This presentation will examine obscure work of the most famous Jewish women from the nineteenth century: Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), Penina Moïse (1797-1880), and Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). As Sephardic writers, they often wrote of exile, particularly of their Spanish and Portuguese heritage, of Jewishness in broader society, and of their pride in establishing a new homeland. Furthermore, their writing was profoundly impacted by their relationship to music. This presentation will reveal their musical projects to gain a better understanding of 19th century American and English Sephardic culture.

Your guide, Leonard Stein, is a literary scholar, musician, and writer. He received his PhD at the University of Toronto Centre for Comparative Literature and Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. An ASF Broome & Allen Fellow (2021), he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Bar-Ilan University, and lectures at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He researches Sephardic literature, crypto-Jewish identity, poetry, music history, and the intersections between music and literature.