Season 3, Episode 10:  “The Shaming of the Tongue" ft Laura Elkeslassy

Narration: When I was a kid, we didn’t have many things from Ethiopia, because we had left during times of political crisis, and couldn’t take much with us. But one thing we did have was my parents black and white wedding photos, which I poured over time and time again. My mother looked so beautiful in her white gown, and her fancy updo, and I loved seeing her surrounded by extended family and community who loved her, so different from the nuclear family life we were living in the United States. In our closet, we also had my parents' wedding capes. Long, black, regal garments, embroidered with gold, which brides and grooms would traditionally wear over their suits and dresses, making them like kings and queens for the day. 

Ever since then, it’s been very clear to me that weddings are more than just celebrations. Weddings are so powerful that you never really know what they are going to bring up, but they are guaranteed to stir something deep in the people who attend, and the ones who simply look through the photo albums years later. They are perfectly distilled gems ready made to bring us into relation with lineage, tradition, and how we make meaning of those golden threads in our own lives. 

In 2015, Laura Elkeslassy was preparing for her wedding. Like many brides, she was excited and worried about the party coming together. Little did she know a wedding song, one she ached to have as part of her big day, would set her on a new path towards a life as a musician and community leader. 

My name is Meklit and this is Movement, music and migration, remixed.

For friends and folks listening with children, this episode starts with a joyous wedding, but it also discusses violence and genocide, please make your own judgements. Take care while listening. 

Laura Elkeslassy grew up in Paris in a Moroccan Jewish family. When she moved to the U.S., she became the third generation of women to start over in a new country. Marrying her American born husband felt like a new level of commitment to living in the Unite States.

So it was really important that her wedding would honor her family’s Jewish Moroccan  roots. She wanted the 3-day party to include a Henna, a traditional part of a Moroccan wedding.

At the Henna, her mom and aunts would decorate the bride and guests’ hands with the henna designs. But what Laura wanted most of all was a band to play North African music.

Laura: There was one song that I really wanted to have, which was the Abiadi Ana song. It was a song that, traditionally in Morocco, in Jewish weddings, grandmothers would sing to bless the lovers. My grandmother on my father's side had always sang that song at all of my cousin's weddings. In France, but she had already passed. So there was no one left to sing that song and I have very, very fond memories of those moments. You know, there are photos in the family of her, like basically taking the mic and like holding the whole stage and all that. When she was 90, so I'm like, okay. There, there was something there.

Meklit: That’s pretty cool! 

Laura: So back to my wedding. I didn't find a band, but I ended up doing a playlist. I gave everything to the dj and I was like, play the song at this moment. And then all the women of my family came out in traditional Moroccan gowns. And we sang the song and we did the ritual of the henna. And it was like a very powerful moments because those rituals are ancestral rituals.

Meklit: Mm-hmm.

Laura:  And so they’re connecting us to. Past, present, and future. 

Narration: The power of the song, Abiadi Ana really stayed with Laura, and she didn’t know yet just how much it would transform her life.

Laura: I was really frustrated at my wedding that I didn't get the song. I mean, no, I was pretty euphoric at my wedding, but like after the fact I was like, okay, I wish I had had that song. After the wedding, I thought, I really need to reconnect to this music because there was a complete absence of it in my life in the US even though I had grown up with it.

Narration: Arabic music filled the air of Laura’s Moroccan Jewish childhood home in Paris, especially on Fridays before Shabbat. But the words were always just out of reach. She didn’t grow up speaking Arabic so she didn’t understand them. 



Laura’s family had lived in Morocco for centuries, and her parents were born there. Her mother moved to Israel as a kid, her father left Morocco for France at 18, and Laura was raised speaking French, surrounded by the echoes of the language and traditions her family had carried for generations. 
At 24, she moved to the U.S. to study theater and build a life in Brooklyn. 

But after her wedding where she couldn’t find a band to play the traditional Maghrebi song her grandmother used to sing something shifted. She realized she needed a place to learn this rich musical legacy herself. So Laura joined the New York Andalus Ensemble, and suddenly, a world of ancestral sound was opening up to her. 

She was singing in Arabic and Hebrew alongside other Muslim and Jewish musicians. Singing these Arabic melodies felt like a homecoming. Eventually she became the lead singer of the ensemble.

A year after Laura’s wedding, her sister was also getting married. Laura was determined to not have her sister experience what she herself had gone through.

Laura: I was like, I need to find the song. I need to sing it at my sister's wedding.

Narration: After spending every Wednesday night  singing with the Andalus Ensemble, Laura didn’t just step up to the mic at her sister’s wedding as an amateur, she took the stage fully prepared to embody a song and a spirit that had been lost in her family.

Laura: I surprised them with the songs. And, I saw all my aunts, all my aunts started crying and laughing at the same time. And everybody was so moved that the song was present, you know? And also they came up to me and said, do you speak Arabic? They couldn't believe that I was actually uttering the words in Arabic.

Narration: After her sister’s wedding, and the reaction of her family, Laura knew she was on the right path. She continued working with the NY Andalus Ensemble an performed with them for 5 years.

And then she began a big musical project of her own. It would become known as Ya Ghorbati - Divas in Exile. In this project, Laura and her collaborator, Ira Khonen Temple reinterpreted songs by Judeo-Arab divas from mid-century North Africa. 

Meklit: How did you learn about the Judeo Arab divas? Like the divas? The divas!

Laura: The divas! I did a lot of research. And there was a lot to uncover. Because, there was a lot that was buried.

Narration: Through her research, Laura found women and queer people who were Jewish cabaret performers, pop stars and folk musicians during the 20th century in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. 

Her research was propelled by a specific opportunity and urgency of the time.

Laura: It was also during COVID, it was in 2020, and,

Meklit: So you had time on your hands?

Laura: I had time and I felt very isolated, and most of my family is abroad and it was really hard for me to not have the possibility to travel. And this isolation sort of brought me back even deeper to the music in a way, which was interesting.

Meklit: Yes, you needed it.

Laura: I needed it. Yeah. It was a way to stay connected to my roots, I think.

Narration: The divas Laura discovered in her research had parallels to her own family history. Like Zohra Elfassia, who sang Abiadi Ana. That wedding song that Laura sang at her sister’s wedding.

Laura:  She was one of the greatest singers in Morocco in the thirties. She used to be a favorite at the King's Court. She was really a diva, like she was a queen. 

Narration: But in the 1960s, Zohra immigrated to Israel, and everything changed for her. 

Jewish people had lived in the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years. But in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of them left their homelands. Laura says it was big systemic factors including French and British decolonization, the creation of the state of Israel and the rise of Arab nationalism that made many Jews decide they had to leave. 

By 1967, about 250,000 Jews had left Morocco. Many went to France or Canada, and a significant number went to Israel/ Palestine. In many ways, Arab Jews were treated as second-class citizens once they got to Israel/ Palestine. They were crammed into transit camps under poor conditions. Arab Jews led demonstrations protesting discrimination, food shortages, and lack of medical care in the camps. Singer Zohra Elfassia found she could no longer live like a beloved queen once she got to Israel/Palestine. 

Laura: She was completely forgotten. Completely forgotten. And, she couldn't really sing.

Narration: Laura thinks there’s a couple of reasons Zohra couldn’t have a career in Israel. First of all, Laura says Zohra mostly couldn’t sing in religious spaces with other Moroccan Jews, because in Orthodox Judaism, women's singing voices are not supposed to be heard by men. 

Laura: For her male counterparts, they could continue to sing in the synagogues. But because she was a woman, my take is that she was actually not even able to sing like inside the community.

Narration: But Zohra couldn't find more public or secular spaces to perform in either. And Laura says that has to do with broader discrimination against Arab culture in Israel. In the 1960s, around the time Zohra came to Israel, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion said and I quote ,"The Moroccan Jew took a lot from the Moroccan Arabs. The culture of Morocco I would not like to have here." 

Ben Gurion also said explicitly that he didn’t want Israelis to “become Arabs” and he referred to North African Jews as “primates” and “savages.” And he wasn’t the only leader who publicly shared such racist views. 

Laura says these beliefs in the superiority of European culture translated directly into which artists had careers in Israel at the time. On TV and on the radio waves, you could mostly hear Ashkenazi artists from Eastern Europe. These singers often transformed songs that had originally been sung in the Yiddish language into Hebrew songs, the language of the relatively new state of Israel. 

And Moroccan diva Zohra Elfassia? She didn’t sing in Yiddish or Hebrew, she sang repertoire in Arabic.

Laura: There was something like very specific to her that I thought I could really feel in the body, which I called the shaming of the tongue. Meaning that, the language that, you know, her tongue was born to speak, was shamed by the state. Anything that was Arab in the early days of the state, was discriminated against.

She could not speak her language. She could not speak Arabic, and she could not sing in Arabic anymore.

Narration: Laura's grandmother, like the diva Zohra Elfassia, immigrated from Fez, Morocco to Israel in the 1960s. And she says her family experienced the same discrimination against Arab Jews. 

Laura: I remember my, my mom telling me stories of how in school they would tell the kids, speak Hebrew to your parents. Don't let them speak Arabic. and that was not only the case in Israel, but it was also the case in France. And that's why I don't speak Arabic. This is why when I was a kid, it was really hard to communicate with my grandparents because we didn't speak the same language. Which is such a violent rupture. 

Narration:  When Laura was young, one of her grandmas would come to Paris from Morocco to visit.  Laura couldn’t understand her grandma’s French because it had such a thick Arabic accent. So instead, she’d speak Arabic to Laura’s dad or uncles who would translate into French for Laura. Otherwise, Laura says her grandma communicated via gestural expressions of love, like very tight hugs.

So to learn how to SING in Arabic as an adult, Laura had to put in a lot of work. 

Laura: I spend hours and hours and hours to try to understand the lyrics of those songs, to try to find translations, to check my pronunciations, et cetera, et cetera. So much time looking into the language itself when it was my grandparents' language, you know what I mean? 

Narration: As Laura studied this music, she unearthed the layered histories of her Arab Jewish identity. And she began to see how deeply consonant those histories were with the displacement of Palestinians. Not the same, but connected.

Laura: And it was really sort of my way in to understand what happened in Palestine., which was a history of ethnic cleansing, of displacement, and of mass killing.

Narration: Music became the container for these overwhelming truths. It was a way for Laura to hold grief and beauty at once. 

In 2018, she met Natalie Haziza, who was leading egalitarian (or mixed-gender) Sephardi prayer services using the Arabic melodies of their ancestors. At that time, Natalie held the services in her own apartment in New York City.  

For the first time, Laura saw a woman leading a full High Holiday service. AND it was in the Moroccan tradition that she had grew up with. Something clicked.

Laura:  When I saw her do that, she really gave me permission to do that. and at the time I was still sort of like in my early feminist stage, you know, where I was like, oh, I can give myself permission to have power? Okay! So I stepped in and I, joined her in singing and she really welcomed me in it.  I really felt like, you know, the ground was opening up under my feet. It was like, oh my God, I can lead services and I'm a woman.

Meklit: Wow. That's huge.

Laura: Yes. So it was really a groundbreaking moment.

Narration: By 2019, Laura and Natalie were co-leading services together, reviving sacred rituals in radically inclusive ways. That same year, they worked with other community members to seed what would later become the Egalitarian Sefardi Mizrahi Kehilla of New York. 

With the support of dozens of community organizers from the grassroots organizations Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace, their community grew quickly. It was full of people seeking to honor their heritage while aligning with feminist, queer, and anti-Zionist values. 

By 2024, over 300 people were attending their high holidays services. Then, Laura discovered that her work as a spiritual leader was even more connected to her lineage than she knew. That discovery was also revealed through song.

Laura: right before Covid in 2019, I was in Jerusalem and I was studying there with my teacher, Arabic maqam. Which is, arabic music modes.

Narration: Arabic Maqam, those music modes, are mostly taught through oral transmission. But Laura was interested in reading more about the theory, so she asked her teacher if there was any book where she could read about the parallels between these Arabic music modes and Jewish religious practices. 

Laura: And he said, yes, there's a book. You have to go to the Sephardi Bookstore in Jerusalem and you should get this book called “Shahre de Doud”. I said, okay. So I went there and I found the book and, I opened the book and I see that the original preface was written in 1920 by someone called Abraham Abitbol. And Abraham Abitbol is my great-grandfather. So

Meklit: Wow.

Laura: So here I was, I was, you know, holding this book, which apparently, the preface was written by my great-grandfather. I had no idea. I knew we had a great rabbi in the family, but I didn't know, you know, what he did or anything because there was this massive rupture when the family immigrated, and everybody sort of forgot that history.

And I read his preface, which he wrote in Hebrew. In Talmudic, Hebrew, and in it he was basically describing how he had been instrumental in collecting the oral tradition of all the Baqashot. And it's a repertoire of thousands and thousands of songs that, Jews in Morocco had been singing for centuries in synagogues. And it was basically Andalusi music, from Islamic, Spain, from like the medieval times, that was put to, Hebraic sacred poetry. 

And, across Morocco through the different cities, they were rabbis who were holding that, you know, heritage and they decided to compile it. And my great-grandfather was one of the main, compilers of that book.

Narration: So Laura jumps on the phone with her co-leader, Natalie.

Laura: I said, you will never believe what just happened. I discovered that my great-grandfather compiled the book of Baqashot, and she said “my ancestor compiled the book of, Beqashot”

Meklit: Ah.

Laura: And I said to her, who's your ancestor? Are we cousins? What is this? And she says, it's David Kayam. And then I turned, I opened the book again, and then I saw the photo of David Kayam next to Abraham Abitbol. So basically our ancestors had been working together a hundred years ago. On compiling the Baqashot and we were now in New York And we didn't know that both our ancestors had been working together on this like a hundred years before.

Meklit: I’m getting the chills, like I've had the chills for a whole minute and a half.

Narration: When Laura looked through this book more closely, she made another discovery. Her great-grandfather had compiled the book, but his father was in it too. 

It turned out that Laura’s great-great grandfather was a rabbi, a poet anda  musician who had written dozens of songs. The most famous of which is called Yafa Vetama. 

Laura: So I had heard Yafa Vetama in religious circles, but I had no idea that it was my ancestor who had wrote it.

Narration: In 2021, after over a year of researching the forgotten songs of Judeo-Arab divas, Laura was ready to bring her project, Ya Ghorbati to life. 

She held her first public concert on her Brooklyn block and made a bold personal choice. She performed for the first under her full name, Elkeslassy, reclaiming a name her father had shortened in order to pass when he moved to France. 

She sang Abiadi Ana, the wedding song Zohra Elfassia sang, Laura’s grandmother sang, and Laura sang at her sister’s wedding. The song that brought her into this specific spotlight.

Laura: The feeling that I get when I sing this song is that I'm opening channels for the past, present, and future. This is, I could really feel that in my body. And I usually start with a greeting in Arabic. And it says, I am so happy to see you all that are here, and also those who are far away from us. I welcome you to the show tonight. 

We talked about the shaming of the tongue. And I think that things that the project does is that it allows folks to like, feel the language back in their tongue, you know? And that to me is very transformative.

Narration: Laura thinks that hearing Arabic at the start of the concert really impacts people in the audience, especially those who are from Arabic-speaking countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa.  

Laura: We had one of our neighbors, who I had never met and who came to the show. And, who said, you know, I'm Palestinian and I've never felt so welcome on my street.

Meklit: There's something that I'm hearing where it's like the things your family went through are related to what happened to the society and then coming to the United States, you're in this place where you're looking for that thread of connection. You realize you have to provide it for yourself, but then through that you end up providing it for all these other people. It just reminds me of like the wellspring where everyone can drink, you know? 

Laura: It's definitely true that, one of the hopes that I had as you know, we were getting closer to sharing this material with people was that my process of healing would also help, the process of healing of other people. And I did, witness it, for years actually. And you know, the most moving thing to me is that after concerts, people, you know, would come to me and basically start telling me their ancestral stories.

I did a concert, in the UK and, there was a woman who was of Egyptian descent. Jewish of Egyptian descent, who came to me after the concert and she sat down with me and her grandson was there, and she started telling me her childhood history of expulsion from Egypt. She talked about how the police came to their house when she was six and they put a knife on the table and they said, you have to leave tomorrow, or, you know, this is what will happen to you.

And they left to Israel and then she immigrated to the UK and she never talked about it. And her grandson who was there had never heard the story.

Meklit: Wow.

Laura: And he told her grandma like, why did you never tell me the story? And she said, well, well, you know, it's like the past. But I know that that night that the music resonated so deeply in her body that she was finally able to share that story for the first time with her grandchild. And that to me is like the beginning of the work, you know, because this is what's preventing us from, you know, coming out of the cycle of war is The traumas.

And the work that I'm doing in a way addresses that, but also provides an alternative to the narrative of the exchange of population. Because basically what right wing governments have done in Israel for the last 40 years is that they have instrumentalized that pain, they have instrumentalized that story to say, oh, well, you know what? The nakba actually happened. We exiled Palestinians, but Jews from Arab lands were also exiled. And so now, we exchange a population and that's that. So that gives us the right to annex the West Bank, to annex Gaza. 

And that politics of exile is horrifying to me. It's horrifying.

Narration: On October 7th, 2023, Laura was at home preparing to lead services for the joyous Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah when she saw the news. Members of Hamas had breached Israel’s wall around the Gaza strip and were killing and taking Israelis as hostages. 

Right away, Laura called her mom and sister who were in Israel. She was worried about them and she was also angry. She felt like she’d seen this coming and that the Israeli government hadn’t done anything to avoid it, and would use this violence as a way to get the country’s consent for killing many more people in Gaza.

So Laura had to decide would she still lead services that evening, as planned? She jumped onto the phone with other community members and together they decided instead to organize a  vigil mourning Israeli and Palestinian lives.

She joined with the Jewish groups, If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace. They held a vigil outside of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Then they marched to Senator Chuck Schumer's house nearby to ask for a ceasefire. 

It was the first of many marches for ceasefire that Laura would attend as the months stretched on. When we spoke it had been a year a half since that first vigil.

Laura: It's been very hard to sing in the last year and a half. And looking on the ground, you know, at what's happening in Gaza, the carpet bombing, the mass killing, the displacement of 2 million people, the starvation of the whole population, the genocide. We carry so much grief, so much pain. And so it's been really heartbreaking to even utter the words of those songs, utter the words in Arabic and in Hebrew of those songs.

Narration: In May 2025, a few days before we spoke, Laura was invited to use her music in service to 2,000 anti-zionist Jews and allies at the national member meeting of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, held in Baltimore. 

The weekend-long gathering included talks by activists Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour, and Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush, among others. Laura says hearing from these leaders felt electrifying and unifying. 

She says the energy of the weekend kept building and culminated with a Saturday night concert. First, singer Jamila Woods performed. Laura and her band were listening backstage and could hear the excitement in the audience. Then there was a fundraiser. Laura says they raised about $100,000 for Gaza. And then the evening’s emcees introduced Laura’s ensemble.

Laura: I stepped on stage and like from that first moment, I knew that the whole audience was with us. And I sang a song, the first song, Rimoun Ramatani which we have sung for years now at Concerts at Protest, which is an Andalusi song that's derived from this very old repertoire. And it's repertoire that used to be shared between Jews and Muslims.

And so when we started with that, people were right there. Right there with us. It just went to higher and higher pitches as we continued on the performance.

Laura: That was one of the most incredible performances that I've given. And I feel really uplifted this morning, after a year and a half of deep, deep despair. It feels great to know that the movement of resistance is in action.

And, I had conversations with organizers about this, and it really felt like to build movement and to build the inspiration and the hope that's needed in order to continue resistance, in order to continue to take action. We also needed to harness the joy of being together, the joy of all being in the same room and all being directed towards the liberation of Palestine.

What we're always trying to do with this project is sort of like manifest a potential reality that's, a post-Zionist reality. And I know it's very hard to imagine in this moment. But I really see this project as a manifestation of what I call politics of return. Meaning that, I believe that the Palestinian people have a right to return to their land. And I am, you know, committed to fighting for that day to come. 

And I also think that, ultimately Inshallah, there will be a time where that will allow for the opening of the possibility of return of Jewish, not only history, but also life in Arab land.

Meklit: Wow.

Laura: And I'm not, you know, calling for more displacement of population, et cetera in the region. That's not what I'm calling for obviously. What I'm calling for is for a framework that transcends ethno-nationalist politics, that transcends borders so that we can actually reintegrate our worlds. That's what we're longing for, is the reintegration of our worlds.

Meklit: And in order to do that, we have to sing.

Laura: Insh’allah

Narration: You can find Laura’s live album on Bandcamp. And you can go to lauraelkeslassy.com to sign up for Laura’s newsletter, where you can stay in the loop for the upcoming studio album release of Ya Ghorbati, which you heard excerpts of in this episode! Check our show notes for that link, as well as the link to Eye-in press, where you can read Laura’s writing about her projects and more. 

This episode of Movement was produced by Emma Alabaster and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our sound designer and co-founder is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are distributed by PRX. 

Show Notes:

Learn more & sign up for Laura’s newsletter where she will announce the forthcoming studio release of Ya Ghorbati: https://www.lauraelkeslassy.com/

Read more about the stories behind the songs: https://ayinpress.org/folio/ya-ghorbati-divas-in-exile/