Chicken-Footed Demons and Synagogue Shouting: Venezuelan Sephardic Life with Joseph Bendahan
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Chicken-Footed Demons and Synagogue Shouting: Venezuelan Sephardic Life with Joseph Bendahan
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About this listen
Meet Joseph Bendahan, a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. Joseph details his family’s Sephardic roots in the Moroccan cities of Tetouan and Ouezzane before their migration to South America. Reflecting on the endangerment of his ancestral language, Haketia, he describes how the mix of Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic thrived in Venezuela’s unique social environment. Joseph highlights vivid folklore like the chicken-footed dembajos and expressive phrases like se te caiga el mazzal, illustrating how even his Ashkenazi friends adopted these colorful Sephardic words on the playground.
Heritage Words - conversations about the words we inherit and the meaning they bring to our lives - is produced by the HUC Jewish Language Project and HUC Connect.
Host and producer: Sarah Bunin Benor
Assistant producer: Kyle Elbaz Fingerhut
Editor: Avishay Artsy
Video editor: Talia Ehrenberg
Theme music: Maurice El Medioni’s French and Algerian Judeo-Arabic album “Cafe Oran,” featuring the Klezmatics’ David Krakauer and Frank London, courtesy of Piranha Records.