Month-long celebration of Sephardi culture debuts in NYC

Festival Sefarad, a month-long celebration of Sephardic Jewish culture, is debuting in New York City this month, expanding upon the popular New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival by adding a movable feast of diverse cultural events to the much-beloved cinematic programme.

“Especially after October 7, we thought: the more ways to connect, the better,” said Jason Guberman, Executive Director of the American Sephardi Federation (ASF).

With the support of the UJA Federation of New York, ASF is launching a series of intellectual, cultural and communal events across New York City as part of a festival named and styled after the eponymous Festival Sefarad de Montreal, all in service of spotlighting the distinct beauty of Sephardi life.

“The overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community is Ashkenazi, so expressions of culture are going to tend to be Ashkenazi,” said Guberman. “And unfortunately, that means that the Sephardic experience often gets left out.”

Sephardi identity, according to ASF, is “not limited by geography or ethnicity - for us it's always been a philosophy,” Guberman said. “So we are very open to different expressions of that.”

The New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival (NYSJFF), whose 27th edition kicks off on 8 June as the centre point of Festival Sefarad, has long offered up a platform for such expressions.

In years past, NYSJFF’s cinematic exposure has shone the torch on Sephardi life in places with lesser-known Jewish communities, from Greece to Iraq, Morocco to Yemen, India to Kurdistan, all the while educating viewers on the  artistic contributions Sephardic Jews have made across the globe.

In 2015 ASF opened the world’s eyes to the surprising role Jews played in early Bollywood movies, hosting an exhibition called Baghdadis & the Bene Israel in Bollywood and Beyond at the Center for Jewish History in New York. The exhibition revealed the obscure history of two small but mighty Jewish communities in India and how, in the early 20th century, they made a sizeable splash in the burgeoning Bollywood film industry.

Photo Courtesy of the American Sephardi Federation.[Missing Credit]

“There was a taboo on Indian women appearing in films, so the Jewish women were the ones who were willing to do it,” said Guberman. “Not only did they star in these films, but they ended up becoming media moguls in the 1920s and 30s.”

Though the Sephardi community makes up just about a quarter of the global Jewish population, it’s stories like this – which illustrate the far-reaching and cross-cultural impact of Sephardic Jewry – that NYSJFF and its new companion Festival Sefarad are trying to bring to light.

“The Jewish people are incredibly diverse,” said Guberman. “Sephardic Jews in particular were always travellers, traders, philosophers, scientists, and very international. It's such an array of people that the Sephardic world can bring together. It’s not  easy to pigeonhole us,” said Guberman.

True to the community’s cosmopolitan roots, this year’s festival emphasises the fluidity of the Sephardi diaspora, with representation of Jewish communities from around the world.

Chief among the 12 films to be screened during NYSJFF’s five-day run is the world premiere of the documentary Yael Naim: New Soul, which explores the life of the French-Israeli singer behind the hit 2008 song New Soul. Naim, who became the first Israeli to hit Billboard’s top ten chart after her song was chosen by Steve Jobs for a MacBook air commercial, will also be honoured with an ASF Pomegranate Award for “Sephardi excellence in the arts” during the festival’s opening ceremony. Three others – Michel Boujenah, Fortuna and Roya Hakakian – will also be awarded Pomegranate Awards for lifetime achievements in film, culture and literature.

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The film festival is also due to host the US premiere of The Last Righteous Man (Baba Sali), a Hebrew-language documentary about the aristocratic rabbinical Abuhazira family and their dynastic rise across Morocco and Israel.

“We used to have an abundance of documentaries versus narrative films,” Guberman said. “But the UJA theme for their grant was Jewish joy, and so appropriately this year we have more comedies than we've ever had before.”

Israeli comedy films Jinxed and Hilula, the latter of which was a hit after its initial release in Israel in 2023, will have their US premieres at NYSJFF, while Matchmaking 2, the sequel to the popular 2022 Israeli film Matchmaking, will also be screened by NYSJFF for its New York premiere.

The poster for the film Matchmaking 2, debuting at the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival this year.[Missing Credit]

Though Guberman says it can be difficult for Sephardi films to gain broad traction, he is confident that interest seems to be growing. Last year’s festival set a new record, doubling the previous record of ticket sales which had been set before the pandemic.

“Before the pandemic, the box office record was $27,000; Last year it was over $50,000,” he said.

The popularity of the new Festival Sefarad, meanwhile, has yet to reveal itself. But a highly varied programme of events - from Shabbat dinners, culinary experiences and walking tours to Persian, Hebrew and Arabic calligraphy workshops and a jazz and Sephardi Piyyut event in honour of Juneteenth – promises something for everyone.

“The beauty, depth and vitality of the Jewish experience is what the ASF is very committed to showing, as well as the internationalism, the cosmopolitanism,” Guberman said. These things are frequently forgotten.”

NYSJFF is on 8-13 June. Festival Sefarad is on until 29 June.