Neta Elkayam did not come to New Orleans looking for a new home. Then again, few people do. But like so many before her, the Israeli singer and multidisciplinary artist found herself caught in the city’s intoxicating gravitational pull.
“I find New Orleans to be perfectly broken,” Elkayam told The Jerusalem Report. “Which feels deeply familiar to me.”
For Elkayam, whose work is rooted in her North African Jewish heritage, there was one aspect of New Orleans culture that she connected to immediately.
“The music,” she said. “Music as a way to survive. As a form of resilience. It all feels so Jewish. The way people here use music to honor the dead, to pass down history, to tell their stories – that’s something every Jew can identify with. We’ve been doing that for generations.”
But before Elkayam could tell her own story, she needed to hear it – in its original language.
Straddling two worlds
Elkayam grew up in Netivot, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. Her father left Tinghir, a city in central Morocco, as a toddler; her mother left Casablanca at eight. Both sides have Amazigh roots, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa whose Jewish minority settled in Morocco.
Like many children of immigrants, Elkayam straddled two worlds: the one her parents carried in their tattered suitcases and the one they pushed her to embrace in Israel. But there were limits to what they could take with them from the old country – and what they could pass on in the new one.
“When people leave their homeland, they take music, they take food, maybe some costumes, memories, a few photos,” she said. “And that’s what I got from them.”
But Elkayam was also getting very different messages from the outside world.
“On the one hand, I was being taught to be afraid of anything Islamic or culturally Arab,” she said. “On the other, I’m watching my grandmother communicate with her Palestinian neighbors and hearing about her Muslim neighbors back in Morocco. And it didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t we live like that here – in peace rather than in fear?”
Those contradictions did not make Elkayam uncomfortable. They made her curious.
At 28, she traveled to Morocco for the first time, a trip that changed her life.
“I realized there are 40 million people who speak the language of my grandmother,” she said. “Forty million people who I share this powerful connection with.”
Back in Israel, the life Elkayam had made for herself in Tel Aviv – studying art and beginning to exhibit in galleries – suddenly seemed less important.
“I knew I wanted this unfiltered connection with people who speak Arabic,” she said. “I wanted to be around people of different faiths, people with strong ties to the cultures they came from.”
But she was not ready to leave Israel, so she chose the next best thing: Jerusalem.
Finding her place
Friends thought she was crazy to trade sexy, secular Tel Aviv for heavy, divided, religious Jerusalem. But the eclectic mix of hassidic, Palestinian, Russian, Ethiopian, and Kurdish communities was exactly what she was looking for.
Elkayam began studying Arabic and dating Amit Hai Cohen, who eventually became her husband, creative partner, and “best friend,” she added with a smile.
“At the time, Amit was much more into music than I was,” she said. “I was very much focused on visual arts. He was the one who brought the piano into our relationship. And into our living room.”
Elkayam knew she had a good voice but never felt she had a place in Israel’s crowded music scene. That changed when she began singing in her grandmother’s language. Suddenly, she had found a way to shine, as she put it, “with all my colors.”
Their first recording was meant as a gift for Elkayam’s mother: a song by a famous Algerian Jewish singer. But after they posted it online, responses poured in from Egypt, Algeria, and France – many from Muslims who remembered the Jewish singers, neighbors, and sounds that had once been part of their own countries.
“We miss those voices. We miss our neighbors. We miss the stories. We miss those tunes,” Elkayam recalled people telling her.
She and Cohen began searching for North African Jewish musicians whose work had fallen “between the pages of history.” They tracked down aging musicians, recorded their stories, and built performances around their work.
Closing the circle
In 2013, Elkayam returned to Morocco and performed with Palestinian musicians from east Jerusalem. Standing together onstage as an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim, they were met with a standing ovation.
“It felt like a true full-circle moment,” she said. “My grandmother left this place to go to the Holy Land, and there I was, back in Morocco, feeling as though I was standing in my own kind of Holy Land.”
Elkayam returned to Jerusalem, where she and Cohen began to make a name for themselves as successful musicians and educators. They were busy, established, and not remotely considering leaving.
Until they were contacted by BAMAH, an organization that brings artists from Israel to historically Black colleges and universities. They were offered a one-semester residency at Xavier University in New Orleans, the nation’s only Catholic HBCU.
But before the family could make the move, the October 7 attacks left Elkayam, Cohen, and their two young children stranded in Morocco, where they had traveled for a film screening and concert tour. A planned one-week visit stretched into nearly three months. By the time they secured visa interviews through the US Consulate in Casablanca, the semester was about to begin.
They flew back to Israel, packed up their lives and said goodbye to their friends and family in five days, and left for New Orleans.
Lessons from Jerusalem
At Xavier, Elkayam and Cohen developed a course called “From Jerusalem to Morocco and Back: A Journey Through Culture and Music,” which uses art and music as a language to explore identity, memory, and place.
“We believe that history is everywhere,” she explained, describing how they send students back to their elders, their churches, and their local communities to document songs, rituals, and stories. “The same way we were able to knock on the door of our own roots, we send them to do the same.”
It has quickly become one of the university’s most popular courses. What began as a temporary residency continued, with Xavier finding a way to keep the couple on as artists-in-residence.
But like so many musicians who find themselves in New Orleans for longer than they expected, they began to get that familiar itch.
“We could never stop making music,” Elkayam said. “And even more so after October 7. It became our way to come together, to resist the world that was falling apart around us.”
Joined by musicians steeped in the city’s jazz traditions, Elkayam and Cohen blend Moroccan Jewish, Amazigh, and Andalusian music with rock and jazz.
“I’m a big believer in dynamic traditions,” Elkayam said. “If a tradition is not dynamic and you just preserve it, it’s going to die.”
Instead, she uses tradition “like colors on my palette,” drawing from an identity that is Israeli and Moroccan, Western and Eastern, southern Israel and the Deep South, traditionally Jewish and inseparable from Arabic language and Islamic culture. “I don’t want my Judaism to be only a flag,” Elkayam explained.
Nor does she claim that music can resolve the conflicts between those worlds. “I’m not a politician. I have no big answers for the Middle East. The only answer I have is music.” ■