Panel Discussion
Between Worlds: Jewish, Latin, and Arab Identities in Conversation
Conversation with author Sonia Daccarett and filmmaker Emily Cohen Ibañez. Moderated by Estelle Tarica
Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 3, 2026
at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Join us for an illuminating panel discussion on navigating Jewish, Latin, and Arab identities. Featuring author Sonia Daccarett and filmmaker Emily Cohen Ibanez, this conversation explores Latin-Jewish hybrid identity formation across cultures, countries and languages. Our panelists share how language and diverse cultural inheritances shape questions of home, memory, belonging, and self-definition. Moderated by Estelle Tarica, professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, they will examine what it means to live between more established Jewish narratives and how we forge identity at the intersection of different cultural landscapes..
About Sonia Daccarett
Sonia Daccarett is a writer and communications professional. Born in Colombia to a Christian Palestinian father and a Jewish mother, she moved to the United States and received an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a master’s degree in international and public affairs from Columbia University. For more than two decades, she worked on strategic communications initiatives with corporate and non-profit clients and currently writes and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Photo Credit: Susan Adler Photography
Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Arab and Jewish in Colombia
Roots of the Guava Tree: Growing Up Arab and Jewish in Colombia is a debut contemporary memoir about a young woman struggling to understand her identity as the daughter of a Jewish mother and Christian Palestinian father, coming of age in Colombia as increasing violence and the instability of the 1980s engulf her country.
About Emily Cohen Ibañez
Emily Cohen Ibañez is a Colombian-American filmmaker with Syrian Jewish heritage who pairs cinematic lyricism with activism. Her feature, Fruits of Labor, about a teenage farmworker, premiered at SXSW 2021, aired on PBS POV, and was nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award. Her short films have distribution with The Intercept, TIME, PBS, and The Guardian. She is currently completing her short film River about ex-combatants of the FARC turned champion river rafters in the Amazon; she is in production for her hybrid feature film, Orquidea about diaspora, orchids, and the aftermath of war in Colombia. She was awarded an SFFILM Rainin grant to complete her screenplay, From Honey to Ashes. Her films have received support from Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Perspective Fund, Chicken & Egg, Firelight Media, BAVC, Film Independent, Cinereach, Points North, and SFFILM. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from NYU.
Photo Credit: Lara Kaur
Orquídea
Set in the Colombian Amazon, Orquídea, a hybrid documentary film, follows a diasporic filmmaker through a mythical labyrinth of flowers, encountering unexpected alliances between biologists, indigenous elders, farmers, and former left-wing guerrilla fighters who conserve orchid-filled forests in the aftermath of war.
About Estelle Tarica
Estelle Tarica is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University (2000). In her research and teaching she examines colonial legacies of race in modern Latin America, Indigenous and Jewish memory cultures, and the transformative power of testimony, fiction and poetry. Her first book, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores the subjective effects of racialized national identity formations in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. Her second book, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022), is about how Holocaust memory and history circulate in Latin America and shape the ways Jews and non-Jews understand the state violence they experienced during the Cold War period. The book explores how and why the Nazi genocide of the Jews became meaningful to Latin American authors and activists from the 1960s to the present, especially in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala. Her work in the field of Latin American Jewish studies also includes articles on Leo Spitzer’s Hotel Bolivia, about Austrian Jews who found a refuge from Nazism in Bolivia, and on French novelist André Schwarz-Bart’s linkage of Holocaust memory and decolonization in the Caribbean.