These Israeli artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university

By Asaf Elia-Shalev, Forward

Their popular course has become a rare space for Black–Jewish exchange on campus — but the funding that brought Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen to New Orleans is running out

The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings. Usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew.

The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — do not ask what the lyrics mean. They listen. They feel something, and it’s the feeling that eventually leads to learning. 

“Seeing me perform live reveals a common ground, the desire we all share to understand our origins, a search for the lost voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam said in an interview. “The fact that I am singing not in English but in an African language resonates with the students and helps propel them on their own quest.”

The scene has become familiar at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic historically Black university, where Elkayam and her partner in life and art, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the past two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, memory, diaspora and interfaith exchange, grew out of an initiative to increase understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It is now one of the most sought-after electives on campus, recommended by students by word of mouth.

It is an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been shaped by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose creative lives have long resisted fixed categories. Yet Xavier has become a place where their music, pedagogy and personal histories suddenly make sense together.

It is also the place where they now face a crossroads.

After two years of teaching, performing and building cultural bridges in New Orleans, the private funding that brought them to Xavier has ended. The university wants them to stay. But whether they can remains uncertain, a predicament reflecting a wider strain on the institution itself.

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