Intrigued by the database of non-English newspapers at the NYPL, I decided to spend some time on the website to notice what was there and think about what was not. My interest in Jewish diaspora studies compelled me to look at the Yiddish section, which includes digital copies of 12 Yiddish-language newspapers—a considerable number in comparison to some of the other sections, such as Arabic, which includes 7 newspapers, and Korean, which has only 2. Yet, since my research thus far has been largely concerned with Jewishness outside of Ashkenazi European contexts, I was curious about the lack of any newspapers in Jewish languages besides Yiddish and Hebrew. Given the incredible multilingualism of the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish diaspora, I wondered, then, if languages such as Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, once had a place within the linguistically diverse journalism scene in the city.

In my research, I came across La Vara, a leftist Ladino newspaper published from 1922-1948 in the Lower East Side and thought to have been the last Ladino newspaper in the world. During its lifespan, the paper shifted in theme and content, at first establishing itself as political satire and later taking on a more serious tone necessitated by the Second World War. The paper also developed linguistically, as explained by scholar Devin E. Naar in an interview from the Association for Jewish Studies Podcast. According to Naar, the linguistic changes in the paper reflected the larger ideological and cultural concerns of the working class Sephardic Jews of the city. In its earlier years, the founders of the paper grappled with their connection with the larger Hispanic world. While some writers wished to identify more strongly with Hispanic countries, and thus chose to “hispanicize” the Ladino with which they wrote, others rejected this shift and found that such hispanicization rendered the Ladino unreadable to those less familiar with Spanish. Later on, the paper’s decision to include a page fully in English in the mid 1930s was indicative of the Sephardim’s increasing knowledge of the English language and desire to draw in and maintain an anglophone audience. I find these linguistic shifts to be quite fascinating, especially as they intersect with political and cultural changes in the city, and I wonder how including La Vara in the NYPL’s newspaper archive could better highlight the complexity of Jewish history in NYC. 

I’m also more generally curious about how La Vara has been made accessible to the public online, given it’s absence from the NYPL listings. To my knowledge, the only place where the paper can be found online is on the National Library of Israel website. La Vara is certainly a Jewish newspaper, drawing from a broad range of cultural Jewish influences, but it is also a distinctly New York paper, one that documents the efforts of Sephardic immigrants to formulate a Jewish, Hispanic, and Ottoman identity within the diverse and politically complex NYC of the 1920s-40s. What does it mean, then, that the paper is not mentioned within the NYPL listings of non-English newspapers in NYC, but is rather solely disseminated by the National Library of Israel? How do these non-English and multilingual resources get sorted into different archives—which institutions get access to which diasporic material, and why? Is there a certain displacement—a reductionist sorting of diasporic multilingualism into national identities—that occurs when archival material becomes distributed by national libraries? (Or should we just be glad that the material is available at all?)

La Vara‘s last year of publication was 1948, the same year as the establishment of the State of Israel. In his interview, Naar describes how this was likely due to the Sephardim’s belief that Israel was an “emergent homeland,” a “new beginning” that would allow them to play a larger role in the “global Jewish nation.” Indeed, it appears that the newspaper has been of interest to Israeli Jewish history and research. At the same time, such identification with Israel ended the Ladino newspaper’s presence in NYC, and thus marked the end of all Ladino newspapers in the world, a significant loss for the Ladino language, now endangered.