece, as well as Rhodes, an island in the Aegean Sea near the Turkish mainland.

The Sephardic Jews of Greece and Rhodes experienced devastating loses during the Second World War. Most of the Jews of mainland Greece were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau beginning in the spring of 1943, including nearly 50,000 from the city of Thessaloniki (Salonica), which had once been home to the largest community of Ladino-speaking Jews in the world. The Jewish population of that city decreased by 95 percent rendering it one of the most decimated Jewish populations in the entire continent.

The Jews of Rhodes similarly met their fate in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. They were among the last Jews to be deported to Auschwitz — shortly before the war ended. They also had the misfortune of experiencing the longest voyage from their homes to the Nazi death camps, having been rounded up in Rhodes, sent by ship to the port at Athens, interned in a concentration camp there, and then sent by train to Poland. The entire treacherous journey lasted three weeks. Of the 1,600 Jews deported from Rhodes, fewer than 200 survived.

The devastation of the Jewish community of Rhodes is therefore representative of the broader plight of Sephardic Jews during the World War II — a catastrophic event that led to the dissolution of the longstanding Ladino-speaking Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean.

What might we learn from this story in light of the refugee crisis now underway in Europe?��

The story of Claire Barkey and her family as they fled their native island on the verge of the Nazi occupation — and thereby averted almost certain death — resonates deeply with the plight of refugees across the world today. But as Claire’s desperate letters make clear, few places in the world were willing to accept them. In fact, only two places offered the family refuge: Tangiers and Shanghai. Remarkably no other country in the world offered to open its doors to this family — not even the United States.

In this regard, the Barkeys were not alone. Thousands of Jews petitioned various countries for admission but few were granted entrance, especially into the U.S., even if they already had relatives there. The family of Anne Frank had applied for a visa to join relatives in the United States; it was rejected.

My own great uncle in Salonica, Greece, likewise applied for a visa to join my grandfather and other relatives in the United States. It, too, was rejected. Like members of Barkey family who remained on Rhodes and like the Franks, my Naar relatives who remained in Salonica were also murdered in the Nazi death camps. Fortunately for the Barkeys, Tangier afforded them an unusual escape route whereas many others could not get out and ultimately perished.

Viewing the experience of today’s refugees through the lens of the Barkey story cannot but provoke empathy and compassion for those displaced in our own age, who seek shelter and a new beginning in foreign lands.

What is remarkable about the Barkey story is to recognize just how rare it was, how unusual it was, for a family to get out in time; most did not make it. Now as we observe from the distant comfort of the U.S. the conflict in Syria, which has already resulted in a remarkable 400,000 deaths, we would hope that our country would be able to do more to aid refugees than it had in the past. But so far, it remains more of a hope than a reality.

Are the Barkey family’s documents archived with the 91̽��Sephardic Studies Program? How large has that library now grown?��

Yes, the family’s letters and documents have all been digitized as part of our�� and will soon be available online. There, one can access the original texts in Ladino, the nuances of penmanship, the creases on the page, the sense of the age of the materials. There, these documents gain their significance not only because of the text written on them, but also because they constitute historical artifacts with multiple dimensions and layered clues as to the lives of their writers and readers, and the paths that they traversed across continents and oceans.

The Barkey papers join a growing set of original documents and books written in Ladino or otherwise relevant to the Sephardic Jewish experience that have been incorporated into our collection. We now have more than 200,000 digitized pages of material that constitute the largest digital collection in 91̽��Libraries, managed in partnership with the The collection includes more original Ladino books than the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library and continues to grow each day.

While most of the materials stem from individuals here in the Seattle area, our reputation is growing and individuals and institutions from across the country and abroad increasingly send us material to digitize, incorporate into our library, and make accessible to interested scholars, students and community members.

The goal remains to bring the history, culture and language of Sephardic Jews — for a long time forgotten or invisible within American public consciousness — out into the open for all to see and explore.

What do you think readers will take away from reading the story of the Barkey family?

Readers will take away a sense of the character and determination of a young woman to rescue her family at all costs, and they will also catch a glimpse of the now lost world of the Sephardic Jews of the island of Rhodes.

They will see, unexpectedly, the legacies of that world that continue to echo right here in Seattle, home to one of the largest communities of Sephardic Jews in the country — especially those from Rhodes. They will realize that even though the world of the former Ottoman Empire, the atrocities of the Holocaust, and now-largely-defunct Spanish-Jewish dialect seem so distant in terms of time, space and culture, they have all made their mark right here at home in Seattle.

###

For more information about the book or the UW’s Sephardic Studies Program, contact Naar at 206-616-6202 or denaar@uw.edu.

The upcoming season finale of TLC’s popular program “” airing May 1, will feature 91̽��assistant professor helping television star (“Glee,” “Scream Queens”) learn about her Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

“Most Americans probably have never heard of Sephardic Jews,” said Naar, who chairs the UW’s , located in the , part of the UW’s .

“So for such a prominent celebrity to speak so publicly and intimately about her connection to this often invisible history and culture will be a turning point.”

Michele gained fame in the Broadway musical “Spring Awakening.” She was born Lea Michele Sarfati, to a Sephardic Jewish father and Italian Catholic mother. Though public sources refer to Michele’s father as a Sephardic Jew whose family came from Spain and Turkey, the episode will reveal that part of her family also came from today’s Greece.

Naar was able to find documents on Michele’s ancestors in archives in New York and Moscow — a challenging task given the devastation experienced by the Jewish communities of Greece during World War II, including the seizure of Jewish community records.

For Naar, it was an extra treat to discover that he and the celebrity share a similar family trajectory. Both their ancestors came from Salonica, migrated to New York, joined an organization called the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, and then settled in New Jersey.

The episode, scheduled to air on��TLC at 9 p.m. EST on May 1, end the current season, during which the show has also profiled celebrities Scott Foley, Molly Ringwald, Chris Noth, Aisha Tyler and Katey Sagal.

“It’s really exciting,” Naar said. “The episode��will��familiarize Americans with the very existence of Sephardic Jews and hopefully pique their curiosity and inspire them to learn more.”

• Read more about the episode:
• Learn more about Naar and how he learned the nearly-lost Ladino language to be able to read his own family’s history:
• Learn more about the Sephardic Studies Program:

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To learn more, contact Naar at denaar@uw.edu.