Sonic Affinities and Expectations: Re-collecting and Re-interpreting a North Moroccan Sephardic Woman’s Audiovisual Archival Voice from Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2025

North Moroccan Judeo-Spanish folksinger Alicia Benassayag de Bendayan (1922-2021) played a central role in preserving North African Sephardic language and song for an exceptional span of 70 years, beginning in the 1950’s in Morocco and after her migration to Israel in the 1960’s. Since expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, her community continued to orally preserve Moroccan Judeo-Spanish (Haketía) lore through practices embedded within the fabric of daily life and ritual. During the the 20th century, ruptures of colonialism, migration, ethnic discrimination, and national pressures toward homogenization endangered her family and community traditions. In the face of these changes, Bendayan treasured her lore in her memory and partnered with researchers to ensure its archival preservation for future generations. Previous studies of Bendayan stressed her role as a source of information regarding the Judeo-Spanish song from North Morocco, fixating on song texts and melodies. In contrast, the current study introduces Bendayan as an artist and a living archive, stressing her agency and critically evaluating the ways that her lore was represented,
preserved, and interpreted. In particular, this paper draws upon ethnographic and oral history video footage from the late 1990’s-early 2000’s as a tool to better understand gendered and embodied
modes of performance in the North Moroccan Sephardic context. Bendayan’s experience as a heavily recorded folksinger of a domestic tradition highlights tensions between the individual and broader group identity formation in the Haketía community. Along these lines, her biography invites questions concerning memory and meaning-making, the nature of representation in ethnography, and the role of the archive.

Courtney Blue is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA, specializing in Anthropology. Her interests include memory studies, transnational networks of song, and giving voice to women’s
stories. Adept in multiple languages including Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic, she is also interested in language transmission and migration. Presently, she is researching heritage making and song transmission in North Africa and the Middle East, specializing in the North Moroccan Judeo-Spanish diaspora. Courtney is a conservatory-trained vocalist with experience performing classical, jazz, and folk repertoire. In addition, she plays the mandolin, is an avid yoga practitioner and teacher, and leads the Ladino choir Kantigas Muestras in Los Angeles.