From the ARCHIVE: JIMENA Continues to Work on Behalf of the White Jewish Supremacy

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David Shasha

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Jun 5, 2023, 8:11:00 AM6/5/23
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Jews of the Middle East or Ashkenazi Donors?

By: Tom Pessah

The following is an interview with Kouichi Shirayanagi, a graduate student from San Francisco and former employee of the US-based organization Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA). 

Can you introduce yourself?

I’m Kouichi Shirayanagi, I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m a Master’s student at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri. In 2012 I was in Tunisia and I wrote many articles about Tunisian Jewish communities in Tunis and in Djerba. I was working for the first English language post-revolution start-up news website, Tunisia Live. I found out that there was an organization in San Francisco, JIMENA, which was reprinting articles from my website without my permission. They used the entire article instead of posting a snippet and including a link. I contacted them about that and eventually they offered me a job with good pay as their Communications Director in San Francisco. I wanted to come back to the Bay Area for familial reasons, so I accepted. I flew back in August 2012.

What did you know about JIMENA (“Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa”) when you accepted the job?

I looked at their website and I saw that they had a speakers’ bureau of Jews from different countries in North Africa and the Middle East who had left their home countries and had immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I thought I’d like to learn more about Jewish communities from places I hadn’t been to, like Yemen, Lebanon and Syria.

What did you do when you began?

I wanted to expand the organization’s reach by coming up with new ways of communicating stories about Jews from Arab countries. So I managed to establish a JIMENA blog on the Times of Israel, where most of the writers are usually Ashkenazim, and another one in the Jerusalem Post, also a very Ashkenazi paper. JIMENA also wanted to create a project with twelve websites about Jews from nine Arab countries, Turkey and Iran. I spent a lot of time researching about food and finding stories on the web and I was supposed to promote these websites in Jewish media so that donors would know about them.

So this sounds like a positive experience, so far. Was it?

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”.

Were there any other problems in the way they presented the history?

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.

Also, one of the main points of JIMENA tries to make is that there was a population exchange and that there were just as many Jewish refugees from Arab countries as Palestinian refugees; Jewish refugees were just resettled in Israel. Therefore, Palestinians who left Israel as refugees have no claim to the places they fled. I think that notion is absurd and racist. On the JIMENA website there’s a whole section about the Jerusalem Mufti. I don’t think you can tie whatever persecution Jews experienced in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Turkey, Morocco, etc. to the Jerusalem Mufti. But I had to help edit it on the website even though I doubted the veracity of the content. In addition, we also had to upload claim cards to the website so that people would fill them out. (http://www.jimena.org/redress-registration/)

What are these claims cards?

They want Jews from Arab countries to write down and disclose to the Israeli government what the properties were that they lost. It is in order for the Israeli government to claim that, against any Palestinian claims. But as long as I was there, for ten months, I didn’t know anybody who printed out and sent in a claims card. Because the notion is absurd – to go to the Israeli government and give whatever property you lost to the Israeli government to use as a bargaining chip with the Palestinians. Why wouldn’t you go to the government where you lost your property? I think it is awful to blame Palestinians to what happened Jews from Arabic speaking countries, it’s racism – because a Jew from Morocco or Algeria who left had nothing to do with Palestinians.

Do you remember any other incidents from this period?

I wrote a timeline of historical events for the Tunisian Jewish community, and I said that the Holocaust happened not just in Europe but in Tunisia too. But Sarah told me I couldn’t compare what happened in Europe to the suffering of Jews in North Africa. I was very upset about that, because I spent a lot of time in La Goulette, and they have a house for the elderly, and almost all the people there had Holocaust experiences: they remember the day when the Nazis occupied their country in May of 1943. They all experienced horrible treatment. Men were forced into slave labor. When I was in Tunisia I interviewed Roger Bismuth, the current president of the Jewish community. He was fourteen or fifteen years old when the Nazis came and he had to do hard labor building the port of La Goulette for the Nazis. In the Jewish cemetery in Tunis there is a monument to the 161 Tunisian Jews who were in France who were taken to concentration camps and killed by the Nazis. Israel’s former foreign minister’s family was hidden by fellow Tunisians in Gabes during the six months of the Nazi occupation before Silvan Shalom was born. I had a big argument with Sarah about that.

What about other members of JIMENA? Did you have contact with them?

I talked to Gina Waldman, the founder, and she would say that the reason why we’re able to raise the money that we’re able to raise and have the organization that we have is because of the hasbara angle of our organization. I talked to board members. There was one woman who was completely Ashkenazi who had been involved with StandWithUs. I had to organize a speaking appointment in some synagogues for one Moroccan guy who gave a hardline pro-Israel talk, which had little to do with the experiences of Jews in Morocco.

Did you have any contact with Israeli representatives?

The decisions they make in Israel advocacy come from working in concert with the Israeli government. They have a partnership with the Israeli ministry that deals with Hasbara. They wanted me to promote a video by Danny Ayalon which is very racist and depicts Arabs poorly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_3A6_qSBBQ) I also had to go to a conference on Jews in Arab countries in Jerusalem. What Israeli government officials were saying there was JIMENA’s line. Israeli officials and Israel advocates want Jews’ religion to define their national identity. But what I learned when I was in Tunisia was that Tunisian Jews define themselves as Tunisians. They are no different from American Jews who are 100% American. The Tunisian government regularly helps the Jewish community. So I disagree with this underlying premise the Israeli government makes that Jews from Arab countries belong in Israel and I think it’s very dangerous for those Jewish communities, to tie them to the Jewish state.

What made you leave your job?

It got to the point where I felt this organization isn’t what they’re saying it is. They’re using the Mizrachi experience to mask pro-Israel advocacy. The point of the organization is really not to advocate for Jews from Arab countries.

I’ll give you another example: There was an archive of Iraqi Jewish material that Saddam Hussein held in a police warehouse in Baghdad, and when the U.S. forces invaded, they had partly destroyed the archive, and to restore it they took it to the National Archives here in Washington, D.C. The US Department of Defense signed an agreement with the Iraqi government because the materials were the property of the Iraqi government, and the agreement said after the National Archives did restoration work with the documents they would be returned to Iraq. The Iraqi government wanted to keep the archive of Jewish life in Iraq, because Jews had lived there for thousands of years and the documents are part of that country’s vibrant history.

JIMENA together with another group called Justice for Jews from Arab countries wanted the U.S. government to keep the archive, without the Iraqi government’s permission. I was arguing that this is a war crime, because under international law an invading country is not allowed to keep the spoils of war.

But Justice for Jews from Arab Countries had already made the decision to go to court and fight to keep part of the archive in the U.S. They were also coordinating with the Israeli government about legal strategies to bring parts of the archive to Israel, and that is when I quit.

I said I’m going to have nothing to do with getting PR quotes in the press to advocate for a war crime.

Like this one here from Sarah Levin:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/the-iraqi-jewish-archive-should-the-us-send-it-back/2013/12/10/badfab84-61df-11e3-a7b4-4a75ebc432ab_story.html

You really have to return the archive to Iraq and it doesn’t matter how many Jews live there or how the Iraqi government got the documents from the Jewish community. The US Government has a much lower claim to the documents than the Iraqi government does. I’ve been to the British Museum and many places in the West where you see stolen artifacts sitting there for hundreds of years and not going back. It is upsetting. I was particularly upset that they dared to want some of the archives to end up in Israel, because we had just done a program on the Aleppo Codex, and the way the Israeli government neglected and destroyed a lot of it. I was livid with the organization, so I stopped doing work and they laid me off. That was in late July of 2013. I don’t believe in pillaging spoils of war, but JIMENA does.

What would be your advice for Mizrachim who would consider joining this organization?

If you want to do Israel advocacy, JIMENA is an organization for you, but not if you want to advocate for Mizrachim and Mizrachi communities. There still isn’t an organization in America for Mizrachim that is independent of Israel advocacy. I don’t want to advocate for the positions the Israeli government is taking. I think this Israeli government in particular is one of the most recklessly irresponsible groups to ever govern the country. The Israeli government isn’t working towards a just and equitable solution and I don’t want to blame Palestinians for the lack of peace and create obstacles for the peace process that the American government has totally given up on due to a reluctance of working with this Israeli government.

Lastly, the experience of working with an organization like JIMENA is an exercise in trustworthiness of getting your information. As a former communications director for the organization, I would not trust anything the organization says.

Reached for a comment, JIMENA gave Jewschool this statement, published here in full: 

“We are saddened to see that Mr. Shirayanagi, who worked with JIMENA for a very short time over two years ago, chooses to express his personal disappointments by deflecting from the true mission of JIMENA. We invite you to visit our websites (www.jimena.org) and view our Oral History collections which tell a diversity of Middle Eastern and North African stories in the first person. You will find by looking through our extensive online content that Mr. Shirayanagi’s comments are incorrect.

Regarding criticism of Arab countries, it is true that just like the victims of the Holocaust have every right to criticize the Nazi regime for what they did to the Jews, so to do Jews from Arab countries reserve the same right to condemn the Arab countries which were responsible for confiscated their assets, arbitrarily arrests and final expulsion from their native countries. These Jewish communities lived and sometimes thrived in the Middle East and North Africa for over two millennia.

 

JIMENA doesn’t blame Palestinians for the loss of their homes and for their expulsion, we blame Arab leaders who, by declaring war against Israel created not only the Palestinian refugees but Jewish refugees as well. These Arab leaders called for the expulsion of the Jews living in their own countries, knowing full well that these communities had nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

 

Was the Tunisian and North African Holocaust history downplayed? Yes. The Fascist and Vichy governments, supported and implemented Nazi racial laws and operated dozens of labor camps throughout North Africa and JIMENA remains committed to raising awareness to this little known chapter of Holocaust history.”

 

From Jewschool, August 5, 2016, re-posted to SHU 753, September 7, 2016

 

JIMENA Ashkenazi HASBARAH Supremacy Comes to eJewish Philanthropy

 

In the WION of 9/8 I wrote about a post from eJewish Philanthropy written by an Ashkenazi rabbi that complained about the lack of “Mizrachi” inclusion in Jewish institutions:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/_zb1lI0uLcs/moTb0A5rAQAJ

 

Here is the original eJP post by Rabbi Elchanan Poupko:

 

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-mizrachi-jews-run-your-organization/?utm_source=Sept++6%2C+2019&utm_campaign=Fri+Sept++6&utm_medium=email

 

Once again it was Ashkenazim representing Sephardim on the matter of Sephardim not being represented!

 

Indeed, it is impossible to make these things up.

 

Not to be outdone for that prime piece of CHUTZPAH, eJP posted yet another item with the same problem, showing us that they have not understood their White Jewish racism:

 

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jewish-diversity-and-sephardic-and-mizrahi-jews/?utm_source=Sept+16%2C+2019&utm_campaign=Sept+16&utm_medium=email

 

The post was written by the Ashkenazi Sarah Levin who runs the Ashkenazi HASBARAH group Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.

 

JIMENA is, like the American Sephardi Federation and Congregation Shearith Israel, a putatively Sephardic organization controlled and run by Ashkenazim.

 

Their unwieldy name means to studiously avoid the word “Arab” and repeat the canard that Jews predated Arabs in the region, a favorite tactic used by Lyn Julius.

 

Maybe we should just use the name “Canaanite” and be done with it!

 

That would definitely simplify things.

 

We can see how the deal works in the following pamphlet “Jewish Refugees from the Middle East” by the Right Wing extremist Zionist group StandWithUs, which draws on the standard HASBARAH sources that are listed at the very end of the booklet:

 

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/46fc49_46b72c19d98d489ea190441b5a257082.pdf

 

The term “indigenous” is skillfully deployed in this HASBARAH context for very Zionist purposes.

 

And JIMENA is right in the thicket of this radicalism.

 

I hope that you are familiar with JIMENA and its duplicitous tactics by now.

 

If not, here once again is Tom Pessah’s article exposing the group as yet another White Jewish sham:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/pessah/davidshasha/u8KXBiFOLRU/WeiaSW1FAgAJ

 

Naturally, JIMENA presents the usual Islamophobia and rejection of Arab-Jewish Convivencia, and are more than happy to be part of the New Convivencia with organizations such as John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which has its own “Mizrahi Initiative”:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/jimena/davidshasha/3itc3MH_tQQ/qP1ruUm5BwAJ

 

Karmel Melamed’s Jewish Journal article on the CUFI Mizrahi HASBARAH initiative contains the following evidence of how this works:

 

Perhaps the greatest Jewish community support for the Mizrahi Project has come from the San Francisco-based Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), nonprofit that for the past 15 years has been trying to raise public awareness about the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran through lecture series, cultural events, documentary films and community outreach programs.

 

“Including the issue of Mizrahi refugees into discussions and education regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict adds nuance and complexity,” said Sarah Levin, JIMENA’s executive director. “At its core, this is a human rights and justice issue and my hope is that it won’t become just another ‘hasbara [public relations] talking point’ thrown into overly polarized public discourse about the Israeli-Arab conflict.”

 

Levin said the stories of Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern countries have long been overlooked by the larger Jewish community, and perhaps the CUFI Mizrahi Project will shed light on their experiences among Jews and non-Jews.

 

“The 850,000 former Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa deserve recognition and redress for their heritage and for their losses,” Levin said. “My greatest hope is that CUFI will empower their constituents with not only the story of Mizrahi refugees, but also with the rich legacy and contributions of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.”

 

Mizrahi activists living in California said they are pleased by CUFI’s project.

“We need to get our history, our stories, our trajectory out there — and Pastor Dumisani is doing what the Jewish community, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, has not been willing or able to do,” said Rachel Wahba, a Mizrahi blogger and activist based in San Francisco. “I have been writing and pleading for the Ashkenazi mainstream to hear our story, to ‘use’ our (Mizrahi) story to debunk the lies about Israel being a white colonial enterprise.”

 

Naturally, Melamed cites the Ashkenazi Islamophobe Norman Stillman for his information. 

 

Stillman of course is a devoted student of the late Bernard Lewis, King of the Islamophobes:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/bernard$20lewis/davidshasha/Fh9n7-UwpSg/1XoRSBK1AAAJ

 

We have come to learn how these Ashkenazi interconnections work when it comes to misrepresenting the Sephardim for the purposes of Zionist advocacy and through the embrace of Christian radicals and Anti-Semites like John Hagee.

 Sarah Levin’s voice is prominently featured in the CUFI article.  

In her eJP article she shows us how she sees Sephardim in relation to the spurious “Jews of Color” construct:

In reflecting back on the meeting, it’s quite clear to me that this professional didn’t fully understand the differences between race and ethnicity. It’s likely that in her mind all Jews who aren’t of Eastern-European, Ashkenazi descent are automatically coded as Jews of Color – including Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews. Within the Jewish community, I’ve observed that the conflation of race and ethnicity and the tendency of Jewish organizations and professionals to socially categorize Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews and non-white Jews together into one lump binary happens often and tends to be problematic in the eyes of many Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish leaders.

 

Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews are certainly racially diverse, but have rarely defined themselves in racial terms. It’s far more common for Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews to identify, collectively and individually, in ethnic terms. While there are North American Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who identify as Jews of Color, especially amongst younger generations, it’s safe to assume that a large percentage are functionally white and identify as such. One of the problems Sephardic and Mizrahi scholars and activists face is a lack of empirical data to help us better understand our communities.

Unsurprisingly, her explanation of the situation is incorrect. 

It is not that Sephardim see themselves as “White,” it is that the “Jews of Color” actually identify Jewishly as Ashkenazim, as I have written:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/jews$20of$20color/davidshasha/MrqroEblg9Q/vRNfMh2hCgAJ

More to the point, the “Jews of Color” have attained a far more robust representation in the Jewish institutional world, precisely because they have identified Jewishly as Ashkenazim and present no real threat to Ashkenazi ideological hegemony:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/jews$20of$20color/davidshasha/sCvpFEvFw90/0zf0DfcuAAAJ

 

Traditional Sephardic Judaism, on the other hand, presents an ideological-religious challenge to the Ashkenazim, as I have shown in the following article on the Orthodox icon Samson Raphael Hirsch and his disdain for Maimonidean Jewish Humanism and its Greco-Arabic scientific philosophical rationality:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/hirsch/davidshasha/AQCL2KNg1So/n6WfU5WQBAAJ

 

Levin goes to pains to show us how the taxonomic Social Science standards beloved by White Jewish institutions present a problem in the Sephardic context:

 

For many years at JIMENA, Jewish foundations and partner organizations have asked us to provide demographic statistics on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in North America. It’s been incredibly frustrating that we’ve never been able to adequately meet a single request for information as no empirical data on our communities exists. While Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews were intentionally excluded from the recent Counting Inconsistencies survey conducted by the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative, the results of the study provided useful information affirming that Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, like Jews of Color, have been vastly undercounted, miscounted and inconsistently included in Jewish demographic studies across the board.

 

Because so little reliable research has been conducted, JIMENA has relied heavily on anecdotal research and it’s very likely that Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, and their descendants, constitute the largest ethnic minority group amongst American Jews. We know that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are occupying greater spaces in organized Jewish life and in Jewish Day Schools, yet Sephardic and Mizrahi projects, organizations, and thought-leaders are still underfunded, underutilized and at times tokenized. Jewish institutions, have yet to design much needed programs and policies to ensure the inclusion of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Most troubling, is that as attention towards Jewish diversity is finally growing, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish leaders are frequently left out of initiatives, conversations, and projects that address and advance issues of Jewish diversity and inclusion.

 

Sephardim are presented by Levin as “off the grid” – we must be put back where the Ashkenazim need us as caged specimens to be so that they can study us as an exotic Jewish minority!

 

It is little wonder that she cites Devin Naar, a figure that is by now quite familiar to SHU readers:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/naar/davidshasha/rlu0vCildLk/oKigA5pkAQAJ

 

Naar’s University of Washington Sephardic Studies program is also mired in the Social Science issue, at the expense of the literary, religious and historical, and adds to it the exotic ephemera of what I have called “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit.

 

Naar fits perfectly into the Islamophobic world of self-haters like Lyn Julius and David Suissa as he showed in the following article on religious tolerance:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/naar/davidshasha/hTIHtWaM3xw/YHjH2FOyDgAJ

 

He is thus an acceptable Sephardi for the JIMENA Neo-Cons.

 

Levin cites Naar’s recent piece from Jewish Currents where he is apparently shocked to discover White Jewish Supremacy:

 

The marginalization of Sephardic and Mizrahi individuals, communities and heritage is indicative of a march older and deeper problem that demands a challenging exploration and confrontation if the American Jewish community is to fully commit itself to building truly diverse and inclusive communities. Dr. Devin Naar, Chair of the Sephardic Studies program at University of Washington and prominent Sephardic Jewish leader, explored this issue in a recent article published in Jewish Currents, titled “Our White Supremacy Problem.” In the end of the article he posits that:

 

“Confronting the deep-seated and disturbing history of intra-Jewish prejudice is a prerequisite for the empowerment of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews – and Jews of color – in Jewish spaces, and for a reckoning with the place of most Jews as targets of, and willing and unwilling accomplices to, the structures of white supremacy. Only a Jewish commitment to dismantling white supremacy will do justice to our own histories, keep our own communities safe, and fashion new foundations upon which to rebuild American – and American Jewish – society.”

 

It is perhaps too late in the game for Naar and his hollow “Bourekas and Haminados” scam, and it is certainly quite duplicitous for Levin to represent Sephardim, as an Ashkenazi fronting an organization which in reality is controlled, as Tom Pessah showed us, by other Ashkenazim.

 

But I think that the most important take-away from the Levin JIMENA propaganda article is its inability to actually provide any real sense of what the Sephardic heritage is about. 

 

She uses institutional buzzwords like “inclusion, diversity, and pluralism” that are sure to make her Ashkenazi eJP readers feel better about themselves, as she ends on a resolutely positive note:

 

I want to end this on a high note as there is much to be optimistic about. Jewish professionals are finally expressing an interest to integrate Sephardic and Mizrahi modalities into their programing and there is a wealth of Sephardic content and leadership ready to support them. There are wonderful Jewish foundations who genuinely understand the unique intersections Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews dwell in and are invested in efforts to elevate Sephardic and Mizrahi initiatives and thought-leaders. Most meaningfully, there are more and more professionals who have expressed a desire to listen and learn from American Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who are tirelessly trying to reclaim and share an integral element of Jewish heritage that has been orientalized, acculturated and sidelined to the point of erasure. Our communities are getting closer toward an embrace of Jewish diversity, but until Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are given a growing seat at every single Jewish table, especially ones focused on inclusion, diversity and pluralism, the catchphrase “Jewish diversity and inclusion” loses its authenticity and has very little meaning.

 

Indeed, she has the temerity to use the term “Orientalized,” which can be applied to her own curriculum initiative, as I discussed in the WION of 9/1:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/Z2B-owol_Kg

 

Indeed, you can see for yourself what an Orientalist joke the substance-less curriculum truly is:

 

http://journeytothemizrah.org/the-curriculum

 

Levin knows nothing about the classical Sephardic heritage, but more than that JIMENA has situated Sephardic Jews and their culture in a firmly Ashkenazi HASBARAH context, replete with the current Christian Zionism and its eschatological religious hatred.

 

Her article will serve to garner attention – and much-needed funds – for JIMENA in the Jewish institutional world as they roll out their inept and insulting curriculum.  It will do nothing to help Sephardim, whose culture and standing in the White Jewish Supremacy is lower than ever.

 

 

David Shasha

 

From SHU 920, November 13, 2019

 

Attacking the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum: Ashkenazi Front JIMENA and the White Jewish Supremacy

 

We have long commented on the Ashkenazi-founded and funded JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) and its HASBARAH dominance, as can be seen from Tom Pessah’s 2016 exposé:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/pessah/davidshasha/u8KXBiFOLRU/WeiaSW1FAgAJ

 

It is fully aligned with the White Jewish institutional world:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/UvSLxcVs_NI/XG202VjzBgAJ

 

It is all in with John Hagee and his Supersessionist Anti-Semitism:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/7jB01Xs8JWM/nh2HKjbnDAAJ

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/KRCxQ8mGmMQ/JHqTmG9wBwAJ;context-place=msg/davidshasha/u8KXBiFOLRU/WeiaSW1FAgAJ

 

We have long been tracking the movement of JIMENA mainstay Rachel Wahba and her profoundly confusing self-hatred, which the Ashkenazim are happy to deploy for their HASBARAH purposes:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/EQSW1owUVaA/Fqp0LMSuWwEJ;context-place=msg/davidshasha/KRCxQ8mGmMQ/JHqTmG9wBwAJ

 

Here are two recent examples from The Times of Israel, which has her as a blogger:

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-arabic-jews/

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-are-not-white/

 

She is all in with the Lyn Julius version of the Farhud:

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/farhud-day-remembering-the-screams/

 

And she is not at all happy with Peter Beinart!

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wandered-jews/

 

Indeed, as we can see from her article “We Are Not White,” she is adding her voice to Dani Ishay Behan to make the HASBARAH point of Jews not being White:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/IDAJgK7PSBI/OchmUPfXCQAJ

 

Of late we have been reading a good deal about JIMENA director Sarah Levin in the HASBARAH press:

 

https://www.jns.org/revised-california-ethnic-studies-curriculum-draft-deeply-problematic-still-exclusionary/

 

The key here, as always, is Zionism and Anti-Semitism:

 

California’s Department of Education released its recommendations to revise the state’s proposed ethnic-studies model curriculum at the end of July, as the original draft curriculum had come under fire for containing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content, in addition to not addressing issues of anti-Semitism or including Jewish Americans.

 

Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement that while CDE’s new version “is an improvement over past versions, some of the supplemental materials that have been included are deeply problematic and exclusionary.”

 

When Arabs and Muslims are involved, JIMENA is always on the case:

 

“These supplemental materials ignore the stories of all our coalition members—who together represent an estimated 60 [percent] of Californians who hail from the Middle East and North Africa—while portraying the Arab American experience as a monolith to represent the region,” she continued.

 

The attack on the California curriculum lines up with radical extremists like Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, leader of the AMCHA Initiative, a Zionist witch-hunt group:

 

https://amchainitiative.org/

 

Naturally, she also blogs for The Times of Israel.

 

AMCHA is part of the McCarthyite triumvirate with both Canary Mission and Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch:

 

https://canarymission.org/

 

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/

 

JIMENA shows us that it is all in the MISHPOCHEH!

 

One hand washes the other.

 

As we can clearly see, Rossman-Benjamin is full on with the standard HASBARAH, with all the usual anti-PC caveats:

 

AMCHA Initiative director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said that “the curriculum remains incredibly problematic and concerning.”

 

“The ethnic-studies movement, known as ‘critical ethnic studies,’ which is what this curriculum is a product of, is based on an ‘us vs them’ model,” she told JNS. “It views Jews as white and privileged, and not part of the ‘us,’ and is blatantly anti-Zionist.”

 

Rossman-Benjamin went on to say that “the goal of ‘critical ethnic studies’ is not to educate, but to indoctrinate students into adopting certain political views and engaging in specific forms of political activism, including those that vilify and harm Jewish students. Even more concerning is that right now, a California bill is moving through the legislature that will require all California high school students to take one of these classes, which, given that there are no safeguards against it, could easily become political and divisive at the sole discretion of the teacher.”

 

She called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to not sign AB-331 into law “until safeguards are put into place to ensure any ethnic-studies required classes be based on pedagogically sound principles, not ones that push a specific political agenda and could easily lead to ethnic bigotry, including anti-Semitism.”

 

The UC Santa Cruz lecturer has long been known as a radical flamethrower:

 

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/us-university-lecturers-shocking-hate-speech-against-arab-muslim

 

Pace Bari Weiss and The David Project, Rossman-Benjamin was Cancel Culture before there was Cancel Culture:

 

In February 2012 the Amcha Initiative tried and failed to shut down Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s speaking tour at CSU campuses, falsely claiming that he was “anti-Semitic” and supportive of terror. Tammi Benjamin was also behind a federal complaint alleging that campus political and academic speech critical of Israel creates a hostile environment for Jewish students at UC Santa Cruz, resulting in an ongoing Department of Education investigation into the school. The ACLU recently condemned the federal investigation into UC Santa Cruz as “disturbing” and having “a chilling effect” on student organizing in a letter criticizing a similar investigation at UC Berkeley.

 

Indeed, the following article provides a very detailed picture of her connection to many of the usual Islamophobe suspects, people like Dennis Prager, Nonie Darwish, and Rachel Fish of The David Project:

 

https://jcpa.org/article/faculty-efforts-to-combat-anti-semitism-and-anti-israeli-bias-at-the-university-of-california-santa-cruz/

 

We will recall that Bari Weiss was a Columbia undergrad who was part of The David Project and its “Columbia Unbecoming” conference, which was also designed to stifle free speech on campus, and get professors fired:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit

 

JIMENA is indeed quite consistent when it comes to ignoring White Jewish Supremacy, saving its critical advocacy for non-Jews:

 

https://www.jimena.org/jewish-day-school-program/

 

As we can see from their very exotic Orientalist “Bourekas and Haminados” Jewish Day School program, funded by prominent White Jewish Supremacist groups lie The Koret Foundation and the Jewish Community Federation Endowment:

 

Around the Middle Eastern Jewish World

Provides students with an overview of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewry. Students will understand how Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews came to exist as groups and will learn cultural and ethnic indicators of these groups.

 

Celebrating Sephardic Clothing

Introduces students to Sephardic rituals where special clothing is worn. Students will be able to articulate the values that inspire these clothing traditions and be given the opportunity to try on a kaftan.

 

Forgotten Refugees  

Students will learn the term “refugee” by being introduced to the individual stories of Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Students celebrate the lives and contributions of former Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

 

Henna Party

An Immersive mock henna ceremony provides students the opportunity to learn about North African and Yemenite henna traditions.

 

Open Your Hand – HAMSA

Primer into Sephardic and Mizrahi symbolism and values by focusing on the open hand. Students will create their own Hamsa to take home.

 

Middle Eastern Jewish Cuisine

In this session students will learn about Sephardic and Mizrahi food and will ask the question: What makes food Jewish? What Jewish foods do we know and which foods are new to us?

 

Hafla! The Roots of Mizrahi Music

Introduces students to the origins of Mizrahi music. Students  will listen to several songs and will learn how to sing a classic Piyut or Jewish liturgical song according to the Yemenite tradition.

 

Oral Histories

Presents the stories of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees and introduces students to the benefit and techniques of collecting and preserving family stories.

 

Photomapping

A school-wide map activity introduces students to their classmates’ countries of origin.

 

Sephardic Storyteller

Students will experience the beauty and wealth of Sephardic and Mizrahi folktales and will get to

 

Our Names, Our Identity

In this session students will learn about the meaning of names in the creation of identity and will participate in activity to honor their family names and the family names of those different from them.

 

My Heart is the in East: Mizrahi Museum

An exploration of student family heirlooms and on opportunity for students to present their family’s culture to the student body. Students will create an exhibit of their family heritage.

 

It is not necessary to analyze what is a deeply shallow presentation of Sephardim as exotica, without any intellectual culture.

 

But of course, we have the HAMSA!

 

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hamsa/

 

Where we would we be without it?

 

And the HASBARAH mainstay “The Forgotten Refugees” that once again brings us back to The David Project:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Refugees

 

It is all perfectly consistent with the White Jewish Supremacy I discussed in my recent article on Modern Jewish Philosophy:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/PIQl0sj5em8

 

Indeed, it explains to us why someone like Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute can publish a book called The New Jewish Canon which completely lacks any Sephardic intellectual content:

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/ytx5ztODWRA

 

You can search through the contents of both the Kurtzer book and the Leonard Levin workbook and connect it to the JIMENA “curriculum” and easily see how it is all united to promote White Jewish Supremacy and deny Sephardim a seat at the Adult Jewish Table.

 

It is what the Ashkenazim demand.

 

And you can be sure that JIMENA will remain silent about it!

 

We thus see how the pushback against the California Ethnic Studies curriculum links the HASBARAH Islamophobe radicals and the Self-Hating Sephardim in a union that serves to further marginalize us and erase our history and culture.

 

 

David Shasha

 

From SHU 969, October 21, 2020

 

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:

 

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jimena-aims-to-convene-the-sephardic-and-mizrahi-community-with-support-from-jcrif/

 

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:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xzRZtYI1amnNyGM47ny41p_A32xToEQJPZyUUimzrbI/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs

 

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:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18-zkXjSsQdIRJoNUFeV4MOf6dr3lmzlalBOeGliWg_k/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs

 

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

 

From SHU 1030, December 22, 2021

 

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

 

A New “Sephardic” Leadership Initiative: The JIMENA Ashkenazi HASBARAH Dominance is Still Dominant!

 

Is it really surprising that Sarah Levin and her HASBARAH Sephardi-hating JIMENA is involved with yet another Sephardi fraud?

 

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/a-new-fellowship-aims-to-connect-and-support-sephardic-jewish-professionals/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Your%20Daily%20Phil%20September%206%202022%20copy%2001&utm_content=Your%20Daily%20Phil%20September%206%202022%20copy%2001+CID_15dd13153b7569b9533866713ded782f&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Read%20more%20here

 

Another Sephardi Leadership Initiative!

 

It gives us yet another chance to review the myriad ways in which White Jewish Supremacy Institutional Intersectionality works to undermine Sephardic continuity:

 

https://sephardicstudy.org/leadership

 

We have seen it all before.

 

The Connect-the-Dots is classic.

 

Ty Alhadeff:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/f0Fs9NKPvOg/m/E7MN8Z-qBgAJ

 

Which connects us back to UW and Devin Naar:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rlu0vCildLk/m/oKigA5pkAQAJ

 

To Dr. Mijal “I really want to be Bari Weiss” Bitton:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SOYiusTtXBU/m/8I_VO4LqBgAJ

 

Back to JIMENA Sarah Levin, a real eJP favorite:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xzRZtYI1amnNyGM47ny41p_A32xToEQJPZyUUimzrbI/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs

 

JIMENA is right there at the very head of the Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacy world in the battle against Gavin Newsom and the California Ethnic Studies curriculum:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit

 

You will want to look at the massive list of prominent self-hater names on their Advisory Committee, many of which should already be familiar to you:

 

http://sephardicstudy.org/sephardic-study-advisory-committee-sephardic-advisors

 

Rabbi Marc Angel:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DPCfokksdzUO2iAO1GD-u8B2iNzhnJYmMjlYrC3EtIo/edit

 

Carole Basri:

 

https://www.jewishpost.com/archives/news/justice-for-jews-from-arab-countries-b.html

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ggJAFoCD7us/m/llz_Gl0BAgAJ

 

David Suissa:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c1l0_eK349whup0o6s-Gy_dtWeVCZVQOZC3Q-UFwSQM/edit

 

David Dangoor, lay head of the Tikvah ASF:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14cKispiXs6t14GfQlUw764iNnX6XZTdc9YzMU8LhwHc/edit

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jkws0yY4GqDLXTeGt04TGOjB2GFlpuFlO7kkwpRlmNE/edit

 

Rabbi Daniel Bouskila:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/LL_Xt1-i9GU/m/CXSPA4wSBgAJ

 

Rabbi Rolando Matalon:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15BPpMs591RzxIIwcH0Lrfbevopl7KtG3p1BA7ohbDM4/edit

 

Rabbi Joseph Beyda of the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fvgd94a2OB84vBnKwa8M8ams-vhm1x2vaXoMl8f3jA0/edit

 

And, last but not least, Rabbi Elie Abadie, servant of the Gulf Trumpscum Ashkenazi Supremacists:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/mlhpkkDxx7U/m/KrOo8ExVCAAJ

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Xfe27J4ureU/m/8KwG7ZeoAwAJ

 

Abadie is all about “Gefilte in the Gulf”!

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/cWKlqclIrOg/m/QKLltd_-BgAJ

 

The very carefully-chosen SLI machers represent many Ashkenazi racist institutions.

 

Milken:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arielle-yael-mokhtarzadeh-960912123/

 

San Francisco Jewish Community Federation:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danit-trau/

 

Jewish Federation of Greater LA:

 

https://www.heyalma.com/author/donna-maher/

 

American Jewish Committee:

 

https://sabasoomekh.com/about/

 

https://www.ajc.org/bio/Regina-Friedland

 

Jim Joseph Foundation:

 

https://jimjosephfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rachel_schneider_bio.pdf

 

Stand With Us:

 

https://www.standwithus.com/campus-team

 

The SLI is all about this White Jewish Supremacy Intersectionality, with little if anything to do with the empirical Sephardic community, which has precious little knowledge of its intellectual and religious heritage.

 

As I have said, and continue to say, it is all about the Ashkenazi stranglehold over our community, which determines what we think, how we speak, and how we are permitted to be represented in a Jewish world that wants nothing to do with us.

 

Send in your checks to Ty Alhadeff and Sarah Levin today!

 

 

David Shasha

 

From SHU 1078, November 23, 2022

 

A new fellowship aims to connect and support Sephardic Jewish professionals

By: Lev Gringauz

The Sephardic Leadership Institute (SLI) has started running the first national cohort of its Sephardic Leaders Fellowship, a six-month program to help support and build a network of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish professionals. 

The fellowship will “provide lectures and talks and discussions about issues pertaining to Sephardic, Mizrahi Jews, the Jews in general – but specifically through a Sephardic lens,” Ty Alhadeff, SLI’s director, told eJewishPhilanthropy

Topics for the fellowship include “Where do Sephardic Jewish Americans fit in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)?” and “Sephardic Jews as an Intersectional Bridge,” as well as antisemitism and Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in Israel. 

The institute, launched in July with funding from the Jewish Community Response and Impact Fund (JCRIF), a coalition of Jewish funders that came together at the beginning of the pandemic, is a project of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a Bay area nonprofit that aims to educate about Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. SLI’s focus on DEI comes after JIMENA successfully lobbied for Jews to be included in California’s Ethnic Studies model curriculum, which the state adopted last year.

The fellowship program was piloted last year as a local initiative between JIMENA and the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation to connect Bay Area professionals and increase Middle Eastern and North African  representation in Jewish organizations.

Now, Alhadeff hopes that the national scale of the program – with 20 participants across 10 states (and Toronto) – will create stronger educational opportunities for Jewish professionals. For example, Alhadeff points to what participants might learn from his native Seattle, where a Sephardic community has thrived for more than 100 years, about how to represent Middle Eastern and North African Jews in smaller communities.

“It’s been interesting to reach out to people across the country [who] don’t really have the institutional framework, and to see how communities like Seattle might be able to offer guidance,” Alhadeff said, with different lessons to take from the sizeable Syrian Jewish community in New Jersey or the Persian Jewish community in L.A.

Though the fellowship uses the terms Sephardic and Mizrahi, participants come from a range of backgrounds that don’t fit neatly into any one definition, like Carribean Sephardic, Bukharian, and Arab-Jew. 

“Who likes using the term Mizrahi? Does that include people that are in the Maghreb in North Africa?” Alhadeff said, using the Arabic term for northwest Africa while relating some of the questions raised in the fellowship. “How far does the East go? Does that include the Bukharian Jews? So these are all good questions.”

Some fellows are Ashkenazi, and were accepted because they work at Sephardic organizations like The Sephardic Foundation on Aging. “They want to make sure that Sephardic culture is being represented within the institutions, whether or not they’re actually Sephardic themselves,” Alhadeff said.

The SLI will also be running the fellowship for a cohort of campus professionals beginning in February. Alhadeff sees the program as another way to educate Jews more broadly on a variety of issues, with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews having much to offer the predominantly Ashkenazi North American Jewish community. He hopes fellows will help their organizations implement more Sephardic content, and give Sephardic views more prominence in  organizations such as Hillel International and the pro-Israel group StandWithUs.

“Whether it’s on topics of antisemitism, or being a persecuted minority, or relationships to Israel, it might be interesting to learn from Lebanese Jews or Iranian Jews, or the Jews from Istanbul, who had, let’s say, 500 years of relative stability compared to the rest of the Jewish landscape,” Alhadeff said.

From eJewish Philanthropy, September 6, 2022

 

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