Sephardic Women: Their Legacy and Central Role in Preserving the Sephardic Culture
Apr 15 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
A FLOWING THROUGH TIME AND TRADITION PROGRAM
Join the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life for Sephardic Women: Their legacy and Central Role in Preserving the Sephardic Culture, a Lunch and Learn with Professor Emeritus Rivka Amado exploring themes from the exhibition Flowing Through Time and Tradition.
After the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, women came to play a central role in preserving Jewish—and Sephardic—culture. In the far-flung Spanish diaspora, women used songs and storytelling to transmit culture and as a form of educating their children.
Their songs reflected the values of the Sephardic culture—longing for the return to Spain, and universal concerns of love, loyalty, and tradition. Their songs also reveal the earthy secularism that was part of the Sephardic tradition. In those tens of thousands of households, which outwardly converted to Christianity, but secretly continued to practice Judaism, women played an especially crucial and unique role.
In traditional Judaism, the synagogue was the domain of men and the home the domain of women, but after “conversion,” the household replaced the synagogue as the spiritual center for Converses, and therefore women ascended to many roles previously held by men: teachers, ritual slaughters, transmitters of ritual and tradition. In the contemporary era, as some of these families and communities have re-embraced Judaism and returned to the synagogue, the change has generated deep strains within family and communal life as men have asserted greater authority at the expense of women.
Amado will explore the role of women in both types of communities, the religious communities in the wake of the Spanish diaspora, illustrating her points with Sephardic songs and legends. In addition, she will share a few songs that reflect the life experience of Sephardic women in the Diaspora.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
12:00 – 1:00 pm
In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
RSVP
If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnes@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.
About the speaker
Rivka Amado is a retired Professor and adviser on applied ethics in bioethics and political ethics. She earned her PhD in organizational ethics and education in 1990, from University of Toronto, and has held postdoctoral fellowships in medical ethics at the Hastings Center in New York, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. • Her research focused on organ transplantation, surrogate decision-making and decisions near the end of life. She taught for many years at Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Since moving to the United States in 2004, she has taught at Stanford, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. She is currently teaching at the Legal Studies program at UC Berkeley. On 2022-2024 she was invited to teach courses on Israel politics and Israeli society at the department of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara as a Visiting Faculty. • She has received a number of awards for her research and teaching, including the Pew Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Konrad Adenauer Award, and the Faculty Research award from the International Council of Canadian Studies, as well as an award for excellence in teaching at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous articles, monographs, book chapters, and reports on medical ethics, ethics education, political and governmental ethics, moral leadership and business ethics, and has served on the board of two NGOs in Israel. • As an ethics adviser to National Transplant Institute of Israel, she helped devise ethics guidelines for organ transplantation and allocation of organs, and develop decision making tools for health care providers. She has also written and helped to implement ethical guidelines for senior civil servants in Israel. • In addition to her scholarly work, Rivka maintained an active musical career that is inspired by her Sephardic heritage. She composes, sings, and plays the piano. Over the last twenty years she has performed in Australia, Spain, Israel, and throughout the United States, including the New York City Sephardic Festival, singing traditional ladino songs and her own compositions. • In addition, she has lectured widely on Sephardic history, and the development and spread of ladino—the universal language of Sephardic Jews throughout the Iberian Peninsula and the old Ottoman Empire. In doing this, she has focused on the role of women in preserving Sephardic culture, and the ladino language and music • Rivka produced three albums one of classical ladino music, Hija Mia, and two others, Stations of My Life and Moments of Reflection, that involved her own original compositions. Many of her performances are previewed on You Tube.
About the exhibition
Exploring the theme of water through the holdings of the Magnes Collection, Flowing through Time and Tradition traces how water flows through and shapes Jewish lives: enacting belief, sustaining life and communities, providing the means for spiritual cleansing, and mapping identities.
