[theme music plays]

Jen Richler: Hi, it's Jen Richler, here with another episode of Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

The 28-year-old musician Erez Zobary grew up in Toronto, the daughter of an American Ashkenazi mother and a Yemenite Jewish father. She always knew her family did things a bit differently than other Jewish families.

Erez Zobary: Every Saturday, my mom would try to make us jachnun and malawah. And so I knew that, oh, not a lot of my friends at school are eating jachnun and malawah. They don't—maybe they don't even know what that is. Even on Friday nights, like having my dad recite the bracha, it wasn't just Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu. It was [sings with Yemenite melody] Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech HaOlam. Like, it always was different. And I knew it was different. But I always felt proud of it when it was in the comfort of my home.

Jen: But outside the home, she didn't talk much about her Yemenite identity, including in her music. Over the past few years, she’s made a name for herself with soulful, upbeat R&B pop songs that explore themes like coming of age and relationships. For her next project, she wanted to dive into her identity and heritage.

With the help of a grant from the Canadian government, Erez traveled to Israel to spend a few weeks learning from Yemenite elders in her family and from prominent Yemenite musicians. The result is her new album, Erez, a collection of songs that draws on her family’s stories of life in Yemen and Israel.

[song from album fades up]

I'm losing all my faith, I'm losing all my faith

In everybody

I'm losing all my faith, I'm losing all my faith

In us

[song fades down]

Erez: I wanted it to have a Yemenite sound. I wanted it to follow Yemenite Jewish themes, but I also wanted it to be familiar for Western listeners, who are the majority of my listeners. And so I describe it as an English R&B Yemenite Jewish album.

[singing in Arabic]

I’m choosing humanity, I’m choosing all of me

They ask me to pick one side, I’m choosing humanity… 

[song fades down]

Jen: In this episode of Can We Talk?, Erez helps us kick off Mizrahi Heritage Month, when we celebrate the cultures and contributions of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Erez talks about her family story, the troubled history of Yemenite Jews in Israel, and her feelings about her identity.

[song fades out]

Jen: Erez’s grandparents grew up in the 1930s and '40s in Rada, a small town in Yemen with a vibrant Jewish community. Like most people in Rada, their families were poor. They lived in small, multigenerational houses, with animals taking up the bottom floor. The men spent most of their time studying Torah and earning a modest living, while the women ran the household.

Erez’s grandmother, Bracha, remembers that when she went to fetch water from the well as a child, she and the other Jews had to wait until all the Muslims had gone first. They knew they were second-class citizens.

The place of Jews in Yemen became increasingly tenuous in the late '40s, and in 1947, dozens of Jews were killed in a pogrom in Aden. In response to the rising tension, the newly formed state of Israel airlifted nearly all the Jews of Yemen—almost 50,000 in total—to Israel in what was known as Operation Magic Carpet. Erez’s grandmother was somewhere between ten and thirteen years old at the time. (She doesn’t have a birth certificate.) It was the first time she had left her town, let alone boarded an airplane.

Erez: One of my favorite stories is, um, she told me they just started making a fire on the plane. 

Jen: [laughs] Oh my God. 

Erez: They just started—they wanted to make lunch. They were hungry, and they wanted to make lunch. [laughs] It was really, you know, like a whole new—a whole new world.

Jen: In this new world, Ashkenazi Jews were the ruling class, and Mizrahi Jews were the underclass. Mizrahi Jews were sent to live in ma'abarot, dusty transit camps in the middle of nowhere. In sharp contrast, Ashkenazi immigrants were typically sent to live in apartments in urban centers.

One of the most egregious examples of Israel’s mistreatment of Mizrahi immigrants is the Yemenite Children Affair. In the late 40s and early 50s, over 1,000 babies and toddlers disappeared. Most of them were the children of Yemenite immigrants, but families from the Balkans, North Africa, and other Middle Eastern countries were also affected. Parents were told that their children had died in the hospital from illness.

That’s what happened to Erez’s great-grandmother, Ashwaleya. Her newborn son had been healthy at birth, and she suspected she was being lied to.

Erez: Um, she asked to see the body, and they basically just said, No, we had to bury him quickly because he was ravaged with disease. You can't see him. And so she was released from the hospital, sent back to the transit camp without her baby. But she didn’t believe them, and somehow she found a way to get back into the hospital and just, like, took him back. And they named him Yehiel—God is alive—because they felt like it was such a miracle that they got him back.

Jen: The story about Erez’s great-uncle had a happier ending than most. Most families never learned the fate of their babies, and many believe that they were given to Ashkenazi parents who weren’t able to conceive.

Erez: It’s a pretty dark part of history that I find a lot of people are really shocked about. And I think so many more people should know about it. And it's so important for the Jewish community to be talking about, like, what does this mean? How do we reckon with this? How do we talk about it in a way that's meaningful? And how do we, you know, bring justice?

Jen: In 2021, the Israeli government approved a compensation plan of over $50 million for families affected by the Yemenite children affair. But the government hasn’t offered an official apology and maintains that the children died while under medical care.

After the transit camps, the Zobary family settled in Gadera, a small city in the center of Israel that still has a large Yemenite Jewish population today. Money was tight; Erez’s father, Shaul, and his four siblings all shared a bedroom. His mother worked as a cleaning lady and lunch lady in a school cafeteria, and his father was a welder. They lived on the same street as a slew of cousins. His grandmother, Safta Hamama, took care of all the kids while their parents were at work.

Erez: And he tells me stories about all of them just being together, and how she would do these, like, communal showers. They would all stand in a line, and they would soap up, and then she would hose them down.

Jen: Erez's grandparents wanted their kids to have more opportunities than they did, so they chose to send them to the secular public school where the more affluent, Ashkenazi kids went. Most Yemenite families sent their kids to religious schools with other Mizrahi kids.

After he finished college in the '80s, Shaul moved to New York for graduate school and met Erez’s mom, Alyssa. Erez was born in New York, but moved to Toronto when she was 2. She grew up very involved in the Jewish community—she went to Jewish day school and a Jewish summer camp. But she rarely met Jews from a Mizrahi background. In her majority Ashkenazi community, the only Jewish identities acknowledged were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe or Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors were from Spain and Portugal.

Erez: And that's why I thought I was Sephardic, honestly, until, like, even after high school, which is pretty wild. I didn’t know that there was another, you know, even another category of Jews. And then you look at just how many Jews there are from around the world, and how the Ashkenazi-Sephardic groups don’t even encompass, like, so many other diverse Jewish communities…But I felt at school, that was really what we were hearing about.

Growing up, I definitely felt different. I remember as a kid sitting in class, and I would just, like, be shaking with anxiety as the teachers were going through the attendance list, knowing they wouldn’t be able to say my first name or my last name properly.

Like, I can even feel the feeling of sitting in class, being like, Oh, I know my name’s gonna be last, and I know they’re not gonna say it right, and people are gonna laugh.

And even today, at coffee shops, I don’t say my name is Erez. My name is Erin.

Jen: Erez is Hebrew for "cedar tree."

Erez: And it’s a line in one of my songs, in my song "Cedar Tree." Like, it’s actually speaking directly to my parents. But just talking about how… the line is: Cedar tree, you jaded me, could have named me like the others, sweating through attendance lists and coffee lines.

[song fades up]

Cedar tree, you jaded me

Could've named me like the others

Sweating through attendance lists and coffee lines

Seems to me the only way

To find my voice is off the stage

Listening to every word except for mine 

It taught me to be strong… 

[song fades down]

Erez: Yeah, so Erez means "cedar tree" in Hebrew, which is a tree that is a symbol of, like, strength and courage and stability and groundedness. And so I wrote the song "Cedar Tree" all about, um, the protection that my name has given me in so many ways. Like, it really—I’ve been able to, as especially as I get older, just, like, really settle into it and have so much pride in it and get so much strength from it.

But then also recognizing how, in a way, it’s jaded me. And it does come with all of these feelings of being different and wishing I was more similar to other people.

Jen: So you have this album coming out that includes songs that are really inspired by your family’s story and your Yemenite identity. Um, can we talk about a couple of songs that are especially connected to your family’s story? So one of them is Safta. Can you say a little bit about that song?

Erez: Yeah, absolutely. So my safta is just, like, one of the funniest women. She lets everything just slide off her back. She’s so loving. She’s really the glue of the family. And she says whatever’s on her mind. Um, very strong-willed woman. And I wanted to write this song about her—how I see her as this, like, amazing, blessed, holy woman who is the glue of the family, but also just, like, how, how real she is.

[song fades up]

I see her sitting on a porch

Hiding from the neighbors, laughing to herself

Teeth out on the table… 

[song fades down]

Erez: She always has, like, her fake teeth out. She’s always hiding from her neighbors because she’s, like, kind of an introvert. And, you know, the second it’s 8 p.m., she’s going to watch her soap operas. It really just was an ode to her and how much she endured in her life. She worked so hard for her kids, did whatever she could to, you know, get them to a level in their life where they are successful and highly educated.

And just all the sacrifices she had to make—like, she wasn’t able to graduate school because she had to start working as a cleaning lady as a teenager. And just thinking about how positive she has remained her whole life. She’s just one of the coolest women I know.

[song fades up; Erez and her grandmother speaking in Hebrew at the start of song]

Erez: Her voice is at the beginning. It’s me asking her, like, “How do you say this word?” A lot of me learning Yemenite and these, like, important phrases was me just talking to family members and getting them to kind of speak to me. And I would keep this almost, like, dictionary log. And that was one of my sessions—sitting with her, just asking her, like, “How do you say this? How do you say that?”

Jen: And then what about the song "Henna"?

Erez: Yeah, "Henna" is, um, one of my favorite songs on the album. It really was born out of asking my grandmother to sing some of the traditional Yemenite songs that she remembered from Yemen. And the one that she kept coming back to was this song that was talking about women getting married off in Yemen, which they were often very young. I think her mother was married at twelve or thirteen. And it’s kind of this song pleading to the parents: "Don’t sell me off like a cow. Don’t sell me off like a sheep."

[clip of Safta singing in Yemenite]

Erez: Um, and I thought it was so wild. Like, I knew that this existed in Yemen, and I know that this still exists in certain places in the world. But it felt so far away from what her life was like—she was able to choose her husband—and what even my life was like. I’m able to choose who I want to be with and who my partner is. And so I wrote this song about, you know, the strong women like her and the other strong women in my life who were able to kind of change the path from not having a choice to now having a choice, being able to choose who we’re with.

[song fades up]

Well I’m not losing sleep

Wondering if my love is free

And we're not counting sheep 

Dancing to songs she used to sing to me

[song fades down]

Jen: Do you see any connection between, like, the themes in this new album and some of the work by other Yemenite Jewish women? You know, you’ve talked about the writer Ayelet Tsabari or the Yemenite Israeli female band, A-WA, and the theme of resistance in their work. How do you see resistance in their work, and is there something of the same thing happening in your music?

Erez: I think it’s hard to show up as your full self and create art, which is such an intimate practice and really, like, exposes your soul in a society that doesn’t value your culture and your identity.

So I do see Yemenite artists—especially those that were making music early on in Israeli society—I really do see it as an act of covert resistance. You know, they were sharing their art, sharing their heritage in a society that saw them as, you know, naïve and lesser than. Even the artists that are doing it today in Israel, that are maintaining these traditional practices, I see that also as a form of covert resistance because they’re saying, you know, we’re embracing modernity, but we’re also—we’re not letting go of the past. We know where we came from. We’re proud of it. We’re not ashamed. We don’t want to just, you know, blend in with what’s modern and what’s cool. We want to maintain our family’s tradition. And I think that that is so beautiful.

And I think you need both covert and, you know, overt resistance, because when you have a group of people that are not being treated equally in a society—like the Mizrahi Jews—there were groups that were very influential in changing policies and changing laws, like the Black Panthers in Israel. I feel like a lot of people don’t know that there were Black Panthers in Israel that were fighting for Mizrahi rights and freedoms, right? And I see the Black Panthers and the Yemenite musicians at the time, I see them as doing very similar work, just in very different ways. They’re both fighting for recognition. They’re both fighting for an honoring of their people, of their culture. They’re both fighting for people to see that there’s value and beauty in their communities.

And I think, you know, coming out with this album today, I don’t necessarily see this album as covert resistance. But what I do see this album as is an invitation for both Jewish people and non-Jewish people to see that Jews are so diverse. We come from so many different places. And there is uniqueness to each of our heritages, which are often mixed. And I hope people listen to this album and see the beauty in my family and the joy and the love and the hardships and the difficult moments—and that we’re strong and that we’re resilient. 

[clip from "Henna" fades up]

They told her where to go 

At seven months old

The price was worth the cost

But a daughter was the loss 

Begging to stay home

Pleading not to go

She couldn’t fight for what she wanted

But now I’m on her shoulders

She taught me to be bolder… 

[song fades down]

Jen: Erez Zobary is a musician and educator based in Toronto. Her new album comes out on November 28. You can find out more at E-R-E-Z Z-O-B-A-R-Y dot com.

To learn more about Mizrahi heritage, check out the nonprofit organization JIMENA—Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa—at J-I-M-E-N-A dot org.

You can listen to our episode about JIMENA—and all our other episodes—at jwa.org/canwetalk or on your favorite podcast app.

Thank you for listening to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard "Faith," "Cedar Tree," "Safta," and "Henna," by Erez Zobary.

I’m Jen Richler. Until next time.