Midwest Mahjar: The Recorded Sounds of the Arabic-Speaking Diaspora in the United States at 78 RPM

  Joe Catton: A Kanun and Oud Player Links Two Worlds –  The Arabic-language Hafla Scene and Sephardic Jewish life in Brooklyn Joseph Catton, 1958.   A few of our most recent blog posts have explored the lives of Arabic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish immigrants who left Aleppo, Damascus, and/or Alexandria and immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. We have included Moses Cohen , Mayer Murad , and Nessim Murad among those musicians we have written profiles for, and Hakki Obadia and Shehadi Ashear as musicians we’ve yet to write about in any biographical detail. Arabic-speaking Jews in Brooklyn lived as a minority within a minority. The vast majority of Syrians immigrants to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century identified as Christian - Orthodox, Melkite, or Maronite. Some were even Presbyterian. Small numbers identified as Muslims and still others were Jews. Depending on the sources one consults, Syrian Jewish immigrants began c...