Featuring: Jacobo Sefamí (Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Irvine) and Myriam Moscona (award winning poet and novelist)
Please join us for a lecture and poetry reading highlighting the experiences of the Jewish-Sephardic diaspora in Mexico. Our guest speakers will critically explore narratives that Sephardic Jewish societies developed in their diasporic experience, reflect on the transcultural identity of Judaism in Mexico, and discuss the importance of the Ladino language in preserving the Jewish cultural heritage.
Along with the Jewish Studies Program, this event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; the Religious Studies Initiative; the Center for Global Studies; the Department of Comparative Literature; and the Humanities Institute.
The grandson of Sephardic Jews who emigrated to Mexico City from Turkey and Syria, Jacobo Sefamí is currently Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of Middlebury College’s Summer School of Spanish. He has published articles, interviews, notes, and book reviews for various literary journals in Mexico, Spain, Venezuela, Chile, and the U.S. His books concentrate on Latin American poetry. He has also taught, lectured, and published on various Jewish Latin American writers. His novel Los dolientes (translated and published in English as Mourning for Papá, A Story of a Syrian-Jewish Family in Mexico, 2010) explores the rituals of mourning in the context of Syrian Jews in Mexico City. He co-edited with Myriam Moscona Por mi boka(2013), a selection of texts in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), and with Matthias Lehmann, The Jewish Experience in Mexico(2018). His latest books are: El camaleón y la esponja: David Huerta (2019), Por tierras extrañas (stories and travel chronicles, 2019), Mili, en lo inacabado mutante (poems, 2019), and Caleidoscopia. Escrituras y poéticas de lo oblicuo en América Latina (essays, 2021).
A Mexican writer of Bulgarian Sephardic origin, Myriam Moscona is the author of several books of poetry and novels, including Ansina, poemas en ladino (Vaso roto, 2016) and La muerte de la lengua inglesa (Vaso Almadía, 2020), and León de Lidia (Planeta/ Acantilado editions, 2022). Her book, Negro marfil/Ivory black (translated by Jen Hofer), received the Landom Morton Award from the Academy of American Poets of NY and the Pen International Award for best book translated from any language (2012). She awarded the Poetry Prize Aguascalientes 1988, and she also received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize of Writers for Writers in 2012 for her novel Tela de sevoya. She was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2006. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. She has lived with her dog Isaac for more than fifteen years.
