New Article: JIMENA Ashkenazi HASBARAH Supremacy Comes to eJewishPhilanthropy
David Shasha
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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