The challenge is one that requires some sensitivity: how do you respect a vanishing culture that dates back multiple centuries, while at the same time modernizing it for a new generation? For reasons that have everything to do with her own personal history, Nani Noam Vazana decided­ that the best way to honour the ancient language known as Ladino was to make her own rules.

Today the Israeli singer is part of a wave of artists—Yasmin Levy, Baladino, Sarah Aroeste, and Mor Karbasi— singing in Ladino. But setting her apart from many of her contemporaries is that she’s not rolling out the greatest hits of a past she never knew. On her new album, Ke Haber, the goal is creating something new, singing original songs in an ancient language she’s still doing her best to master while pulling from different genres as a songwriter.

“Some people are really into that—telling me, ‘You’re doing really amazing work, and I need to tip my head down to you,’” says Vazana, reached in New Orleans at the start of a North American tour. “And others are like, ‘Um, we were expecting something else—we thought that you’d be doing traditional stuff—and this is not traditional.’ From my perspective, if you’re just doing a time piece where you’re just trying to write the way that other people felt, when they were in these periods long ago, you will end up faking something. Because you’re not in that time period today. But, if you write a piece from your own perspective, when you put things together it becomes not only more authentic, but also real art. You’re not copying something, so everything you’re doing happens from point zero.”

A Judeo-Spanish dialect that can be traced back to the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492, Ladino evolved over the years to incorporate Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and Balkan languages. The message of that multilingual melting pot is a beautiful one for a world that more than ever seems in endless conflict: no culture need be homogeneous. And the more commonalities we can embrace, starting with language, the better off we’ll be as human beings.

Fittingly, then, Ke Haber is a decidedly forward-thinking record—one heavily influenced by Ladino’s history as a matriarchal language often spoken between mothers and daughters at home.

On “No Kiero Madre” Vazana tackles the world of arranged marriages—still a thing, she says, among segments of the Jewish population, with the punchline coming at the song’s end. When a mother tells her daughter she’ll end up falling for a drunk if she doesn’t accept the man already picked out for her, the daughter happily reveals that’s already happened. More serious is “Sin Dingun Ijo Varon”, based on a 13th-century text where a teenager comes out to their family as transgender.

“The last sentence has the mother accepting the child for whatever they are,” the singer says. “That was mindblowing for me. Although I’ve rearranged things a little bit, the text is from the Middle Ages. So it’s pretty cool we’ve been discussing transgender transformation all this time. If we circle back to millennials, we think we invented the wheel with pronouns. That’s not correct when you look at older languages.”

VAZANA'S HISTORY WITH Ladino is a complex one.

The singer was raised by adoptive parents, whose lineage came from the Sephardic Jews from Morocco. As racism against the Jewish population in Morocco became more prevalent after the war, her father left his hometown of Fes for Israel. Determined to assimilate, and to leave traumatizing memories of Morocco behind, he forbade the speaking of Ladino at home. That didn’t stop Vazana’s grandmother, though.

“My father didn’t let us speak Ladino, so I only spoke it to my grandmother when we were alone,” Vazana says. “She didn’t speak Hebrew very well, and I didn’t speak Ladino very well, but there were a lot of fairy tales, and songs while cooking. Lots of physical affection—it was a very primary relationship, as she was my grandmother. But she passed away when I was 12, so I lost that connection. I started studying classical music, and then performing my own material.”

At 28, Vazana was invited to perform in Morocco, where she had a revelation.

“I’d never been before, so I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I went to my grandmother’s town?’ ” she recalls. “So I went to Fes to explore, and on the street was a huge street party, with a lot of different songs. One of them sounded really familiar to me—they were singing in Arabic, but after a few minutes I realized it was actually a Ladino song that my grandmother had sung to me when I was very little. That moment made me want to know more about my heritage.

“So I started researching online—mostly trying to find out what the song was, which was hard because there’s not a lot of documentation,” she continues. “Through listening to other songs, I was like, ‘These are all really pretty.’ But often the people singing them were all about embellishment, to the point where it was more embellishment than melody. So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we just jammed and did a traditional record that is pure to the music?’ So we did some recording at home, put the songs on YouTube, and they literally exploded with half a million views. Suddenly people started showing up at Vazana concerts demanding I sing Ladino songs.”

And so she did, but on her own terms. Musically, Vazana’s great strength on Ke Haber is the way she sounds every bit as at-home in a centuries-old candlelit tavern (“Gracias a La Vida”) as she does conjuring the ghost of the late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the keening “Cok Seni Severim/Siverias A La Rana”) or channelling the best of ’70s MOR radio (“Una Segunda Piel”).

She’s not the first artist in history to embrace the idea of making something old her own. Think of the White Stripes taking American blues and vintage country to create something fresh and thrilling at the turn of the millennium. Or the Pogues infusing traditional Irish music with punk energy in the ’80s, knowing that, for every thrilled kid at the front row at the 100 Club, there was a traditionalist convinced they were murdering everything the Chieftains once held sacred. Laughing, Vazana notes that she’s solidly on Team Pogue.

She knows there’s a very real case to be made that the language of Ladino is dying. Five years ago it was spoken by only 200,000 people on the planet. Today Vazana says that number is thought to be closer to 60,000, with many of them elderly. But when the singer looks out at her own audience, she sees a generation that might be looking forward, but is also all about connecting with their past in a disposable world of TikTok and Instagram.

“I think that a lot of millennials are trying to search for their roots—for their own lineage,” Vazana says. “If you look at me, I was brought up in a house where lineage was a non-conversational subject. My dad deliberately forbade us to speak Ladino at home. And a lot of people my age—especially if their parents were immigrants—were taught to reject their original culture and keep a distance from it. Now I feel, and I think more people my age feel, that we want to reconnect with the generations of our grandparents. It feels profound, more attractive, and more sexy that what we’re often experiencing today.”