From eJewish Philanthropy: JIMENA Runs the White Jewish Supremacy Gauntlet!
David Shasha
JIMENA Runs the White Jewish Supremacy Gauntlet!
It is hard to overstate the problem of White Jewish Supremacy.
As it is hard to overstate the obsequiousness of Self-Hating Sephardim who seek to genuflect to that racism.
One of the primary examples of this phenomenon is the Ashkenazi HASBARAH group JIMENA, who once again found their way into the White Jewish Supremacy eJewish Philanthropy; a prime marker of that Ashkenazi hegemony:
The complete article follows this note.
Indeed, as I was preparing this note to save on my WORD program, I discovered that this is not JIMENA head Sarah Levin’s first brush with that Ashkenazi hegemony:
It is interesting to see how the article confirms what Tom Pessah wrote about JIMENA and its founding as an extension of that Ashkenazi HASBARAH hegemony:
JIMENA was founded in 2002 as a project of the Bay Area JCRC, during a period that saw other groups being formed around the interests of Jews who follow the customs of Spain (Sephardic) or of North Africa and the Middle East (Mizrahi). JIMENA’s founders were themselves refugees from the Middle East and North Africa determined to deepen the Jewish community’s understanding of the experiences and histories of Jews from that region.
Here is the original Pessah article for comparison:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tXd9HrTpRUm3oOkegJtKAw3MMuD-jt-mume90yyTvMg/edit
It thus comes as no surprise that JIMENA has worked with The David Project to promote their seminal HASBARAH documentary “The Forgotten Refugees”:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
We have indeed been monitoring the doing of Straussian Neo-Con radical David Bernstein, who has moved from trying to cancel Arabs and Arab Jews to the upper strata of the Tikvah SAPIR elite:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/acQAFZfkAck
Bernstein’s racist HASBARAH Cancel WOKENESS is connected to his progeny Bari Weiss:
JIMENA is very much allied to this cancel Cancel Culture culture, as it took the lead in attacking the California Ethnic Studies curriculum that was recently signed into law:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit
JIMENA stands as a HASBARAH bulwark to promote the racist values of Ashkenazi hegemony, as it continues to duplicitously seek a place from Sephardim in that racist hierarchy.
And it has apparently been richly rewarded by that Ashkenazi institutional hegemony for its dutiful service!
It is worthwhile to note that both Ms. Levin and Tikvah Tablet Alana Newhouse, though their names are clearly Ashkenazi, have Sephardic ancestry:
About eight years ago, Sarah Levin went to Evanston, Ill., for a family visit. What the executive director of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) thought would be a typical trip home turned out to be more of a roots trip, during which she learned from reading century-old synagogue minutes that her great-grandparents, immigrants from Turkey, had been fierce advocates for the rights of the Sephardic community.
Given my personal discussions with both women, that ancestry is skillfully deployed as cover for their larger allegiance to the Ashkenazim.
Levin cites her great-grandfather, as if more recent relatives are not of value in the discussion:
“My great-grandfather wasn’t accepted by other Jews, and that wasn’t uncommon for his generation at all,” Levin said. “This is part of my lineage. I’m so proud to be part of this family.”
Indeed, the “Bourekas and Haminados” aspect of JIMENA’s Sephardischkeit is very comforting to Ashkenazim who are not interested in hearing about contentiousness in the Zionist context, as I have written in my review of Yehouda Shenhav’s seminal tome The Arab Jews:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VUAJJo6CRjp_C2xRVI_kCdOG2yy0RtCG/view?ths=true
It is thus critical to understand how JIMENA functions in the HASBARAH hierarchy, as related in the Pessah article.
When asked whether his experience with the group was positive, here is how Kouichi Shirayanagi presents the matter:
It was not. It turns out, the organization is heavily dependent on Ashkenazim for their funding and this shifts the focus of the organization from being about an old and precious Jewish culture to being an Israel advocacy organization almost totally beholden to a Hasbara agenda. The different donors came up every day in conversations with my boss, the Director – Sarah Levin. JIMENA was founded in partnership with the JCRC, and they get funding from JCRC, the Jewish Federations, and the same main donors of the Jewish community in the Bay Area. If you look at the board of the Jewish Federations, those who make the decisions on grants JIMENA applies for, or the people who run the JCRC, they’re mostly Ashkenazi. Promoting the diversity of Jewish communities is not the first priority of these organizations: they mainly want to create a new angle for Hasbara and promote Israel. My job as communications director was to write materials that would make people donate money to JIMENA. So I would write something and it would get changed completely, to fit what Sarah thought that the mostly Ashkenazi donors would want to see.
If anything sounded negative about Israel, I couldn’t use that information. For example, there was a Moroccan Jewish guy that we interviewed, and he said his family brought certain documents to Israel and Israeli government officials kept them when they arrived and never returned them. When Syrian Jews came to Israel they bought certain relics such as the Aleppo Codex and the Israeli government didn’t preserve them, they got destroyed. Sarah told me to delete that from the video interviews.
There was a review of a film on the Jews of Egypt from an Egyptian website, and it was positive towards Egyptian Jews but anti-Zionist: it said people should be supportive of the last Egyptian Jews and be appreciative that they haven’t left for Israel. I put it on the Facebook page and Sarah immediately told me to take it down, because our donors would be unhappy that we posted something anti-Zionist. On the other hand, almost every story had to have some link to Israel. In the JIMENA Blogs, unless Israel had something to do with the story I would prefer not to mention anything, but Sarah wanted to include people’s positive comments about Israel. That would get thrown in. We had a common formula in almost all the organization’s communications of Jews in majority Muslim countries being persecuted by Muslims and having to flee for Israel, and that is why Israel has a right to exist as a “Jewish State”.
He then explains Levin’s process:
Whenever Jews were persecuted, Sarah wanted to emphasize that the problem was Muslims, whereas I believe that the reason that Jews left Arab countries were greater problems of colonialism and post-colonialism… since Jews were closer to the colonial rulers in a lot of these countries during the colonial era, they often lived with privileges such as higher education and income. Often colonial rulers were more likely to grant citizenship of the colonizing country at a higher percentage rate for Jews than the religious majority in the countries they colonized. After the European colonizers left, Jews left with them because they felt they would be better off living in places with a much higher standard of living. There was also the trend of Pan-Arabism and pan-Arab nationalism, a reactionary movement to colonialism that left Jews out of their own countries. JIMENA didn’t want to focus on all the reasons Jews left Muslim countries, they just wanted to focus on how Israel was great and was the solution to Jewish persecution in these countries.
This explains why JIMENA’s deeply ignorant and useless curriculum has been adopted by over 300 American institutions.
Looking at its paucity of Sephardic intellectual content, it is not hard to understand why that is:
http://journeytothemizrah.org/the-curriculum
That is truly the essence of “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardschkeit.
With a side order of Henna!
Naturally, JIMENA, with its deep pockets, is connected to the Tikvah ASF, with its deep pockets:
Levin is careful to note that there are pockets of integration and equality, such as the Hillel chapters at both Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles, which both include Sephardic prayer groups, and the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund that funds JIMENA’s leaders fellowship. The American Sephardi Federation is a longstanding member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
That is a powerhouse of the White Jewish Supremacy and how Sephardim kowtow to its massive institutional power.
I have continued to monitor the Tikvah ASF, as can be seen in the following articles:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14cKispiXs6t14GfQlUw764iNnX6XZTdc9YzMU8LhwHc/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jkws0yY4GqDLXTeGt04TGOjB2GFlpuFlO7kkwpRlmNE/edit
More recently we have seen Tikvah ASF publications editor Aryeh Tepper present a Neo-Con symposium on – what else? – Anti-Semitism, which linked up with the Black Neo-Cons in a true Straussian festa:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KcrIEAbb8bTSUFlrl2ftRMolPzxaLz5jaX7bGecAdYo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lHRy4s8XIPfPnDPNRLPOI2t1-YTdOc3vtMVgN90lFVY/edit
And finally, the icing to the proverbial White Jewish Supremacy cake is the prominent role in the JIMENA program being played by another Self-Hater Mijal Bitton:
Mijal Bitton, a scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute, will lead the demographic study. The leadership-training component will offer several projects and programs with the aim of building communal infrastructure, Levin said.
Ms. Bitton’s role in the White Jewish Supremacy Shalom Hartman Institute has led to the usual racist results, as we have seen:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Rp2kwRQcny_KeF1X24JQav3-an2edAl7lySF8nwv6w/edit
Indeed, in my recent review of the matter of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who abandoned Jewish Humanism for the sunnier climes of Washington Heights racism, we saw how Bitton expressed her Ashkenazi loyalties:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T95UtKqVQrTZWObnxgTYMxrBYvc-6SzTpQM668sKoj4/edit
In the end, it is quite impressive to see how the eJewish Philanthropy article on JIMENA serves to confirm this racist Ashkenazi hegemony, but also to show us how putatively Sephardic organizations work to placate the Ashkenazim and do all they can to service the White Jewish Supremacy.
And that is a winning recipe for getting grants and achieving prominence in the White Jewish world!
David Shasha
JIMENA Aims to Convene the Sephardic and Mizrahi Community, with Support from JCRIF
By: Helen Chernikoff
About eight years ago, Sarah Levin went to Evanston, Ill., for a family visit. What the executive director of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) thought would be a typical trip home turned out to be more of a roots trip, during which she learned from reading century-old synagogue minutes that her great-grandparents, immigrants from Turkey, had been fierce advocates for the rights of the Sephardic community.
“My great-grandfather wasn’t accepted by other Jews, and that wasn’t uncommon for his generation at all,” Levin said. “This is part of my lineage. I’m so proud to be part of this family.”
JIMENA was founded in 2002 as a project of the Bay Area JCRC, during a period that saw other groups being formed around the interests of Jews who follow the customs of Spain (Sephardic) or of North Africa and the Middle East (Mizrahi). JIMENA’s founders were themselves refugees from the Middle East and North Africa determined to deepen the Jewish community’s understanding of the experiences and histories of Jews from that region.
“The heart of it has always been that of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, who never talked about the stories of their lives. It was such a privilege in those first few years to give elderly people an opportunity to talk to a Jewish organization that recognized them,” Levin said.
JIMENA continues to do that work, but it’s also broadening its mission. With support from the Jewish Community Response and Impact Fund’s (JCRIF) Reset program, JIMENA is preparing to serve as a convener of the Sephardic and Mizrahi community in the United States, and to help that community stake its claim as leaders of the community as a whole. Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions are particularly relevant in this moment of debate about justice and equity in the Jewish world and in American society, Levin said.
“This grant is an acknowledgement by the established Jewish community that JIMENA should go national, and that their issues should become part of the national agenda,” said Henry Green, a professor at the University of Miami, who in 2009 created Sephardi Voices, an organization that interviews Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews to collect their stories in oral histories and on film.
JCRIF was founded by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Maimonides Fund, The Paul E. Singer Foundation, and the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation as an emergency fund to protect hard-hit Jewish institutions during the early days of the pandemic. In February 2021, it announced the Reset program, which asked communal organizations to mine the disruptive experience of the pandemic for inspiration. The funders approved $24 million in grants to eight organizations, including JIMENA, which will use the funding to conduct a first-ever demographic study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States, and to create leadership programs for Sephardic and Mizrahi professionals, intellectuals, lay leaders and allies.
The Pew Research Center’s “Jewish Americans in 2020” found that 66% of the 7.5 million American Jews consider themselves Ashkenazi, while 3% considers themselves to be Sephardic and 1% consider themselves to be Mizrahi. The other 30% consider themselves “Just Jewish,” a combination of groups or not sure. The Sephardic and Mizrahi population has been stable for about 20 years, said Ira Sheskin, a demographer of American Jewry at the University of Miami, citing the 2000 Jewish Population Survey.
The community has long debated the question of to what extent it could or should maintain a separate identity from the Ashkenazi majority, Sheskin added, recalling a 1992 event hosted by the American Sephardi Federation that commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Spanish Inquisition during which that topic was widely discussed.
Levin’s answer: “We should be able to do both, to assimilate and to hold onto our heritage and our culture.”
Levin traces her ability to help JIMENA become a more powerful advocate for its community to a turning point she experienced as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, from which she graduated in 2003. She wasn’t connected to the Jewish community during those years, and found herself called on to represent the Jewish perspective in classes and conversations about Israel and the Middle East. She realized that her peers didn’t understand Israel’s culture or its history, considering it purely Ashkenazi and European despite the influence of Sephardic and Mizrahi culture.
This experience also helped Levin understand the extent to which her own Sephardic heritage had been obscured by the demographic dominance of Ashkenazi traditions in American Jewry.
“We’ve been fighting for 100 years to be included, and we’ve just accepted that we are only going to be seen as insular, and accepted that the only thing Ashkenazi [Jews] are interested in is our food,” she said. “So much has been lost.”
Levin went to Israel after college and stayed for 10 years, connecting shortly before she left with one of JIMENA’s cofounders, Gina Waldman, as the organization was being created. Levin was thrilled that such a group was coming into existence and stayed connected to it. When she returned to the United States in 2009, there was a job opening.
“I helped to articulate a vision that hadn’t been articulated by a younger person in an empowered way,” she said, adding that she grew the organization with the help of a “tremendous network” of volunteers, staff and partner organizations.
In her time at JIMENA, Levin has created new projects that have raised the profile of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, such as a six-month leaders fellowship supported by the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund in the Bay Area, and built bridges between the community’s organizations, Waldman said. “From day one, her agenda has always been to strengthen the position of all Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish organizations, leaders and community members, and this is why she is able to naturally lead this exciting new initiative,” Waldman said.
JIMENA’s determination to expand its mission still further can’t be divorced from efforts made by Jews of Color to gain representation and power, which were themselves fueled by a broader conversation about race in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. JIMENA and its supporters and constituency found the campaigns by Jews of Color a source of both inspiration and pain, Levin said.
“It was an amazing moment when we saw the Jews of Color movement gaining ground,” she said. “There was no question that we were going to support this push. We understand what it means to be on the outside.”
However, Sephardic and Mizrahi leaders also spoke privately with each other at the time that they felt a similar lack of representation and power, and had felt that way for most of American history — a real irony, Levin pointed out, given that Sephardic Jews who settled in New Amsterdam — present-day New York City — from Brazil in 1654 were the first group of Jews to settle in what became the United States. What’s more, the Sephardic and Mizrahi communities were sensitive to the perception that they were themselves Jews of Color, as in the Jews of Color Initiative’s most recent survey, which included them in that category.
“Young leaders would call me in tears,” Levin said, “saying that [Jewish organizations were] calling me a Jew of Color and they’re still not recognizing my story or my heritage. Our communities were still not being served. We felt more excluded than we had in a long time.”
Levin is careful to note that there are pockets of integration and equality, such as the Hillel chapters at both Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles, which both include Sephardic prayer groups, and the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund that funds JIMENA’s leaders fellowship. The American Sephardi Federation is a longstanding member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
She has also, more recently, noticed some changes in attitudes, including a higher awareness among Ashkenazi Jews that they share the United States with other Jewish groups.
“Everyone has familiarized themselves with the term ‘Ashkenormativity,’” she said. “Not everyone is from Europe and eats those foods.”
JIMENA has created a curriculum that has been adopted in 300 institutions in North America.
The group also advocated successfully to have its lesson plan about the Mizrahi Jewish experience included in California’s ethnic studies curriculum, which Jewish groups had criticized for antisemitic content and references to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
However, more needs to be done to make more Jewish spaces fully inclusive of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, Levin said, suggesting hiring members of those communities to teach Torah, to serve as staff and to design programs.
“Jewish education, Jewish overnight camp, Jewish travel need to work a bit harder,” she said.
To more effectively pursue their mission and to optimize their chance to secure a Reset grant, JIMENA led a community needs assessment in 2020 that brought 40 leaders together to talk about what they think is most needed.
“It was the first time all of these leaders worked together and that in itself was a breakthrough,” she said. The Sephardic and Mizrahi world is itself composed of many distinct communities, such as the Syrian community in the New York area, and the Persian community in Los Angeles, with different customs, languages and histories. They form a mosaic that’s very different from the culture of Ashkenazi Jewry, which more than a century after the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe started, has become relatively homogenous, Green said.
Mijal Bitton, a scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute, will lead the demographic study. The leadership-training component will offer several projects and programs with the aim of building communal infrastructure, Levin said.
The broader community will be enriched religiously and culturally, and will also benefit politically, she said.
“The larger Jewish community is aware that people are feeling excluded,” she said. “We can offer an answer to those questions. Our ancestors have given us a blueprint for multicultural living.”
From eJewish Philanthropy, November 8, 2021