Across the United States, Yazidi refugees and diaspora families have created a network of schools and language programs that teach Kurdish (Kurmanji), English, and cultural heritage. Partnerships with churches, NGOs, and youth councils provide classroom space, volunteer teachers, and curricula that balance integration with preservation.
Yazidi qewls are sacred hymns transmitted orally by hereditary reciters within Kurdish‑speaking families. This article examines their modes of transmission and contrasts them with oral practices in neighboring Near Eastern cultures, highlighting both shared mechanisms and distinctive features.
The 2014 Sinjar massacre forced over a hundred thousand Yazidis to flee their ancestral homeland, triggering a cascade of internal displacement and secondary migration to Europe, North America, and beyond. This article analyses how the genocide re‑configured settlement patterns, highlighting drivers, regional variations, and emerging challenges.
Zêrîn, the Golden Spring of Lalish, is a central element of Yazidi ritual life. The article examines its historical origins, its role in pilgrimage rites such as the mor kirin baptism, and its layered symbolic meanings within Yazidi cosmology.
Yazidi pilgrimage weaves together centuries‑old local shrines and the central sanctuary of Sheikh Adi at Lalish. Annual rites such as the Autumn Assembly draw believers from Iraq and the diaspora, reinforcing communal identity through sacred journeys.
Sacred qewls—cryptic, orally transmitted hymns—serve as Yazidi community’s living scripture, preserving the memory of the 2014 Kocho massacre. They are performed in rituals, adapted after the genocide, and reinforce collective identity and defiance.
Modern healthcare access in diaspora settings is reshaping Yazidi menstrual purity customs, prompting reinterpretations of ritual exclusion, enhancing women’s health agency, and generating tension between tradition and clinical practice.
In the mid‑1800s the Ottoman Empire’s drive to centralize power, impose conscription, and enforce conversion policies dramatically reshaped Yazidi tribal structures, landholdings, and demographic patterns. Scholarly work reveals a complex mix of resistance, coercion, and occasional accommodation that left lasting scars on Yazidi collective memory.
This article surveys the geographic spread of Yazidi tribal groups across the Sinjar Plateau, combining historical records, landscape analysis, and contemporary fieldwork to illustrate how clans have settled and evolved in this strategic region of northern Iraq.
The Ottoman Turkish language left a lasting imprint on the way Yazidis are named in both native and foreign contexts. This article traces the etymology, historical documentation, and modern variations of the Yazidi ethnonym, highlighting Ottoman administrative records and linguistic borrowing.