“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Channels Her Inner Tevye”!
David Shasha
White Jewish Supremacy Will Not Stop: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Channels Her Inner Tevye”!
Newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez apparently has an eye on the Jews who have been mercilessly attacking her:
We have learned that she will not be joining the AIPAC trip to Israel:
http://jewishinsider.com/15134/rep-ocasio-cortez-wont-join-aipac-affiliated-trip/
She attended a Hanukkah party of the Hard Left Ashkenazi group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ):
She announced there that she comes from a family of Sephardic Conversos:
To prove her Sephardic bona fides she sang a song in Ladino:
But, naturally, she danced the Hora – an Ashkenazi dance!
She is channeling her “Inner Tevye”!
How wonderfully Heimische.
I was subsequently informed that the band performing at the JFREJ Hanukkah party was Tsibele:
https://www.facebook.com/tsibele/photos/a.1357980377634152/2098426323589550/?type=3&theater
The name of the group is Yiddish, they play Klezmer music:
They come with the White Jewish Supremacist Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of the great Rokhl Kaffrissen, the true Jew of our times:
“Indroysn iz finster (It’s Dark Outside) is a moving and moody collection of traditional and new songs, with some delightfully inventive twists on skarabove (extremely familiar) tunes....Eva Boodman’s trumpet playing is a revelation here, and Zoe Guigueno’s bass playing, especially on the title track, is just gorgeous. ”
Ms. Kaffrissen is no stranger to longtime SHU readers:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/rokhl/davidshasha/q84ktULGijo/aF9iwD4BBu4J
Our racist friend Rokhl does not believe that there is such a thing as “Ashkenormativity”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/rokhl/davidshasha/q84ktULGijo/aF9iwD4BBu4J
How very thoughtful!
How very Yiddishist!
How very Progressive!
For those who might not be aware, “Ashkenormativity” is the term used by the meek-of-heart for White Jewish Racial Supremacy:
While serious Sephardic culture has been forcefully locked out of The Tikvah Fund’s Tablet magazine, Rokhl has her very own regular column on all matters Yiddish:
So, while Ocasio-Cortez was “coming out” as a Sephardi, the Ashkenazim were playing Klezmer!
A truly “Sephardic” way of honoring newly-elected Congresswoman and her “revelation.”
I originally did not see the Ocasio-Cortez story as very important – other than how it reflects the fact that Ashkenazim control all things Jewish, and are keen to turn anything to their ethnocentric advantage.
Nothing new here to see.
But then the vile Jane Eisner gave us her usual racist coup de grace, and I could not resist writing about it:
The complete article follows this note.
The unrepentant hardcore racist Eisner thought that the best way to tell the Ocasio-Cortez “Sephardic” story was to engage Ashley Passmore, an Ashkenazi professor of German Studies, to do it:
Ashley Passmore is Assistant Professor of German and International Studies at Texas A&M University.
Here is a very brief post about the Texas A&M professor that I found on-line:
https://www.60pages.com/people/ashley-passmore/
What any of this has to do with Sephardim is anyone’s guess.
But she is the person that Eisner gave the assignment to process the story for her readers.
The very next day, Eisner doubled down on her White Jewish Racist Supremacy with another Ashkenazi-centric article by Ari Feldman which viciously sought to undermine Ocasio-Cortez:
The complete article also follows this note.
In his disgusting article Feldman cites a number of “Sephardic” scholars – all Ashkenazim.
Here are their names:
Judith Neulander
John Efron
Dalia Wassner
E. Randol Schoenberg
Efron is the author of a much-discussed book on German Jews and the Sephardic “Allure”:
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10624.html
His argument is rooted in Ismar Schorsch’s aptly-named article “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy”:
https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/38/1/75/1048088?redirectedFrom=PDF
Here is the complete Schorsch article:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AcnHjkeHyLqyjv5QowWDLyd2ipgq83kD/view?ths=true
“Myth” indeed!
Efron presents us with a problematic view of Sephardim as seen exclusively through Ashkenazi eyes.
But more than this, there is Feldman’s larger polemic on “blood” which connects to Trump’s ginned up controversy over Senator Elizabeth Warren:
Ocasio-Cortez is also compared to Julia Salazar, a “Sephardic” racial matter that The Forward also weighed in on:
The writer Eisner chose for that attack piece was Mijal Bitton, a member of the New York Sephardic community who has chosen to ally with the Ashkenazim as a useful mole, which I discuss in my note to her offensive article.
The matter of forced DNA tests is very distasteful and very racist.
Feldman himself has no expertise on Sephardic matters, instead he is The Forward’s reporter on Anti-Semitism, Synagogue Life, Jewish Religious organizations, and Orthodoxy:
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world.
Here is a listing of his articles for the paper:
https://forward.com/author/ari-feldman/
He not unexpectedly makes the argument of Sephardic identity a matter of DNA rather than cultural heritage and tradition.
Once again, we have a female member of Congress who is being dared to draw a blood sample and send it to 23 and Me.
It is the sort of thing that we expect from Right Wingers like Jonathan Tobin:
https://www.jns.org/opinion/is-ocasio-cortez-really-jewish/
It shows us how when it comes to Sephardim, there is little if any difference between Left Wing and Right Wing Ashkenazi Jews.
Eisner has ganged up on Sephardim from multiple angles, and in the process echoes the viciousness of Trumpworld in its questioning of ethnic identity, raising the specter, as indicated in the Bitton article, of the “Identity Politics” canard so beloved by the Right Wing extremists in the FOX News Trumpworld.
It really is unbelievable, and unbelievably offensive, that this is who Eisner is – and how far she will go to demean and decapitate Sephardic Jews.
That she presents herself as a Liberal is beyond decency.
She just appeared at an award ceremony promoted by The Forward called “Fearless Women in Journalism”:
http://business-loans-5.blogspot.com/2018/11/join-us-in-honoring-jane-eisner-jill.html
How wonderful to see such a blatant racist be honored in that way.
FEARLESS!
And so, even when Sephardim appear in the news, the White Jews assert their complete control over the discourse.
To the victor goes the spoils!
David Shasha
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Sephardic Story Is One Forgotten By White Jews
By: Ashley Passmore
It happens at least once every semester: a student learns that I teach courses in Jewish studies at my university here in southeast Texas and comes to visit me during my office hours.
In most cases, I have never met this student before, and at first, the conversation is hesitant, as if the student lacks the language to even speak about what she has come to talk to discuss. Inevitably, we get down to the heart of the matter, and the student confesses the reason for her visit: “There are Jews in my family ancestry and I wonder what that means.”
It is a familiar story of Sephardic Jews in the Americas, one that continues to challenge the central narratives of the American Jewish experience.
I thought of my students when I heard the news that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly minted congresswoman from New York, revealed her own Sephardic Jewish heritage through her Puerto Rican ancestors while at a Hanukkah celebration in the Queens congressional district she will soon represent.
“Generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews,” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday. “So many people practiced Catholicism on the exterior but on the interior they continued to practice (Judaism).”
Ocasio-Cortez later qualified in a series of tweets that she didn’t mean she was genetically Jewish but that there was a cultural tradition in her family to this effect.
It’s exactly this kind of narrative that my students bring to me.
Because of where my university is located on the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, the typical student I receive during these visits has Mexican ancestry. Some students hail from the Northern Mexican region around the city of Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León; others are from neighboring states like Coahuila. Some simply come from Tejano families who have lived for a couple hundred years in the area that became part of the United States when Texas achieved statehood in 1845.
During the colonial period in Mexico, these regions were heavily settled by crypto-Jews and conversos, Jewish souls who sought refuge in the border regions of the north to escape the heat of the ongoing Mexican Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The inheritors of this Jewish migratory history who make it to my office as curious students come as seekers on an understandable quest for an inheritance that centuries of hiding, assimilation, and further migration has drummed out of their family’s memory. Their journey to recover and honor their Jewish heritage and to learn how to express Jewish connections without offending other Jews always seems to me like a noble endeavor.
Just one week ago, a student, now in law school, who worked with me last year as he wrote a thesis on Arabic-language autobiographies of Mizrahi Jews in Israel, called me excitedly to share that he too has learned of the Sephardic Jews in his family through his Tejano ancestry (and before then, the Canary Islands). He asked me what I knew about Benjamin Cardozo, the storied Sephardic Jewish United States Supreme Court Justice from New York, whose foundational articulations of common law on the bench make him canonical reading for scholars of American law.
Clearly, this young law student I had mentored was looking for a way to make sense of his own career and life path with a new recognition of an ancestry he had never consciously been aware of until he was already in law school. But now he was very much aware, and he was looking for role models, as any young person would. I never thought until last week that I could be the guidepost to his (or anyone else’s) Sephardic Jewish history.
Ocasio-Cortez is barely five years older than my former student and will be the youngest congresswoman in American history. Many of the Jewish responses to her admission have been, not surprisingly, filtered through the political outlooks of the respondents in question. Some wondered skeptically if she would instrumentalize this ancestry for political ends even though the votes in her election have already been counted.
Others expressed concern that she could use this affiliation to speak in the name of Jews on political issues related to Israel, an ongoing issue in her DSA caucus that has already brought Ocasio-Cortez a great deal of media scrutiny, despite (or, indeed, because of) the fact that she has not staked a clear position on the inflammatory question of the movement to boycott, divestment from and sanction Israel.
Still others saw shades of the story of the recently elected New York state senator, Julia Salazar, who campaigned as a “Jew of color” with Colombian immigrant ancestry.
Part of what was difficult about the debates surrounding Salazar was that those who underwent conversion into Judaism found it particularly dishonest of Salazar to call herself a Jew without, apparently, having completed a formal conversion, which has a relatively established protocol that converts in all streams of Judaism must follow to be accepted into normative Judaism.
Salazar and her defenders, on the other hand, called out racial discrimination in the targeting of a Latina candidate whose Sephardic Jewish heritage is markedly different than that of the majority Ashkenazic Jewish establishment in the United States.
In the end, Salazar’s unclear status as a Jew did not prevent her from winning the Democratic primary in her state senatorial district, which sealed her election to the New York State Senate. Yet the debates around Salazar revealed a general lack of knowledge of the complications that attend Sephardic ancestry in the Americas.
For many, like my Tex-Mex students, that history is a state of unknowing that puts inheritors in a difficult bind once they do learn the truth of their complicated family histories.
If they embrace their Jewish roots, they can be accused of philo-Semitism or a false sense of membership into what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community.” If they ignore it, they risk losing the understanding of the intricate and yes, intersectional, nature of the experience of their Latinx heritage in the Americas.
One is tempted to ask what sorts of potential allies normative American Judaism loses when it fails to acknowledge what the meaning of that ancestry could be?
It seems that there should be a way to forge some sort of inclusion of this inheritance without reducing it to a throwaway command to “get thee to a rabbi”. If my experience teaching in Texas has taught me anything, it is that we must, at the very least, become more knowledgeable readers of the language and the stories of Sephardic Jews in the Americas if only because it will create a far more differentiated picture of the political and social status of American Jews than the one we have today. Maybe we will be surprised by what truths we learn about ourselves. Or, as Ocasio-Cortez put it in a tweet the day after her Hanukkah declaration:
“If anything, the stories of our ancestry give us windows of opportunity to lean into others, to seek them out, and see ourselves, our histories, and our futures, tightly knit with other communities in a way we perhaps never before thought possible.”
Ashley Passmore is Assistant Professor of German and International Studies at Texas A&M University.
From The Forward, December 11, 2018
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Stokes Controversy with Claims of Jewish Ancestry
By: Ari Feldman
Crypto-Jews. Secret Jews. Conversos.Marranos.B’nai Anusim.
These are the terms used for Jews, mainly of Spanish descent, who were forced to convert to Catholicism or die during the period of Spain’s Inquisition. While many Sephardic Jews did convert, some continued to practice their Judaism in secret.
Now, this 500-year history of hidden Jewish lineage has been invoked by an unlikely source: the firebrand U.S. Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. At a menorah lighting on Sunday, she told a room of supporters that her family has Sephardic heritage.
Ocasio-Cortez’s revelation triggered a passionate debate among Jews, genealogists and historians about the veracity of claims of Sephardic ancestry, and their deeper meaning. Some saw her announcement as a cynical political ploy along the lines of Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry. Others say that Judaism should be a big enough tent to welcome Jew-ish people like Ocasio-Cortez. But some experts say that even if Ocasio-Cortez says she has Jewish ancestry, there is likely no evidence — either documentation or family traditions — to support it.
“All of this talk about lighting candles and sweeping the floors, it means nothing,” said Judith Neulander, a lecturer on Jewish studies and folklore at Case Western Reserve University. “If you go back in history and look at these things, it’s sad, but nothing holds up.”
At Hanukkah event with @JFREJNYC in an moving speech, @Ocasio2018 shares that her family were Sephardic Jews who fled to Puerto Rico. “So many of our destinies are tied beyond our understanding” pic.twitter.com/68bjuCFnDD— Taly Krupkin (@TalyKrupkin) December 10, 2018
Ocasio-Cortez’s office and spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Exploring — and publicly discussing — one’s ancestry is trendy these days. The DNA testing company 23andMe has more than 5 million customers; Ancestry.com, which matches DNA tests with genealogical trees, has more than 3 million customers. Dozens of athletes, politicians and cultural figures have gone on the PBS show Finding Your Roots to do exactly that. Warren attracted significant media attention by saying she has Native American ancestry, and doing a DNA test to try to prove it. Over the summer, a Latina New York state politician, Julia Salazar, became embroiled in controversy when her own claims of Sephardic ancestry were challenged.
Some ancestries are more coveted than others. Neulander calls Sephardic ancestry a “prestige lineage,” one that many people claim because it carries exotic, intellectual or otherwise special connotations. The fact that we think of it that way may have to do with Jewish elitism itself.
Sephardic Judaism, which flourished between the 9th and 12th centuries in Islamic-occupied Spain, is widely considered by most Jews to have been full of scholars, intellectuals and grammarians. But it was a medieval community with high rates of poverty and illiteracy like any other, says John Efron, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California-Berkeley. In the 19th century, he explained, German Jews created the myth that Sephardic Jews were uniquely smart and secular, as a way to differentiate their own intellectual culture from Polish Jews. Efron says this German-made myth is part of the reason Sephardic ancestry is seen as so desirable.
“No non-Jewish member of Congress is going to say, ‘I’m descended from early-Modern Polish Jewry,” Efron said. “Everyone wants to claim this ancestry. [Ocasio-Cortez’s] claim is a very old story.”
And it’s very popular among Latin Americans, said Dalia Wassner, who runs the Project in Latin American Jewish & Gender Studies at Brandeis University. Some Latin Americans recall Jewish-seeming family rituals like Friday evening candle lighting, or playing with a four-sided top in December.
“It is common for people to bring it up,” Wassner said. “People play a lot with, ‘I wonder if.’ The knowledge that there were secret Jews that colonized the Americas… is a reality.”
Wassner said that certain names, like León, Coehlo, Perreira and Miranda can denote Sephardic ancestry. Some people point to family traditions that seem to dovetail with Jewish practices: cleaning the house vigorously around Passover; not eating pork; and celebrating Esther, the hero of the Purim story, as a saint around the time of Purim on the calendar. It has only been fairly recently, however, Wassner said, that people have connected these names and traditions to Jewish ancestry.
“I don’t doubt that there are a number of converso Jews who kept these traditions, if not knowledge that they came from Judaism,” Wassner said. “But it’s up to those people to then claim those identities in a meaningful way.”
‘My dog ate my homework’
In some genealogical circles, however, the casual claim of Sephardic heritage has become infamous. In the Facebook group The Sephardic Diaspora, while some members lauded Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement, others wondered where the proof was, and whether or not the announcement was a political stunt.
“Almost everyone cannot prove it, and people who can prove it will say, ‘My dog ate my homework,’” said E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney and genealogist who sits on the board of JewishGen, an online Jewish genealogical database, and is a curator for the genealogy social networking site Geni. Schoenberg is an administrator for The Sephardic Diaspora. (He also litigated the trial and arbitration that returned the famed Klimt portrait of Adele Blochbauer to her heirs.)
Many of the problems come down to documentation. While there are archives for the Inquisition, Schoenberg says that it is close to impossible to draw a straight line back 500 years in genealogy — especially for the descendants of converts. People who claim to have done this, he says, often make many assumptions that, for example, the “Julio Gomez” they find on a ship record is the same Julio Gomez they believe to be their great-great-grandfather.
Neulander, who studied myths of converso ancestry among New Mexicans, said that in many cases, purportedly converso-descended people learned about their ancestry from suspect sources, such as academics with weak reputations among their peers.
“They’re not ever part of the family history,” Neulander said of supposedly “converso” traditions like lighting candles, saying that the traditions often don’t go back beyond a few generations.
There are some accounts of people purporting to trace their roots to converted Spanish roots. The New York Times reporter Doreen Carvajal wrote about tracing her ancestry to a wealthy Spanish man in her book “The Forgetting River.”
What complicates this picture is the math. Any person alive today may have more than a million potential ancestors alive around the time of the expulsion of Spain’s Jews, in 1492.
“It’s likely that every Latin American has one ancestor who is Jewish. That’s the math of it,” Schoneberg said. “But what is also true is that there is no trace of that.”
Gatekeeping, or making allies
It’s unclear if Ocasio-Cortez will provide any proof of her ancestry. She has said only that her family has discovered that “generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.”
Over the summer, Salazar received wide criticism after articles and op-eds questioned her claims of Sephardic heritage and other aspects of her Jewish identity (a spokesperson for Salazar declined to comment for this story). And while Warren’s camp assumed her DNA test would quell a backlash to her statements about Native American ancestry, it only provided fodder for further criticism that she is relying too heavily on controversial race science.
Wassner says that people who are overly concerned with proof are missing the upside. She said that many Latin Americans muse about Jewish ancestry as a way to have empathy for Jews. She pointed to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who spoke about his possible Jewish heritage in the context of defending Jewish culture.
“There’s often been very visible talk about what happened to those people, is that a legacy we’re proud of, is that a legacy that applies to me?” Wassner said.
In an opinion essay for the Forward, Ashley Passmore, an assistant professor of German at Texas A&M University, wrote that accepting claims of Jewish ancestry like that of Ocasio-Cortez could lend American Judaism more allies.
Schoenberg acknowledges that there is a gatekeeping, elitist aspect to his and other genealogists’ concerns about proving Jewish ancestry. But, he says, the widespread claiming of Sephardic ancestry may have a sinister side-effect.
“We may be coming into a world where there are many times more Messianic Jews than what we would call Jews,” said Schoenberg. “And they might use this sense of, we are all Sephardic Jews, to change our ideas about who a Jew is.”
Ultimately, Schoenberg says, it’s good when people say they have Sephardic ancestry — perhaps it will make them less likely to be anti-Semitic. But he has a hard time getting past the trendiness.
“It’s just a fad that makes the rounds every so often,” he said. “And that bothers me a little bit.”
From The Forward, December 12, 2018