Speaking the language of music, Israeli-born couple brings Moroccan roots to US university |
JTA — The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings — usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew.
The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — do not ask what the lyrics mean. They listen. They feel something, and it’s the feeling that eventually leads to learning.
“Seeing me perform live reveals a common ground, the desire we all share to understand our origins, a search for the lost voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam said in an interview. “The fact that I am singing not in English but in an African language resonates with the students and helps propel them on their own quest.”
The scene has become familiar at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic historically Black university, where Elkayam and her partner in life and art, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the past two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, memory, diaspora and interfaith exchange, grew out of an initiative to increase understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It is now one of the most sought-after electives on campus, recommended by students through word of mouth.
It is an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been shaped by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose creative lives have long resisted fixed categories. Yet Xavier has become a place where their music, pedagogy and personal histories suddenly make sense together.
It is also the place where they now face a crossroads.
After two years of teaching, performing and building cultural bridges in New Orleans, the private funding that brought them to Xavier has ended. The university wants them to stay. But whether they can remains uncertain, a predicament reflecting a wider strain on the institution itself.
Xavier University is facing significant financial uncertainty, underscored by recent layoffs even as it received a major gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that offered partial relief. At the same time, moves by the Trump administration to cut or reshape federal higher-education programs have disrupted key funding streams the university relies on, adding to the instability.
For Elkayam and Cohen, who have spent their careers moving along what they call the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis,” the question is no longer how to live between places, but whether that in-between can become a home.
Long before New Orleans entered the picture, Elkayam and Cohen were already artists of transit and connection.
Elkayam, 45, rose to prominence in Israel, Europe and Morocco for her reinterpretations of North African Jewish music, not as preservation, but as reinvention. Born in Netivot, on Israel’s geographic and social periphery, she grew up acutely aware of the ruptures many Mizrahi Jews feel: the distance from ancestral languages, sounds and stories. Her work has become a way to address that loss, offering a path back to connection beyond nostalgia.
Drawing on Andalusian, Amazigh (Berber) and Jewish liturgical traditions, she folds in elements of jazz, rock and contemporary performance art. Her sensibility is evident in projects like “Hilula,” a multidisciplinary opera blending drag, Torah study and live music, and “Arénas,” a collaboration built around archival recordings of women from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains who passed through a transit camp in Marseille on their way to Israel.
Cohen, 43, has worked in music, cinema and visual installation, often in collaboration with artists from Morocco. He recently explored memory and ritual across Judaism, Christianity and Islam through a ceiling installation for the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem that weaves together elements from all three faiths.
Together, the couple built ambitious, research-driven projects that blurred the line between scholarship and performance. Their collaborators included towering figures of North African Jewish music — among them the Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni — as well as Moroccan Muslim artists and Gnawa masters.
“We’re not interested in freezing the past,” Cohen said. “We’re interested in what happens when you improvise inside it.”
That ethos drew the attention of scholars such as Chris Silver, a professor at McGill University who studies North African music and Jewish-Muslim history. Silver describes their approach as not merely performing an inherited repertoire, but actively shaping how the past is understood and carried forward.
“As a scholar focused on the relationship of music to history, I marvel at what sometimes feels like their historiographical approach, in which their music builds on a well-known and lesser-known past, is in dialogue with the contemporary, and is future-oriented, contributing to and shaping the sounds of the possible and what may yet be,” Silver said.
For Flo Low, the founder of Bamah, the nonprofit that........