Piyutim, and a language kept alive by singing it

Yasmin Levy

Israeli singer of Ladino, born in Jerusalem in 1975 and the daughter of Yitzhak Levy, the cantor and researcher who first set down the Judeo-Spanish songs of the Sephardic diaspora. She took the fifteenth-century repertoire her father collected and made it living music again, letting flamenco and Middle Eastern phrasing into songs that had been sung in exile for five hundred years.