Jewish Cultural Weekend Concert

Fragments

featuring the Yoni Avi Battat Ensemble

Fragments is a collection of original and traditional music that invites listeners into the complexity of Yoni Avi Battat’s Iraqi-Jewish identity. Inspired by traditional Arab musical forms, the project combines Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Yiddish lyrics to express the fragmenting effects of migration, lost languages, colonialism, assimilation, and erasure.

Through this performance, Yoni aims to complicate and nuance your understanding of Arab and Jewish history, culture, and identity. In doing so, Fragments offers visibility and recognition for the many unseen Middle Eastern Jews in America while making room for listeners of all backgrounds to find resonance and healing in its message.

Free and open to the public. Dessert in Kemper Lobby following the performance.