Sephardi Spaces: Migration and Identity features Dr. Shai Cohen of the University of Miami in a lecture at the Jewish Museum of Florida / FIU. Presented as part of the Navon Series in Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies, Spring Season 2026, the program explores how Sephardic histories of movement, settlement, memory, and cultural continuity can be studied through digital humanities.

NAVON SERIES AT FIU

The lecture highlights Sephardi Spaces, a University of Miami project concerned with mapping identity, memory, and migration. By bringing together archival materials, historical research, and interactive tools, the project helps visualize Sephardic lives across time and geography. It invites audiences to consider how routes of migration connect local stories to broader Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caribbean, and American Jewish histories.

The event places Sephardic identity in motion, asking how communities carried language, ritual, memory, family histories, and cultural practices across borders. It also reflects on how digital projects can make these histories more accessible to students, scholars, and the public.

This lecture is part of a broader Spring 2026 series on Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies at FIU, which includes programs on Sephardic roots in Brazil, the Jews of Edirne, David L. Yulee, Ladino Holocaust testimonies from Thessaloniki, Jewish communities in Indonesia and Pakistan, late Ottoman and Mandate-era Sephardic life in Jerusalem, and Arabic in the Ottoman Yishuv.