Newsletter Special: Miriam Gamliel, Jewish Schooling Through the Ages

[David Shasha]

Friends,

 

            I have come to understand that my pro-Sephardi advocacy is largely seen by most people as a foolish crusade filled with bitterness and pointless resentment, reflecting what such Jews see as sour grapes and jealousy of the majoritarian dominance of the Ashkenazim.

 

            I am all Bad Vibes instead of Good Vibes, as Orly Wahba and her benighted Mr. Rogers generation might say.  Just smile and everything will be all right!  Be kind to the bullies.  Stop focusing on the negative, and get with the Ashkenazi program.

 

            Continuing to reject the naysayers, I have just posted another attack on Rabbi Marc Angel for his fierce loyalty and devotion to the White Jewish Supremacy, as he demands that Sephardim accept their oppression with a mindless smile and empty heart:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/yNGBbGczcgg

 

As if by magic, a value that Angel and the Sephardi self-haters apparently believe in with all their hearts, I received the following article from Academia.edu just minutes after finishing my Angel attack, in one of the many e-mails they send me each day:

 

https://www.academia.edu/19912019/History_of_Jewish_Education_Survey?email_work_card=title

 

I must say that I was utterly shocked when I downloaded the PDF file and began to read its contents.

 

What shocked me what that Dr. Miriam Gamliel’s extraordinary paper on the history of Jewish Education was written at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli School of Education!

 

With that background, would it be possible for Sephardim to get a fair hearing?

 

And, lo and behold, the very comprehensive and well-balanced paper did something that I did not think possible from a Washington Heights product: It repeated many of my usual themes and talking points about White Jewish Supremacy, as it provides a fulsome, robust, and nakedly honest presentation of the history of Jewish pedagogy in a way that makes clear the problem of Ashkenazi racism and the openness and intelligence of the classical Sephardic tradition and its salutary manifestations throughout Jewish History.

 

I soon learned that Dr. Gamliel was originally trained in the Musical Theater and came to Judaism later in her life as a Ba’al Teshuvah. 

 

She is the founder of a Jewish Arts group called ATARA:

 

http://www.artsandtorah.org/gamlielmiriam/

 

Her background is interesting insofar as she has not taken the usual White Jewish Supremacy route to understand our history.  And this makes her paper a more honest and thorough examination which seeks a Judaism that is more intellectually penetrating and morally coherent than the one currently being fought over by the many dysfunctional Ashkenazi groups.

 

As you read her paper, you will see that she is fully cognizant of the Ashkenazi problematic as I articulated in my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction.”

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZLhopNWNnqMb0GW2OQGcripP8SnZojsmxamctBLDzU/edit

 

Though she does not deploy the nomenclature of Andalusian Convivencia and Religious Humanism, her work clearly displays an understanding and appreciation of those terms and their utility for the current Jewish situation. 

 

Her paper is not just an accurate reflection of the Jewish past which places the Sephardic heritage at its very center, but is an existentially-charged plea for the cultural openness that is the hallmark of our tradition.

 

And so it is that Gamliel’s paper stands in opposition to Marc Angel’s pitiful genuflection to and acceptance of a White Jewish Supremacy institutional system that is embodied in YU and its relentless quest to erase the classical Sephardic heritage. 

 

She understands the complications of Ashkenazi factionalism and finds its roots in the Middle Ages and the old Franco-German rabbinical system, and its resonance in the contemporary Orthodox Yeshivah world. 

 

She presents the Sephardic rabbinical tradition as the antidote to this dysfunction, as her paper expertly details the integrity and continuity of that tradition and the ways in which it has for many centuries served to present an efflorescent Judaism which does not fear the world, as the Ashkenazi Orthodox Shtetl does, but embraces pluralism and complexity.

 

And though the paper does not utilize the important work of the late Jose Faur, especially his studies of Jews and Conversos in Christian Spain and their impact on Modernity, Gamliel has produced a dazzling study of Jewish Education and its illustrious history that for once does not cave in to the Ashkenazi racism and the nefarious ways in which that racism has corrupted our pedagogy.

 

I have taken the liberty of presenting here the original PDF of the paper, as well as a WORD file conversion and the usual SHU newsletter template version, for your convenience.  It is my hope that you will read the paper carefully and understand that Sephardic resentment is not some illusion or sour grapes, but an active issue which involves what Jewish identity really means and how we might be able to reform the current status quo and its religious, intellectual, and moral corruption.

 

 

 

David Shasha