Stone Room Concerts @ Hill Center Featuring Celebrated Ladino Singer/Songwriter Nani.

Sunday, March 2 at 5PMStone Room Concerts @ Hill Center Featuring Celebrated Ladino Singer/Songwriter Nani.Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital921 Pennsylvania Ave, SE Washington, DC  20003202-549-4172

Through her gorgeous songs, singer, composer, and instrumentalist Nani Vazana helps lead the effort to preserve Ladino, the endangered language of the Sephardic Jews—a Jewish diaspora that was once concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula. The catalog of Ladino traditional music is rich but limited, given a history of dislocation and loss, so Nani has begun to chart a celebrated course performing and composing songs that call into being a Ladino with continued vitality in the modern world.

Ladino has its linguistic roots in medieval Spanish, combined with Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. When the Spanish Inquisition forced the Spain’s Jewish population to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews were scattered through the Mediterranean and beyond. Complex sociocultural factors and forces,…