Arielle Angel, "Are We Post-Sepharadim?"
David Shasha
No “Woke” For You! Jewish Currents Editor Arielle Angel Proudly Proclaims the Death of the Sephardim
We have seen how former Forward-editor Jane Eisner helped to trivialize Sephardic culture with her “Year of the Arab Jew” charade in 2015:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/xc9zKGtway4/m/HMSwHwMfCAAJ
How did that one work out for us?
Her preferred Sephardi was Sigal Samuel, who seems to have fallen off the edge of the planet – just as it should be.
Then we had Tikvah Tablet Alana Newhouse and her Zalman Bernstein Neo-Con racism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/djrhFHPqpRw/m/MyWX64EdBQAJ
She has had Esther Levy-Chehebar writing a series of insultingly banal article about Brooklyn Syrian Jewish ephemerality and light-headedness:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/6tcvzDjOf5Q/m/n3WgsEYFFgAJ
Those SYs are great at business!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/g2JsWu4lGvM/m/d9qNMVIsAwAJ
Her author page is an inventory of ignorance and mindlessness:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/esther-levychehebar
Sephardim are nothing when it comes to staking up to the mighty Ashkenazim.
Indeed, it has been primo White Jewish Supremacist Rokhl Kafrissen that has done the heavy lifting for Newhouse, as was clear from the time she denied that there was even such a thing as “Ashkenormativity”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/DEsGIpGXYJs/m/xq4VgIKK8joJ
Newhouse has been a big proponent of serious Yiddish culture while relegating Sephardim to the proverbial “Bourekas and Haminados” kitchen:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/56EcGF08X4o/m/XyPCvmLIAgAJ
She gave us her pal Devin Naar with his unique take on that marginalization:
Naar has sought to utterly ignore the classical Sephardic heritage and focus on just that “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rlu0vCildLk/m/oKigA5pkAQAJ
The Tikvah Tablet linkage made sense at both the personal and professional levels, as Naar was at the time looking to secure a place in the Neo-Con Jewish world as he vigorously denied the concept of Jewish-Muslim Convivencia:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/hTIHtWaM3xw/m/YHjH2FOyDgAJ
But the Neo-Cons apparently did not like his book on Jewish Salonica, and that was the end of that:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/E-2RBVl-7ck/m/8y8XFaL4BgAJ
It then came as something of a surprise that he published a very vocal piece at the Neo-Marxist Jewish Currents:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/bQLar9l8oZs/m/pXipTlsPBAAJ
Here is that article, which sounds an awful lot like my brand of stridency:
https://jewishcurrents.org/our-white-supremacy-problem/
We just got a JC post featuring an exchange between Naar and his current pal Arielle Angel:
https://jewishcurrents.org/are-we-post-sepharadim/
The complete article follows this note.
As we have seen, shapeshifting can be a wonderful thing for ambitious young college professors!
The radical publication has recently gotten a good deal of attention for bringing on Peter Beinart and his One-State Solution that has caused all sorts of apoplexy in the Jewish institutional and media world:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8-lRe-aqXzI/m/E0pJJ4mkCAAJ
The HASBARAH crowd have taken careful notice of his new NYT gig:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/10/06/new-york-times-op-ed-page-gives-peter-beinart-a-promotion/
We have also seen how JC is fully in with the “Bourekas and Haminados” routine:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/X1BJSxbbO54/m/OyPcLX0vAAAJ
The connection between JFREJ and JC is part of that Neo-Marxist political context:
https://jewishcurrents.org/why-im-still-a-marxist/
https://www.jfrej.org/news/2016/09/jfrej-calls-on-brooklyn-commons-to-cancel-anti-semitic-event
We will recall that JFREJ helped putative Sephardi AOC find her “Inner Tevye”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/XpXkpgpZCNo/m/Uf4K2tKjCAAJ
Angel’s leadership role at JC has indicated the same thing, as she states in the article:
When Naar reaches out, I’m sometimes defensive: What if my Sephardiness is not the point in a given exchange? And besides, I’m a quarter Ashkenazi! Still, I appreciate Naar’s provocations, which have often resulted in sprawling, intense conversations that get to the heart of my reluctance to represent myself not just as a Jewish public figure, but a specifically Sephardic one.
She also indicates that the self-hating shapeshifter Naar is the last Sephardi:
It sometimes feels as if Naar is carrying all that’s left of Ladino and its former center, Salonica, on his shoulders. Today, the Judeo-Spanish language has a dwindling number of speakers, but at its height it was spoken by more than half a million Jews—descendants of those expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, who settled primarily in the Ottoman Empire. My paternal grandparents, now deceased, were Ladino speakers from Salonica, two of only 2,000 survivors of the Nazi liquidation of the once majority-Jewish city. Ladino was my father’s first language, but he endeavored to become completely American, and no longer speaks it; needless to say, he did not pass it on to me. This is a common story. Naar, bucking this trend, has spent the last two decades learning the language, teaching it to others, and diligently rescuing the Ladino-speaking world from the abyss of history. He speaks primarily Ladino at home with his young children.
As I have repeatedly stated, Naar has not articulated the most basic intellectual ideas and premises of the classical Sephardic heritage, preferring instead to present a superficial view of Jewish Social History in an Ottoman context:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_k1I5KoFmIK0Qk7Zfd6HvTPo3iYaWL6YpuRp3VY3tgA/edit
He is part of a Social Science Judaic Studies cabal that has set out to marginalize our history and intellectual-literary culture, as I stated in the article:
We have seen the Social Science trend permeate the current group of scholars who deal with our history, such as Devin Naar, Julia Phillips Cohen, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Marina Rustow, and Daniel Schroeter; all of whom have spearheaded a more Conservative and reactionary understanding of the Sephardic heritage, which is directly connected to the Ashkenazi-dominated institutional Jewish world and its media outlets.
It is clear that in the case of Angel and Naar, it is the blind leading the blind.
But Angel is quite correct when she sees us in a “Post-Sephardic” world.
That she ignores the racist implications of this is pretty pathetic and pretty sad.
I recently made reference to an execrable book by Michael Fishbane, one of the most prominent names in “serious” academic Judaic Studies, that sets out to turn classical Judaism into a form of magical Paganism, by imposing an analphabetical reading of Midrash as “Myth”:
https://www.amazon.com/Biblical-Rabbinic-Mythmaking-Michael-Fishbane/dp/0199284202
As I have indicated, his polemic elevates the Ashkenazi tradition over Sephardic Jewish Humanism, specifically in the figure of the deplorable Moses Taku and his deep-seated Anti-Maimonidean fanaticism.
Here is how Fishbane lays out the varied approaches to Midrash and Jewish Myth:
Three types may be noted: (1) a defence of the straightforward sense of Scripture and the Midrash, where they speak in bold imagery about God; (2) a denunciation or denial of the apparent, straightforward sense of these and other passages; and (3) an affirmation of the religious language and depictions in these corpora as a sacred code of the higher mysticism.
He then moves to Taku:
Characteristic of the first position, which takes a literal approach to the anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms found in both the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, is that formulated in Ketab Tamim by R. Moses Taku, a thirteenth-century German Talmudist. The author takes a strong, uncompromising position on these matters – citing numerous sources verbatim, in versions known to him.
Taku was an avowed enemy of Jewish Humanism as we have understood it in the classical Sephardic heritage:
The most commonly-named interlocutor and object of R. Moses’ ire is R. Saadia Gaon, who systematically defanged the straightforward sense of Scripture and Midrash, and substituted allegorical meanings instead. This effort is deemed nothing else than ‘idle chatter’ by our author, for to him the sages were inspired by the ‘holy spirit.’ (pp. 253-254)
This approach is indeed similar to that of Samson Raphael Hirsch in his rejection of the classic Sephardic rabbinic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
In his words:
This great man, Maimonides, to whom, and to whom alone, we owe the preservation of practical Judaism to our time, is responsible, because he sought to reconcile Judaism with the difficulties which confronted it from without, instead of developing it creatively from within, for all the good and the evil which bless and afflict the heritage of the father. His peculiar mental tendency was Arabic-Greek, and his conception of the purpose of life the same. He entered into Judaism from without, bringing with him opinions of whose truth he had convinced himself from extraneous sources and — be reconciled. For him, too, self-perfection through the knowledge of truth was the highest aim, the practical he deemed subordinate. For him knowledge of God was the end, not the means; hence he devoted his intellectual powers to speculations upon the essence of Deity, and sought to bind Judaism to the results of his speculative investigations as to postulates of science or faith. The Mizvoth became for him merely ladders, necessary only to conduct to knowledge or to protect against error, this latter often only the temporary and limited error of polytheism. Mishpatim became only rules of prudence, Mitzvoth as well; Chukkim rules of health, teaching right feeling, defending against the transitory errors of the time ; Both ordinances, designed to promote philosophical or other concepts; all this having no foundation in the eternal essence of things, not resulting from their eternal demand on me, or from my eternal purpose and task, no eternal symbolizing of an un- changeable idea, and not inclusive enough to form a basis for the totality of the commandments.
Fishbane thus reaffirms a long-held Ashkenazi view that Sephardim, the ones who adapted to the Arabic scientific-philosophical culture and its rationalism, were not “authentically” Jewish.
It is a very important assertion, given that we are currently in the midst of an internal Jewish crisis where the rejection of rational thought and science poses serious problems for Jewish continuity.
It is something that is deeply rooted in Christianity, with its literalism and anthropomorphic divinity. The scholars read Biblical and Rabbinic texts strictly in terms of doctrine and theology, rather than in narratological-exegetical literary terms. Traditional Jewish readings are deemed completely off-limits in the most emphatic terms. There is much use of words like theurgy and binitarianism. It is considered to be “objective” and “nuanced.”
Reading the many books and articles is a depressingly futile exercise in obsessively meaningless nitpicking, searching for obscure manuscript evidence to “prove” foreordained theses, and intense jockeying to see who can best undermine what was once thought to be “Normative Judaism.”
It is the usual 19th century German Historicism, which in the end, as is the case with their forbear Spinoza, is not really historical at all.
But that is another academic question for another day.
After finishing the Fishbane book, I read a similarly brutal tome from Peter Schafer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity:
A blurb on the book from Pauline enthusiast Paula Fredriksen makes the point crystal clear:
“God was never the only god, not even in his own book. As Peter Schäfer deftly demonstrates, our idea of monotheism—'one god only'—is modern, not ancient. Two Gods in Heaven not only repatriates New Testament ideas to their originary Second Temple Jewish matrix; it also offers an enriching and intriguing view of the theological dynamics that formed the West.”
The idea is to make Christianity more authentically Jewish than Talmudic Judaism!
Divine Incarnation and Anthropomorphism represent the “true” Judaism; meaning that Jesus is the Christ, and that Christianity is indeed the “New Israel.”
It is something we have seen in the benighted work of Daniel Boyarin and his fellow Neo-Christian Jews:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zhy1aicotiXKJZBwn35uUMzNuQxkuEHiGiPKRBl_7M0/edit
Very Dennis Prager!
It is all part of what I have called the “New Talmudism”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
Which is very Anti-Maimonidean:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qihywNGjZbuPEY4-cbQ1g02-nOoaCL2Ug0G2qZ12t64/edit
Amazingly, Schafer, a devoted Christian partisan, finds Boyarin’s rhetoric too much even for him:
It is precisely on this point that I distinguish myself from research up to now, and in particular from the picture drafted by Daniel Boyarin, who apart from me has dealt with these traditions in greater detail. We agree that binitarian ideas are firmly anchored in Second Temple Judaism. But we do not concur in our assessment of the further developments in the first centuries CE. Nothing lies further from my intentions than to postulate a fundamental difference between “Judaism” and “Christianity” in late antiquity. Quite contrary, early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are not two “religions” that were the firmly established from the outset; rather, they only gradually crystallized in an extended process and in discourse with and against each other, with considerable differences between this new rabbinic Judaism and the Judaism of the Second Temple period. If I characterize the binitarian ideas of 3 Enoch and the Bavli that took shape at the end of this process also as a response to the New Testament message of Jesus Christ, then by no means am I questioning the fact that this answer has its Jewish roots in Christian times. Again, on the contrary, the response is an original Jewish one, but I doubt that the authors of 3 Enoch and the Bavli consciously placed themselves within this pre-Christian Jewish tradition; and I assume that they reacted primarily to the adaptation of this tradition through Christianity, which had meanwhile become firmly established. (p. 138)
In this sense, Schafer is still with Boyarin, who shares many important prooftexts and conceptual arguments with him; it is just that he is not willing to link Judaism and Christianity in a mythical and anthropomorphic sense in such an absolute manner.
Consistent with the current Anti-Sephardic consensus is Schafer’s following negative assessment of Jewish Monotheism, the very core of the Sephardic belief system:
Monotheism was to find its purest form in medieval Jewish philosophy, but there too had to confront the counter-movement of the Kabbalah, which became increasingly successful and popular. (p. 134)
It is clear from the Angel-Naar discussion that neither of them has any real sense of the classical Sephardic heritage, or indeed any real grasp of the issues of Judaism and Christianity as they relate to that heritage and the values of Jewish Humanism.
Naar never makes mention of the seminal work of Maria Rosa Menocal and Jose Faur, who both emphasize these critical elements of our tradition, as I have discussed so many times:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9Bi7Y12B3li38_PHne_JThpC67yhH1kJrSK48XXAX0/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
They are both unaware of the deep and abiding damage done to the Sephardic heritage by Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy, as we recently saw in the case of Rabbi Joseph Dweck and his ill-informed denial of Sephardic Modernity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d9D5dXU_9WgFa2Chna1m_byzPUe1WaW3VbR1Qk_zQWs/edit
Limiting the discussion to Ladino and Social History, as is the hallmark of Naar’s academic studies, does not even begin to address the issue of what has been called “Sepharad in Ashkenaz” and the ways in which Ashkenazi Enlightened Judaism once rejected the Moses Taku approach and adopted the Sephardic one:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zg7TwCy0jZKnZZOB2oIjdOSqNFxBuyZX2YTLYQgGLbo/edit
We can constructively draw a line from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen to Leo Baeck to Emmanuel Levinas which would show how Jewish Humanism grounded the best in Ashkenazi Jewish thought since the time of the Enlightenment.
But “Sepharad in Ashkenaz” is no more.
It is currently difficult, if not impossible, to access the classical Sephardic heritage in Judaic Studies programs at a university level; the Anti-Sephardic bias is so strong that the many literary monuments by our revered figures are simply being ignored while the Ashkenazi irrational magical occult is being reified:
https://kavvanah.blog/2010/07/08/david-shasha-on-kellner-idel-and-nationalism/
Of course, this has myriad implications well beyond Sephardic Studies, as we have seen the predominance of Christian Literalism in the ongoing battle over Constitutional Originalism in America:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/fomWxZTWdq0/m/PIk-NtmmAwAJ
We can see in the case of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik how Sephardic institutions like Congregation Shearith Israel and the American Sephardi Federation are now under the iron grip of Ashkenazi racists.
Indeed, Sephardic access to the media has been blunted, while Ashkenazi-controlled groups like JIMENA are on the rise:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/UvSLxcVs_NI/m/XG202VjzBgAJ
JIMENA head Sarah Levin was deeply involved in the recent tussle over the California Ethnic Studies curriculum with its HASBARAH demands:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/-kLsi6o2ssk/m/JY9NCio7BAAJ
All of this marks, as Angel correctly notes, the Sephardim as essentially dead in the water.
Why bother fighting it?
What we need to remark on is how Ashkenazi racism plays a dominant role in the process, and how those same Ashkenazi racists, as we can clearly see in the many polemical articles in JC, are on board with the anti-racism of groups like Black Lives Matter:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/aHZaUz-PA24/m/-OG73p4vDAAJ
JC has a long history with BLM:
https://jewishcurrents.org/tag/black-lives-matter/
While the Progressive Left is all about being “Woke” and asserting the right of minorities to be free of racism, Angel is basically acquiescing to the legitimacy of White Jewish Supremacy:
I’ve been telling you how I don’t always feel comfortable speaking in that voice—or even putting in my Twitter bio that I’m Sephardi/Mizrahi, as some people do—precisely for that reason. It would feel like claiming something even as I’m not sure what it means, something that affords the appearance of diversity and a measure of protection to Jewish Currents without accounting for how a lot of the attendant cultural and ethnic markers have been erased through very strong currents of assimilation and Ashkenormativity. In the case of my family, Ashkenazi Jews in Brooklyn just didn’t think they were even Jewish, and so they were kept out—when my aunt started dating, she was accused of being a Puerto Rican pretending to be Jewish to land a rich, Jewish man. Once, my grandmother literally brawled with her Ashkenazi neighbors.
Part of what frustrates me is that we’re not accounting for how a certain level of erasure and assimilation has already happened, and is still happening. Which raises the question: How much work do I need to do personally to represent myself as this thing that I am?
Such a question would never be asked when fighting Israeli oppression of Palestinians, or White oppression of Blacks in America. But Sephardim are negligible.
It is truly sad to read the exchange, which is based on insider privilege and access for those Sephardim who have “passed” the Ashkenazi test and found themselves inside the oppressive racist system of White Jewish Supremacy.
It is not about Gefilte Fish, “Fiddler on the Roof,” or pushcarts on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the 20th century.
The problem of Ashkenazi racism goes back in time and embodies a myriad of complex religious, intellectual, and socio-cultural problems that are currently being addressed in the halls of academia where Sephardim have no voice and no representation.
Angel and Naar appear to be oblivious to the situation and their exchange is just more hot air designed to placate White Jewish sensibilities.
David Shasha
Are We Post-Sepharadim?
By: Arielle Angel
I know that if I’ve recently participated in an interview or conversation, I can expect a call or an email from Devin E. Naar, professor of history and Sephardic studies at the University of Washington, with whom I share Ladino-speaking Salonican heritage on my father’s side. When Jewish Currents held a roundtable on Seth Rogen’s An American Pickle, for example, in which the staff dissected the mythologized Ashkenazi history portrayed in the film, Naar contacted me to point out instances of what he calls “dissimulation,” moments when I’ve missed an opportunity to assert a Sephardic or Mizrahi perspective (my maternal grandfather’s family came from Algeria via Palestine), thus erasing myself—and those like me.
When Naar reaches out, I’m sometimes defensive: What if my Sephardiness is not the point in a given exchange? And besides, I’m a quarter Ashkenazi! Still, I appreciate Naar’s provocations, which have often resulted in sprawling, intense conversations that get to the heart of my reluctance to represent myself not just as a Jewish public figure, but a specifically Sephardic one.
It sometimes feels as if Naar is carrying all that’s left of Ladino and its former center, Salonica, on his shoulders. Today, the Judeo-Spanish language has a dwindling number of speakers, but at its height it was spoken by more than half a million Jews—descendants of those expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, who settled primarily in the Ottoman Empire. My paternal grandparents, now deceased, were Ladino speakers from Salonica, two of only 2,000 survivors of the Nazi liquidation of the once majority-Jewish city. Ladino was my father’s first language, but he endeavored to become completely American, and no longer speaks it; needless to say, he did not pass it on to me. This is a common story. Naar, bucking this trend, has spent the last two decades learning the language, teaching it to others, and diligently rescuing the Ladino-speaking world from the abyss of history. He speaks primarily Ladino at home with his young children.
I’m amazed by Naar’s efforts. I’m also grateful to him for making my grandparents’ world a bit more accessible to me, and for helping me situate their experiences—and my own—within larger frameworks of marginalization in the Jewish world. And yet, I’m skeptical about the possibility of recovering a meaningful Sephardiness in the face of a very thorough destruction. At a time when questions of representation loom large, I spoke to Naar about what it might mean to make Sephardic representation genuinely meaningful in the contemporary Jewish world. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Arielle Angel : Maybe you can talk a little bit about why you’ve been mad at me.
Devin E. Naar: [Laughs] It’s not about you; it’s about the system. The public Jewish conversation has really been an Ashkenazi- and white-oriented one in terms of its cultural, historical, and literary references. So I’ve been trying to figure out whether there’s space for Sephardic and Mizrahi perspectives in that framework. What can those voices look like if they are actually articulated? If they’re not just presented as tokens, but if they’re actually part of an attempt to change the discourse? I don’t expect you to come up with a set of fully articulated Sephardic or Mizrahi perspectives overnight. But you could start by just identifying when those perspectives are missing. They need to be there for you to bring your full, undiminished Jewish self—Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi—into the conversation. I am a Sephardic and Ashkenazi person; my Ashkenazi mother has been a great supporter of my efforts to recover and uplift Sephardic perspectives. So I’m also thinking about how to capture this complexity, recognizing, of course, that one “side” is well represented and the other hardly at all.
AA: I’ve been telling you how I don’t always feel comfortable speaking in that voice—or even putting in my Twitter bio that I’m Sephardi/Mizrahi, as some people do—precisely for that reason. It would feel like claiming something even as I’m not sure what it means, something that affords the appearance of diversity and a measure of protection to Jewish Currents without accounting for how a lot of the attendant cultural and ethnic markers have been erased through very strong currents of assimilation and Ashkenormativity. In the case of my family, Ashkenazi Jews in Brooklyn just didn’t think they were even Jewish, and so they were kept out—when my aunt started dating, she was accused of being a Puerto Rican pretending to be Jewish to land a rich, Jewish man. Once, my grandmother literally brawled with her Ashkenazi neighbors.
Part of what frustrates me is that we’re not accounting for how a certain level of erasure and assimilation has already happened, and is still happening. Which raises the question: How much work do I need to do personally to represent myself as this thing that I am?
DEN: The first step would be to begin to articulate these stories. What has been transmitted in the face of erasure? Just telling these stories about individual or family or community experiences, in Greece or Algeria or Brooklyn, and forcing people to confront them, becomes an act of resistance. To acknowledge this is an opening—the aperture increases, and you can enter in and try to explore that occluded world.
AA: So what does that actually look like? You and I both come from a very specific lineage, from Salonica, or Thessaloniki, which was totally destroyed in the Holocaust. There are so few people representing this particular lineage—if you weren’t doing the academic work, I don’t know who would be. In a situation where this obliterative process has already happened, what does it mean to do the work of uncovering that history, of forging an authentic relationship to it that isn’t just about bourekas or whatever? Does it mean I have to become an academic? To learn Ladino? It seems that would require making it my whole life.
DEN: The first step would be to recognize that we’re not alone. I have now met hundreds of people who have emailed me after reading something I wrote to say, essentially, “I thought I was the only one—I thought there was nobody left from my world.” There are people who are also grappling in different ways with this sense of rupture, of loss, of discontinuity, of assimilation, of evaporation. You don’t necessarily need to be learning Ladino, delving into the archival materials, but you can find community among people with similar backgrounds who haven’t had a space to come together for an exchange of these stories in 70 years. Then maybe a few of those people will delve further into the historical record. They will go to Salonica or Djerba or Baghdad, and they will track down the houses and the newspaper references. They will go to the rabbinic responsa and try to understand how the leaders of that world understood and adjudicated questions. There’s a lot that can be done between “nothing” and dedicating your whole waking life to this work.
AA: This raises the leftist dimension of all this, as being a leftist in Sephardic and Mizrahi communities is a barrier to “finding your people,” so to speak. A few years ago, I joined the young professionals group at a Sephardic synagogue. There was a moment when I had to come out to them about my politics, that I’m not a Zionist. The organizers were young, and pretty understanding. But still, you know, there are Israeli flags up everywhere, and at the time they were talking about having [the right-wing former Consul General of Israel in New York] Dani Dayan come and speak to us. And of course, to go there to pray with my husband, we had to sit separately, which is one of the reasons my family wouldn’t have gone to a Sephardic or Mizrahi shul growing up.
DEN: Part of the problem might be that you’re calling them shuls. Kehila! Or kahal!
AA: [Laughs] You’re right. Anyway, building community is even more difficult when that community is so invested in appearing monolithically conservative—in pushing left-wing histories out of the purview, or casting them as Ashkenormative in themselves.
DEN: There’s nothing necessarily Sephardic or Mizrahi about what you’re describing; these dynamics parallel those in the general Jewish establishment.
AA: Except that having bigger numbers, as Ashkenazi Jews do, means there is a greater diversity of spaces.
DEN: That’s true. Another part of it is the way that counternarratives to the Jewish establishment narrative developed, going back to Yiddish socialism, which has not made room for non-Yiddish Jewish socialists. For all the good that movement may have done, its monoculturalism has been very exclusionary. And there hasn’t been an accounting of the damage.
There was a moment during World War I when the Sephardic socialists tried to get together with the Yiddish socialists in New York, and they had some kind of relationship for a few months. But it became clear to the Ladino-speaking socialists that this was not their space. None of these leftist Jewish institutions made space for participation by other kinds of Jews.
AA: Right. But the Yiddish left staked out a space for themselves that was hard-won, and was itself repressed by forces in the Jewish community. Meanwhile, in addition to all of the structural oppression we faced—which you’ve documented very well—it seems we also just didn’t have the numbers or the financial resources to create the institutions that would have spoken to us in our language. To play devil’s advocate for a moment: What would the Yiddishists have had to give up to accommodate us? Would it have meant not speaking Yiddish? Should they have been willing to make that trade to include a small group of Ladino-speaking Jews?
DEN: It’s a very good point. I think we have to think about power and access to resources. The institution that has access to more resources needs to be ready to deploy those resources to accommodate and welcome smaller groups—otherwise it just replicates the pattern of exclusion.
I don’t think of it as a zero-sum game. Or at least it doesn’t have to be, under certain models. For example, Ladino socialism in Salonica was federative. The plurality of the Socialist Workers Federation of Salonica were Ladino-speaking Jews, but they also came together with Greek-speaking Christians, Bulgarian-speaking Christians, and Turkish-speaking Muslims. They gave speeches at their meetings in all these languages. They had what we might call “caucuses” that would break out and do their own thing, but they could come together under shared terms. I suppose those meetings were very, very long, but I don’t know why that couldn’t have happened in the Jewish community.
AA: I want to give you a chance to talk about doikayt—the Bundist idea of “here-ness,” which asserts that Jews belong wherever it is they live—because I know you’ve expressed discomfort with it.
DEN: Look, I like the concept of doikayt. But my question is whether there is room for additional concepts drawn from other strains of Jewish thought. Doikayt speaks to me, this idea that we can focus on our struggles here and strive for more complete liberation here. But I do wonder about the dichotomy this sets up between “here” and “there.” When we hold onto the Israel/diaspora dyad, we actually perpetuate the idea that Israel is the center and we are dispersed from the center—even as we attempt to assert that that former periphery is a new center. Thinking of Israel as “there” rather than “here” still gives it pride of place; it still occupies half of the entire framework. The other problem is when New York becomes the only “here”!
There are many more nodes in our contemporary experience than “here” and “there,” and I wonder if a Sephardic approach can give us some ways to think about that. There is a famous French philosopher, born Edgar Nahoum, who took the surname “Morin” in the French Resistance during World War II. His family was Ladino-speaking Jews from Salonica who received a French education in the part of the Ottoman Empire that became Greece; they had Italian passports and distant converso roots. Reflecting on the multiplicities of his family experience, he coined the concept of “poly-enracinement,” or “multi-rootedness.” For me, the idea of multi-rootedness has a lot of potential, because it brings us out of the dichotomy between “there” and “here” by saying that there can be multiple “heres.” We should think about the multiplicity of spaces and communities that we’re connected to—if that can help us make sense of the multiplicities of the Sephardic experience, and the Jewish experience in general.
AA: Recently, a bad-faith right-wing critic accused Jewish Currents of neglecting discrimination against Mizrahim while scrutinizing Mizrahi advocacy groups. In response, I tried to highlight the cultural and political work we’re doing on Sephardic and Mizrahi topics, while publicly claiming my own identity. This was met with a lot of backlash because of the magazine’s leftism. People were saying that I was tokenizing myself, that I was “chosen” by the Ashkenazi establishment as a shield, which is obviously ridiculous, but instructive.
DEN: Part of this process of reclamation is acknowledging the wide range of perspectives and political orientations that people bring. Anybody who tells me that Sepharadim or Mizrahim are only conservative, I tell them it’s a wonderful myth they’ve invented. I don’t want to get into a war of words over whether left- or right-wing is more “authentic” in Sephardic or Mizrahi communities because that fetishizes authenticity in a way that’s counterproductive. There was no one static way of life in Morocco or in Baghdad, which was once 25% Jewish, or in Salonica, which was half Jewish. To say, for example, that they were “traditional” and didn’t believe in women’s rights or egalitarianism or radical politics is actually to enforce an Orientalist, static vision of what were in reality dynamic societies that included people whose positions we would now say put them on the left. In Salonica in the 1920s, almost 40% of the Jews voted for the Communist Party. And there were influential Jewish leftists in Morocco and Baghdad and elsewhere in Sephardic and Mizrahi contexts. A multiplicity of perspectives and political positions that were active in those communities got written out and effaced.
AA: I see a lot of talk about representation. But I do wonder: What is representation without decolonization? Meaning: I’m a Sephardi and Mizrahi person in this position at Jewish Currents—that’s representation. But I feel like until I do the work of unlearning this hegemonic Jewishness and rooting in my own heritage, it’s somewhat meaningless, no?
DEN: We need to have an understanding of what we mean when we say “decolonization.” One of the processes this can involve is a peeling off of the layers of externally imposed ways of thinking, epistemologies, practices, and ideologies—not to find an authentic core that was there before it was polluted by colonization, but to begin to hear the multiple voices that have been violently erased. It requires collaboration—coming together and taking the time to share stories and to learn to move beyond one’s own particular story.
Spending time with texts and with languages is really important. So is the task of recuperating literature. Who is the Ladino Sholem Aleichem? People don’t know. Most people think it’s a crazy question to ask, because Ladino literature has been written out of the canon: Sephardic Jews, we are told, are good for food and music, not literature and politics. If you enter into the literary realm in Ladino, you get a very different image of what Jewish life was like. There is no shtetl in Ladino literature and there’s no sense of isolation. There are cities, a sense of connectivity, an urban fabric, movement. There are multiple languages in play all the time. There are interactions—some playful and cooperative, others violent and aggressive—between Jews and Greeks and Armenians and Muslim Turks. The Ladino language has much more to say to the American experience, I would argue, than Yiddish does.
AA: How so?
DEN: Spanish has been a language of the Americas since the 15th century. It’s a language of colonization, of immigration, of indigeneity. It has a lot of different political vectors.
AA: That relates to the California ethnic studies dust-up. Right-wingers think that left-wing Jews don’t want Jews in an ethnic studies curriculum. But actually, it seems many on the left do think there’s an opportunity for an ethnic studies curriculum to relate to Arab Jews, to the history of colonization, to the Spanish language—all of these things that you’re talking about.
DEN: The figure of the “Arab-Jew” is so powerful because it destabilizes basic terms of discussion about Israel and the Middle East. As a Spanish-based language spoken by Jews from the Muslim world, I think Ladino can serve as a connective tissue.
AA: I tried to learn Spanish for ten years, and my Spanish is okay. It’s actually the way that I communicated with my grandparents, because I didn’t speak Ladino, especially as they got older and forgot their English. To learn Ladino seemed insane, because who else spoke it? When I look at Yiddishists, I’m often like, “What is this project? How is it going to live?” I recognize all the amazing, beautiful things that they are creating in this “post-vernacular” context—where Yiddish is an identity marker if not a primary spoken language—but it really feels like there’s a hard limit there in terms of how it can be passed on moving forward. I know you speak Ladino with your children . . .
DEN: I speak a reconstituted, 21st-century American Ladino, based on what I acquired from my nono [grandfather] and his siblings, from living in Salonica, reading newspapers and archival sources for 20 years, interacting with members of the Sephardic community in Seattle, going to dictionaries, and bringing in influences from the Spanish that we hear more often. It’s been a family decision: Andrea, my Ashkenazi spouse, who also speaks Spanish and is involved in immigrant advocacy work, is deeply invested in our experiment in reclaiming Ladino. We make up new words—my kids call the trash collectors “basuradjis,” which is the Spanish word for trash, plus “dji,” which is the Turkish-origin suffix used in Ladino to describe somebody who does something. This is an invention, but that’s how language grows and evolves. It’s not so different from a century ago when the first Ladino-speaking Jews came to the United States and coined new words, like “shine-djis” for bootblacks, a job many of them did.
We’re trying an immersion, but I don’t expect other people to do that. Here in the Seattle area, we have the Sephardic Adventure Camp that builds this practice of infusion into its curriculum—it increasingly brings terms, expressions, proverbs, and prayers into the campers’ worlds, and helps them to bring them back into their own family and community spaces.
AA: Not so different from the way that many American Jews grow up with some Hebrew.
DEN: Right. The difference is here it requires more intentionality. It will not happen organically because of the low value that has been placed on this culture and this language, the way it has been marginalized. It requires a concerted effort to do that.
AA: What do we get when we do that?
DEN: First of all, you get enjoyment! You get access to slightly different ways of thinking about things through some of these small expressions. One Ladino refran [proverb] goes like this: “Rova pita, beza la mezuzah.” This is about someone who steals pita bread and kisses the mezuzah. This is the concept of the hypocrite, in this image. That’s a very interesting way to talk about hypocrisy!
AA: I’ve been thinking a lot about something you wrote to me in response to Emily Lever’s review of When We Were Arabs. You wrote about the conversos, those who had been forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition and secretly kept their Jewish identity. When they were finally allowed to come out as Jews, they had to recreate themselves—not as they were before, but as they were at that point. That’s a very useful way for me to think about what we’re doing here. What does it mean to recreate ourselves as Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews in this moment in full view of everything that we’ve lost?
I have a lot of desire to figure this out for myself, and also a lot of skepticism about what’s possible. I do feel hard structural barriers to me being able to do this work in terms of the paucity of spaces where it’s happening, the political barriers, the sense that in order to really do it I would have to devote my life to it, and then the sense that if I don’t do it I’m just tokenizing myself . . . Sometimes I think that perhaps the most important thing to do is just to make room to grieve this heritage that has been taken from us.
DEN: The grieving is very important. In my house, every Shabbat morning we make “challah tostada a la franka,” challah French toast. That’s what we call it. We made that term up. And afterwards, I recite parts of the Shabbat morning tefilah for (and increasingly with) my kids, the Salonican way that I learned from my family, from my great uncle, a hazan born in the Ottoman Empire. And I cry every time. Whenever I try to talk about it with my dad or my mom or anybody in my family, it’s just immediate tears. Because it’s like . . . God, I feel like my Shabbat morning is a big Kaddish. My whole work is a big Kaddish, a big Ashkavah. It makes me think: Are you—are we both—post-Sephardic Jews? You know, maybe we are.
AA: So this ends with both of us crying.
DEN: I guess it probably couldn’t end any other way.
Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.
From Jewish Currents, October 20, 2020