New Article: Meet the “New Sephardim”: Playing A Very Dangerous Game of Connect-the-Dots with Sina Kahen
David Shasha
Meet the “New Sephardim”: Playing A Very Dangerous Game of Connect-the-Dots with Sina Kahen
In another great act of racist irony, the Ashkenazi-run ASF has just alerted us to the erasure of Sephardim:
https://mailchi.mp/asf/sww_5dec20?e=9f39c396e1
As a start, maybe we should have Sephardim running putatively Sephardi organizations!
Although, as we have seen in the case of Jewish Currents and its editor Arielle Angel, Self-Hating Sephardim running Ashkenazi institutions does not make things any better:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Q82jUjKiHMk/m/EYOCbUQAAwAJ
The London Jewish Chronicle article is about someone named Sina Kahen, whose name I had not heard before:
He is a member of the London Sephardi community, which includes our dear friend YU Rabbi Shalom Morris, who I most recently discussed in an article about White Jewish racism and the demeaning presentation of Sephardim in the Social Sciences:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ggJAFoCD7us/m/llz_Gl0BAgAJ
I followed that article up with one more on Devi Mays that carefully reviews the racist movement in academic Judaic Studies:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/i7GjycvgTh8/m/WXhKM8lgBwAJ
No Robin DiAngelo for Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/c1_dJkCTKhw/m/Zq36INbHBwAJ
Welcome to the wild and wacky world of the “New Sephardim”!
London has indeed become a hotbed of the “New Sephardim,” as I discussed in my article on LIMMUD UK from 2018:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/nW2DNWUl9Dk/m/5oaSDp1sAwAJ
We will recall that Lyn Julius and her HASBARAH organization HARIF are trusted local leaders:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/zIENe4p0bII/m/vBhJaP52AQAJ
https://www.thejlc.org/lyn_julius_co_founder_of_harif
And for all the blather on Sephardi erasure, I have been informed that London currently does not have a single Sephardi school. They all go to Ashkenazi Yeshivas.
Unsurprisingly, the many enthusiastic blurbs for Kahen’s book make it clear that he has many Ashkenazi Orthodox fans:
https://www.sinakahen.com/books
He has quite skillfully garnered plaudits from Religious Zionists, Neo-Haredim, and the usual gaggle of Self-Hating Sephardic rabbis like Bevis Marks head Joseph Dweck and the ubiquitous Washington Heights macher Marc Angel.
I was particularly intrigued by the praise from Rabbi Samuel Lebens, whose academic work on Jewish Philosophy is diametrically opposed to the classical Sephardic tradition and its Religious Humanism:
His biography is a fascinating example of where Religious Zionism is at today:
https://www.samlebens.com/about-me
Kahen’s actual professional career has nothing to do with Sephardim or Jewish scholarship, but is very commercially-oriented in the standard Hipster marketing manner:
https://www.sinakahen.com/about
His book’s title is quite Platonic, contrary to the classical Sephardic heritage and its anti-mystical tendencies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
His list of illustrious influences is a true clash of perspectives:
Rambam
Meiri
Radak
Rabbenu Bahya
Ramhal
Rivash
Ralbag
Ri Migash
Ibn Ezra
Nissim Gerondi
Sa’adia Gaon
Hoter Ben Shelomo
Ya’akov Anatoli
Ibn Kaspi
Nissim ben Moshe
Ibn Tibbon
Yosef Albo
Zakharia ben Rofe
Elia Del Medigo
Ben Zion Uziel
Shimshon Raphael Hirsch
David Nieto
Avraham Yitzhak Kook
Joseph Soloveitchik
Aharon Lichtenstein
Yosef Qafih
Yosef Faur
Jonathan Sacks
Joseph Dweck
Eliezer Melamed
Moshe Shamah
Maimonideans and Anti-Maimonideans stand together in a truly bizarre union.
Here are articles I have written on some of them and the issues they present to Sephardim.
Hirsch:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/AQCL2KNg1So/m/n6WfU5WQBAAJ
Soloveitchik:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/oh-jil6C4c0/m/JxvGvCl8AgAJ
Angel:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/g3J2kwjK36w/m/xxH-CD2BBAAJ
Shamah:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/1YDG73IxkgI/m/yNHa4-u9cJwJ
Dweck:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/fiMfpnIua9I/m/uWtX4mB8BgAJ
Faur:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/OOpZzMziYP0/m/HWO4PrCMBQAJ
I recently re-posted my 2003 EDAH Journal article on Rabbi Sacks, which deals with the concept of Jewish Humanism in a Sephardic context:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/xoky3O7XU5o
But what a difference 17 years makes!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ViNnB7rIjps
A tribute to the late Chief Rabbi took place, featuring many of our good friends – and you know who you are, none of whom are much on Jewish Humanism or the Dignity of Difference:
https://rabbisacks.org/shloshim/
I have also written an article that delineates the New Sephardic Jewish Binary caught between Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy and Ashkenazi Haredi Orthodoxy, which is now being collapsed by these “New Sephardim”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Md20wpiqEk4/m/qCuUrF7-BwAJ
Kahen is part of this illustrious alliance as we see in his connection to the Od Yosef Hai Synagogue:
https://www.odyosefhai.com/history/
He was educated at the Hasmonean High School for Boys, a typical Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox institution:
https://hasmoneanboys.org.uk/our-ethos/
He recently presented at LIMMUD, bastion of White Jewish Supremacy:
https://www.jw3.org.uk/stories/jw3-limmud-present-it-says-what-sina-kahen
And is a member of a group called, in the usual Ashkenazi nomenclature, The Sephardi Habura, Habura with a “B”:
https://www.facebook.com/TheSephardiHabura/
The whole thing is a very fascinating Ashkenazi YU-oriented construct, as we have seen in the work of Joseph Dweck and his fabulous assertion that Sephardim are not Modern:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BOrUXGLCx9GUx4jpQER9pqSyVgMMe3Sw/view?ths=true
It is a SHATNEZ hybrid that soft-pedals the problem of White Jewish Supremacy and the thorny matter of Arab culture and Zionism, as it seeks unity and synthesis by ignoring the deep Anti-Maimonidean values of contemporary Orthodox Judaism and its deep-seated Islamophobia and Orientalism.
It goes way beyond “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit, into a zone of intellectual-religious incoherence that expeditiously seeks to turn Cordoba into Har Etzion.
As we have also seen in the work of Tikvah Tablet Mijal Bitton, a fellow traveler in the “New Sephardi” movement, it is critical to present the Sephardic heritage in a way that is amenable to Ashkenazi racism and not make waves:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/blWoxt23bvk/m/ZAMDGuYsAgAJ
Better to be a “Good Sephardi” than a “Dead Sephardi.”
As I have learned from some very bitter personal experience, your wallet and family will thank you!
Indeed, Bitton has expertly alerted us to the Trumpscum Sephardim, who are central to the new movement I am discussing here:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8InDVESFuJs/m/37KvpqkmAQAJ
Tikvah Mosaic magazine re-posted an interview she did with the ASF Ashkenazim that marks Rabbi Jose Faur as “eccentric”:
It is a sentiment that is reflected in Rabbi Raphael Zarum’s blurb for Kahen’s book:
This is certainly an unusual and eclectic work. The author believes in a Judaism of the mind as well as the heart. He confidently weaves together ideas from scholars both within and beyond the Jewish tradition, but is especially enamoured of his own Sephardic tradition whose richness and profundity has so much to contribute to our understanding of the Torah today. If you want to go on an intellectual adventure, read this book.
Sephardim are still very much a bizarre curiosity to contemporary Ashkenazim, and their “Fiddler on the Roof” universe:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gms7spmwqnA
Indeed, reading the introduction to the Kahen book is a truly whiplash experience:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08C8XFDT4/#reader_B08C8XFDT4
His weighty collection of far-flung citations is stylistically very Modern Orthodox Nehama Leibowitz. The variety is an affirmation of a Rainbow Coalition which effectively turns Sephardim into Ashkenazim, rather than point to how the Ashkenazim like Hirsch and Soloveitchik have sought to destroy our values and mark us as not-Jewish.
Crucial to this point is the idea of Convivencia and its cosmopolitan acculturation to new and different values, which has been brilliantly formulated by the late Maria Rosa Menocal in her many studies of Andalusian civilization:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/__3JkvXJiTE/m/DrivSaphAwAJ
The “New Sephardim,” as we can see from Marc Angel’s depredations, are not accepting of those Convivencia values:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/_nrcdGWekO0/m/9HlHPrs9AQAJ
It has now become common to the “New Sephardic” world:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/QTbtJWS0WC0/m/JFA0XztdBAAJ
In a more general sense, the traditions of pluralism endemic to Religious Humanism have been expounded in a deeply progressive, anti-Colonialist framework by Karen Armstrong, whose latest book The Lost Art of Scripture is a model for creative hermeneutical understanding of sacred texts and how such readings impact culture and history:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8qr2Ci7gJvs/m/hBQHejt9CAAJ
This open hermeneutical understanding of sacred texts stands in clear contrast to the “New Talmudism” led by figures like Daniel Boyarin and Christine Hayes who propound an atavism rooted in doctrine and dogma, which is deeply tied to Christian literalism and its debased anti-rabbinical depredations:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/erDn17QuaLc/m/B8wqZQSQBgAJ
I have further contextualized the “New Talmudism” in my article on Maimonides and the ongoing destruction of Sephardic Humanism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VXe7iEiJHJ0/m/XlVCD2AyAgAJ
As I note there, one of the enthusiastic academic proponents of the “New Talmudism” is Rabbi Ricky Hidary, a devoted student of both Boyarin and Rabbi Moshe Shamah; men deeply resistant to the ideas of the classical Sephardic tradition as presented in the work of Rabbi Jose Faur.
We can also contrast the values of Andalusian Religious Humanism with the militant primitivism of racist Ashkenazi thinkers like Michael Wyschogrod, whose ideas also reflect Christian Literalism of the Evangelical variety.
And here we can point to the shift in the Jewish discourse spearheaded by The Tikvah Fund and one of its driving forces Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Ll-nRoyE2mY/m/FCdgKDIZBwAJ
Soloveichik has emphasized this benighted literalism, with all its attendant racism and prejudice, in his Princeton dissertation on Jewish Election, written under the tutelage of fellow Tikvah leader and aggressive Straussian Leora Batnitzky:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
Indeed, Soloveichik’s prominent role in the Sephardic Question brings us right back to representation and the problem of institutional autonomy, as he has now turned the oldest Synagogue in America, a prime representative of the classical Sephardic heritage, into a Tikvah outpost:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gm1W7pJHRYI/m/LArV53KjBQAJ
And so it is that the three most high-profile “Sephardic” organizations in America, Congregation Shearith Israel, the American Sephardi Federation, and JIMENA, are all controlled by Right Wing Ashkenazi interests rooted in the racist White Jewish Supremacy system.
I recently wrote an article on “Sepharad in Ashkenaz” that speaks directly to the problem Kahen and the “New Sephardi” faction poses to us:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/kKoo0WTd4Pk/m/EiVX0avmAgAJ
As we have seen with the HASBARAH deployment of the Arab Jewish Refugee issue, Ashkenazim have become more comfortable with the current set of activists that includes the aforementioned JIMENA:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/-kLsi6o2ssk/m/JY9NCio7BAAJ
It all came together with the promulgation of Naftali Bennett’s Biton Committee:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/jPQwQi6kJrg/m/lbJh1g69AAAJ
In truth, we continue to remain “Idiot Sephardim”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/HWE675C8-No/m/VxmT4bkxZlcJ
Like abused pets, we continue to take our whipping and come back for more YU chastening.
The “New Sephardi” movement thus aims to undermine the values of the classical Sephardic heritage in favor of a duplicitous compromise with the very racist forces that continue to displace our culture and institutional integrity.
David Shasha