The category doesn’t start with a lecture. As a substitute, Neta Elkayam stands on the entrance of the room and sings. Often within the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, fairly than her native Hebrew.
The scholars — most of them Black, most of them American, lots of them encountering Jewish tradition for the primary time — don’t ask what the lyrics imply. They pay attention. They really feel one thing, and it’s the sensation that ultimately results in studying.
“Seeing me carry out stay reveals a typical floor, the need all of us share to know our origins, a seek for the misplaced voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam mentioned in an interview. “The truth that I’m singing not in English however in an African language resonates with the scholars and helps propel them on their very own quest.”
The scene has turn into acquainted at Xavier College of Louisiana, the nation’s solely Catholic traditionally Black college, the place Elkayam and her associate in life and artwork, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the previous two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, reminiscence, diaspora and interfaith trade, grew out of an initiative to extend understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It’s now one of the sought-after electives on campus, really useful by college students by phrase of mouth.
It’s an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been formed by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose inventive lives have lengthy resisted mounted classes. But Xavier has turn into a spot the place their music, pedagogy and private histories immediately make sense collectively.
It is usually the place the place they now face a crossroads.
After two years of instructing, performing and constructing cultural bridges in New Orleans, the personal funding that introduced them to Xavier has ended. The college needs them to remain. However whether or not they can stays unsure, a predicament reflecting a wider pressure on the establishment itself.
Xavier College is dealing with important monetary uncertainty, underscored by current layoffs even because it acquired a significant reward from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that provided partial reduction. On the identical time, strikes by the Trump administration to chop or reshape federal higher-education packages have disrupted key funding streams the college depends on, including to the instability.
For Elkayam and Cohen, who’ve spent their careers transferring alongside what they name the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis,” the query is now not how one can stay between locations, however whether or not that in-between can turn into a house.
The couple typically carry out collectively, with Elkayam singing and Cohen on the keyboard. (Shmulik Balmas)
Lengthy earlier than New Orleans entered the image, Elkayam and Cohen have been already artists of transit and connection.
Elkayam, 45, rose to prominence in Israel, Europe and Morocco for her reinterpretations of North African Jewish music, not as preservation, however as reinvention. Born in Netivot, on Israel’s geographic and social periphery, she grew up aware of the ruptures many Mizrahi Jews really feel: the gap from ancestral languages, sounds and tales. Her work has turn into a technique to tackle that loss, providing a path again to connection past nostalgia.
Drawing on Andalusian, Amazigh (Berber) and Jewish liturgical traditions, she folds in components of jazz, rock and up to date efficiency artwork. Her sensibility is clear in initiatives like “Hilula,” a multidisciplinary opera mixing drag, Torah examine and stay music, and “Arénas,” a collaboration constructed round archival recordings of girls from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains who handed by means of a transit camp in Marseille on their technique to Israel.
Cohen, 43, has labored in music, cinema and visible set up, typically in collaboration with artists from Morocco. He just lately explored reminiscence and ritual throughout Judaism, Christianity and Islam by means of a ceiling set up for the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem weaving collectively the weather from all three faiths.
Collectively, the couple constructed bold, research-driven initiatives that blurred the road between scholarship and efficiency. Their collaborators included towering figures of North African Jewish music — amongst them the Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni — in addition to Moroccan Muslim artists and Gnawa masters.
“We’re not taken with freezing the previous,” Cohen mentioned. “We’re taken with what occurs once you improvise inside it.”
A nonetheless from a music video that includes Elkayam and Gnawa musician Moktar Gania.
That ethos drew the eye of students resembling Chris Silver, a professor at McGill College who research North African music and Jewish-Muslim historical past. Silver describes their method as not merely performing an inherited repertoire, however actively shaping how the previous is known and carried ahead.
“As a scholar targeted on the connection of music to historical past, I marvel at what typically looks like their historiographical method, wherein their music builds on a well known and lesser-known previous, is in dialogue with the up to date, and is future-oriented, contributing to and shaping the sounds of the attainable and what could but be,” Silver mentioned.
For Flo Low, the founding father of Bamah, the nonprofit that introduced the couple to Xavier College two years in the past, the long run Silver describes crystallized in a single second.
Low, an American Jew who has lived in Israel, first noticed Elkayam carry out in Jerusalem in 2018, at an outside live performance beneath the partitions of the Previous Metropolis. She anticipated virtuosity. What she didn’t count on, she mentioned, was what occurred subsequent.
“Neta began singing in Moroccan Arabic,” Low recalled, “and 1000’s of individuals within the viewers have been singing alongside along with her. Her music is permitting so many individuals within the Jewish world to reconnect with their Jewish roots by means of their music.”
For Low, who had been working to construct cultural trade packages between Israeli artists and American establishments, the scene was revelatory.
“I knew at that second that I needed to carry Neta and her associate Amit to the US,” Low mentioned. “If they may encourage me and 1000’s of others in a single efficiency, I might solely think about what they may do with a full semester, or perhaps a full educational yr, with college students.”
Nonetheless, it will take a number of years, and an sudden chain of occasions in New Orleans, earlier than the partnership materialized.
Cohen taking a selfie along with his college students (Courtesy)
The highway to Xavier started with Kanye West, the musician who now goes by Ye.
In late 2022, as antisemitic rhetoric surged into mainstream discourse — fueled partly by Ye’s public outbursts — college students at Xavier have been discovering themselves caught in a complicated digital and social crossfire.
“My freshman honors college students have been listening to lots of people of their lives say that ‘Kanye has some extent,’ they usually needed to know, as college students at a traditionally Black college, ‘What’s our response?’” recalled Shearon Roberts, a professor and affiliate dean at Xavier. “They realized: we don’t truly know Jewish individuals. Many college students had by no means met a Jew in any respect.”
Roberts noticed a possibility for a unique form of training. “How about we begin there?” she advised them.
A small group of Xavier college students launched an initiative that got down to tackle antisemitism and anti-Black racism collectively, fairly than as separate issues.
They partnered with native Jewish organizations and college mentors, constructed relationships with college students at close by Tulane College, recognized for its excessive concentrations of Jewish college students, and started internet hosting dialogues that emphasised shared histories of exclusion and violence — alongside the tensions and misunderstandings between the 2 communities. The scholars designed workshops, social media campaigns and campus occasions targeted on media literacy and the warning indicators of radicalization.
“We needed to deal with that downside in our group,” Aarinii Parms-Inexperienced, one of many Xavier college students, who graduated final month. “We noticed it rising with Kanye West, Whoopi Goldberg, Kyrie Irving and different figures saying issues like, ‘Black individuals are the true Jews’ or ‘Jews individuals management the media.’”
Parms-Inexperienced mentioned the scholars have been impressed by the historical past of Jewish-Black solidarity, from the civil rights motion to the Jewish teachers fleeing the Nazis within the Nineteen Thirties who discovered refuge at HBCUs.
Their venture ultimately received a nationwide Division of Homeland Safety award for progressive anti-extremism programming. (The federal program behind the award was shut down by the Trump administration earlier this yr.)
The win led to a visit to Israel for the scholars and after they returned they needed to maintain the connection, particularly to Israel’s racially and ethnically various tradition.
“The venture began as a technique to give again, to carry Black and Jewish college students collectively and counter hate, and it simply took off,” Parms-Inexperienced mentioned.
After the assaults of Oct. 7, the work felt solely extra pressing.
“As a substitute of speeding accountable, individuals on campus requested questions,” Parms-Inexperienced mentioned. “They needed context. We didn’t see protests — there was extra curiosity than something.”
Whereas it’s true that Xavier has not been a central hotspot of campus unrest across the struggle in Gaza, the ambiance has not been completely tranquil both. In June 2024, directors canceled a graduation tackle by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield after college students organized a petition and raised objections over her position in U.S. coverage backing Israel within the Gaza struggle.
Nonetheless, simply because the Xavier college students have been on the lookout for methods to interact with Israelis, Elkayam and Cohen have been looking for a technique to keep overseas, cautious of returning to a rustic in turmoil.
That they had landed in Morocco two days earlier than Oct. 7, planning on little greater than per week of live shows and screenings. The documentary they have been exhibiting, directed by a neighborhood Muslim filmmaker and titled “In Your Eyes I See My Nation,” follows the 2 as they journey by means of Morocco, looking for traces of the Jewish world their households left behind, a world that after numbered a couple of quarter million individuals and has dwindled to just a few thousand.
Elkayam and Cohen, within the entrance row at far proper, attend the Marrakech Worldwide Movie Pageant for the premiere of “In Your Eyes I See My Nation” by Kamal Hachka in 2020. (Courtesy)
On Oct. 6, they gathered to have fun at Hachkar’s residence with a largely Muslim circle of pals the place they recited the Jewish blessing over wine that marks the beginning of the Sabbath, and sang, and shared tales late into the evening. The following morning, they woke to the information.
With two younger kids and a single suitcase, they confronted a selection.
“We rapidly understood the madness that was coming to Israel and determined to remain,” Cohen mentioned.
Their outlook proved to be a premonition of what number of Israelis would come to really feel over the following two years, as greater than 69,000 residents left Israel in 2025 alone, contributing to sustained unfavorable migration and one of many largest fashionable spikes in emigration from the nation.
For Elkayam and Cohen, the choice was about preserving relationships and the flexibility to assume, mourn and communicate actually, particularly given how unpopular their left-wing views have turn into in Israel after Oct. 7.
“It’d sound bizarre however we felt safer in a way in Morocco, to be amongst our pals and accepted with our complexities, the place we are able to discuss totally different narratives directly.” Cohen mentioned. “In Israel, contained in the household, you possibly can’t at all times communicate freely. I don’t need to battle with my dad about politics. I’m not going to let it occur.”
After three months, dwelling in pals’ properties and watching occasions unfold from a painful distance, Bamah introduced the couple to Xavier College.
At Xavier, Elkayam and Cohen weren’t handled like visiting artists passing by means of. They have been, as Roberts, their host and champion on campus, put it, “a part of the college’s prolonged household.”
“They’re a mannequin for what it seems wish to have members of the Jewish diaspora — Israeli residents, artists, educators — serve, educate and mentor at a traditionally Black college,” she mentioned. “And so they’ve at all times led with their artistry first. If you join with individuals by means of artwork, by means of magnificence, every thing opens up another way.”
Roberts continued, “If I introduced somebody who was like a Jewish research skilled or political or sociology skilled, they usually’re lecturing to those college students about complicated points related to Jewish id, African American id, Jewish or African diasporic identities, it’d get misplaced in translation. However when Neta and Amit say, ‘All proper, seize an instrument. Let’s sing, let’s improvise,’ they’re all talking one language, regardless that they don’t communicate the identical language.”
The nice and cozy embrace the couple has discovered at Xavier, together with from Muslim college, comes at a second when many Israeli teachers report feeling the other: remoted, focused, and professionally susceptible on American campuses amid the Gaza struggle.
For Roberts, it’s no shock {that a} traditionally Black college can be totally different. HBCUs, she says, know how one can follow inclusion as a result of they have been based as a solution to racial exclusion. “By nature, we welcome earlier than we flip away,” she mentioned.
On the identical time, Elkayam and Cohen’s specific outlook and elegance have helped them keep away from the sorts of conflicts and tensions Israelis have confronted at different universities. By their very own account and that of supporters like Roberts, their work is deeply political, however as a result of they convey by means of their artwork, it’s more durable to flatten them right into a caricature or forged them as political adversaries.
Their success at navigating an period liable to strife isn’t confined to Xavier or New Orleans.
In August, Elkayam and Cohen traveled to Flint, Michigan, the place they appeared on stage with their New Orleans band alongside musicians from the Nationwide Arab Orchestra, in a live performance co-presented by Bamah and the Flint Jewish Federation.
Titled “Songs of Our Moms,” this system represented a uncommon collaboration in a second when Israeli artists typically face boycotts. The night unfolded quietly, with out protest and with out political interference.
At Xavier, every semester culminates in a public showcase of scholar work, the place initiatives starting from brief movies to musical performances and analysis displays are shared with classmates, college and group members.
“One scholar advised me he would have by no means been in a position to voice how I really feel on an inventive degree with the category,” Parms-Inexperienced mentioned. “He left that class feeling extra assured, his capability to form of simply put himself on the market.”
For all their journey, Elkayam and Cohen have begun to put down one thing like roots in New Orleans. They constructed a band with native musicians, adapting their repertoire of Moroccan Jewish songs to the rhythms of town, letting brass and jazz sensibilities seep into the preparations. They have been struck by how New Orleans’ second-line parades echoed Morocco’s road rituals, the place music spills into public area and celebration turns into one thing the entire neighborhood strikes by means of collectively.
“It’s like once I went to Morocco for the primary time and was completely shocked,” Elkayam mentioned. “You see music inside individuals’s properties, artwork inside individuals’s properties. Immediately all of the hierarchies in your head collapse — what’s ‘folklore,’ what’s ‘excessive artwork,’ what’s ‘low.’ We got here again from Morocco as totally different individuals, it blew our minds. And it’s the identical right here, discovering America — the non-stereotypical America, the one they don’t market to you.”
Final yr, they delivered to New Orleans one of many figures who helped unlock their Moroccan heritage: Reuven Abergel, a founding father of Israel’s Black Panthers.
The motion, began by Mizrahi Jews within the Seventies, deliberately borrowed its title and ways from the American Black Panther Celebration to protest the systemic discrimination and domination of Israeli society by Ashkenazi elites. A longtime mentor and good friend to Elkayam and Cogen, Abergel met with the scholars at Xavier, making a bridge between two distinct histories of marginalization and resistance. Cohen filmed the go to for an ongoing documentary about Abergel’s life, capturing the second the place the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis” met the American South.
Cohen additionally helped create a digital exhibition marking 100 years of The Louisiana Weekly, town’s historic Black newspaper, serving to analysis its archives and design the location. The work pulled him into the civic reminiscence of the place, into conversations about race, migration and tradition that felt acquainted and new directly.
Elkayam and Cohen are a part of a band that performs in New Orleans (Courtesy)
At residence, the method has been quieter and extra sophisticated. In our dialog, Elkayam described feeling like an immigrant for the primary time, whilst her kids, nearly with out noticing, have been turning into New Orleanians. They now communicate largely English to their mother and father. They know the songs, the parades, the small neighborhood rituals. “They’re actually from right here,” she mentioned. “They grew up contained in the parades. For them, that is the way you have fun.”
The couple are additionally seeing transformation in themselves. The struggle, the gap, the months in Morocco and now New Orleans have left them feeling untethered from the nationwide identities that they had as soon as inhabited. They miss Jerusalem and the group that fashioned round them there. Additionally they acknowledge the reduction in being in a spot the place they aren’t required to carry out loyalty, and the place it’s attainable to carry grief and criticism in the identical breath.
“We don’t really feel Israeli within the rooted sense of the phrase,” Cohen mentioned. “What issues to us now just isn’t the place, it’s the individuals.”
They’ve begun to consider themselves as Jews within the diaspora — not as a brief situation however as a manner of transferring by means of the world.
What occurs subsequent is unclear. They’re at the moment in the US on J-1 visiting scholar visas sponsored by Xavier College, however the college can not provide sufficient funding to rent them as full-time instructors. With out outdoors help to switch the now-expired Bamah grant, they danger dropping their visas and their proper to remain within the nation.
For now, they preserve instructing, composing and constructing relationships, not sure how lengthy New Orleans will stay residence.
“I actually really feel like a Jewish migrant proper now, in essentially the most fundamental sense of the phrase,” Cohen mentioned.
Elkayam provided a caveat. She has come to see their time overseas as a fragile privilege — a short likelihood to heal whereas others, particularly Mizrahim with out the means to go away, stay caught.
Grateful but uneasy, she misses the heavy duty she as soon as carried in Jerusalem: exhibiting up for her group, serving to maintain its historical past, telling tales that may in any other case disappear. From New Orleans, she permits herself to relaxation, whilst she is aware of the long run is unsure.
“Possibly, God keen, we’ll be capable of proceed right here,” she mentioned, “as a result of yeah, I don’t at all times miss that position.”
