New Article: Haggadah and HASBARAH: The New Jewish “Diversity” and Sephardic Self-Hatred in an Orientalist Context
David Shasha
Haggadah and HASBARAH: The New Jewish “Diversity” and Sephardic Self-Hatred in an Orientalist Context
When I began my long and ultimately painful journey to reconnect with my Sephardic identity after many years of Ashkenazi indoctrination, the work of Edward Said was instrumental in the process.
There was, of course, his monumental 1978 study Orientalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
https://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X
Even more helpful to me in the long run was its brilliant companion volume Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_and_Imperialism
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Imperialism-Edward-W-Said/dp/0679750541
That same year, Said’s Reith BBC lectures Representations of the Intellectual provided a handy summation of how activism functions in the lives of public intellectuals, with a special emphasis on Third World discourse:
http://palestine.mei.columbia.edu/said/edward-said-lectures
https://www.amazon.com/Representations-Intellectual-1993-Reith-Lectures/dp/0679761276
Central to Said’s philosophical understanding of history and culture was the work of Giambattista Vico.
Mauro Scalercio presented this union in his excellent article “The Italian Job: Giambattista Vico at the Origins of Edward Said’s Humanism”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L83Daf1I-17dO5dF3xOt75aFZkniZ42T/view?ths=true
I recently presented a series of articles on Vico which express his Religious Humanism and pluralistic vision of human civilizations:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/s68WrLiIOR8
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/vyob0-lYeEA
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/_cAAlXAffaM
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/BZmQewcBYXk
Said’s attacks on Western Imperialism and his support for Palestinian nationalism has not gone unnoticed by the HASBARAH crowd.
Back in 1999, Commentary magazine published the notorious slander by Justus Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” which remains central to how many Jews see the late Columbia professor:
The ownership of the Said house given by the Zionists to Martin Buber is recounted in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s Yale Jewish Lives biography:
https://readingreligion.org/books/martin-buber
But the Said attacks continue unabated:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/30/an-attack-on-edward-saids-legacy/
Indeed, Newsweek gave space to the rabid White Jewish Supremacist Caroline Glick as recently as July of last year to mark Said as the “prophet of political violence”:
https://www.newsweek.com/edward-said-prophet-political-violence-america-opinion-1515770
Said’s work became central to the emergence of the Mizrahi Radicals, led by Ella Shohat, whose seminal 1988 article “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” took its title from a 1979 Said essay originally published in Social Text:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXa2ZPUWpyZ1pFS0k/view
Here is that essay:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/466405
https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Edward-Said-Excerpt.pdf
I published my own tribute to Said when he passed in 2003:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GhzRtLG1MEroSyoDlMAvb7iLGCrA9jS_esxuRD7YlOM/edit
Shohat’s work in raising awareness of the Sephardic Question was soon followed by Ammiel Alcalay’s 1992 book After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture:
https://www.amazon.com/After-Jews-Arabs-Remaking-Levantine/dp/0816621551
And by Yehouda Shenhav’s The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity in 2006:
https://www.amazon.com/Arab-Jews-Postcolonial-Nationalism-Ethnicity/dp/0804752966
I wrote a lengthy essay on the Shenhav book that discusses many of the issues raised in the new scholarship:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LQGPldAVbze_Fjb78pZ57LwQ0pC-Pt0eetskBVQ8aq4/edit
A shortened version of the essay was published in Tikkun magazine:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VUAJJo6CRjp_C2xRVI_kCdOG2yy0RtCG/view?ths=true
But over time we have seen the Mizrahi Radical vision unravel, as the Mizrahi Jews in Israel have resolutely moved to a far more Right Wing Zionist position under Begin, Netanyahu, and Likud.
The matter was expertly addressed by Rachel Shabi in her 2008 book We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands:
https://www.amazon.com/We-Look-Like-Enemy-Israels/dp/B005DIAL0I
Shabi’s thesis about the Israeli equivalent of Thomas Frank’s “Kansas” Americans was brutally confirmed by the emergence of Naftali Bennet’s Biton Committee; named after the North African Israeli poet Erez Biton:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wMx-oym3rT1kUCphAbxYT0DK2SodTA1ufn2fC6dnNJo/edit
Bari Weiss favorite Matti Friedman helped to inaugurate the new Mizrahi identity in his 2014 Tikvah Mosaic article “Mizrahi Nation”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/wuylouYh6oc/m/06PUusQvEVIJ
Five years after publishing that article, Friedman was even more explicit when it came to how he was using the Mizrahim for HASBARAH purposes:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ayEvYhPlfrM/m/8WyLcUGGDAAJ
Weiss enthusiastically brought Friedman to The New York Times when she was hired in 2017:
https://www.nytimes.com/column/matti-friedman
His name appears prominently in the list of Right Wingers she added to the paper’s Op-Ed page:
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
I addressed these dramatic changes in Sephardic identity in my 2017 article “The New Sephardic Jewish Binary: Between Meir Kahane and Moshe Feinstein”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EyglybEAkHmQ35sIU6XubsU92mLCM1FGO90ENj_NE-w/edit
An insightful article by David Halbfinger on the Israeli Mizrahim and their “Kansas” Red State socio-political stance was recently published in The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/israel-mizrahim-netanyahu.html
I included the article in SHU 984:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8uNMYY2szqE/m/R0QUoXdxBAAJ
Completely oblivious to the Mizrahi Radical critique, a new generation of Sephardim have no sense of their intellectual-literary heritage, and do not see Ashkenazi racism as an issue.
In my recent article on the anti-“Woke” movement, I made reference to the matter in a comment on the ties between the ASF, Bari Weiss, and Isaac de Castro:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/0REwTSkrwk8/m/J-Lo6ZxqAwAJ
Here is what I said there:
It thus came as no surprise that just a day following my viewing of the Maher and Cobb programs, I received the following e-mail from the Ashkenazi-run American Sephardi Federation, which fits right into the whole Alt-Right Binary mess:
https://mailchi.mp/asf/newjewishactivism?e=9f39c396e1
“New Jewish Activist” Isaac de Castro represents the current HASBARAH in a way that fully dovetails with the Bari Weiss worldview:
Most would categorize right-wing and left-wing antisemitism as the most common forms of antisemitism in the United States. Both of these versions manifest themselves on college campuses. Nonetheless, right-wing antisemitism smacks us across the face. Left-wing antisemitism, disguised as criticism of Israel, seeps through the cracks and is defended by proponents of “academic freedom” and “social justice” and by professors and students themselves. Antizionism is today’s antisemitism, and its breeding ground is university classrooms. Our goal must be to recognize it as such.
It then came as absolutely no surprise to learn the following day that he is participating in one of Weiss’ McCarthyite college witch-hunts on Anti-Semitism:
He proudly heads his own McCarthyite group called “Jewish on Campus”:
Jewish on Campus is an organization that posts anonymous accounts of antisemitism on college campuses in the United States and abroad. We started in July of 2020 and have grown to more than twenty-seven thousand followers on Instagram alone. Today, we do more than post stories, but also make educational content on Zionism and Judaism, and work with university administrations to create more welcoming spaces for students on campus. Our core goal remains the same, to amplify the voices of Jewish students and fight for our inclusion.
And has naturally gone all in with the Ashkenazim on the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum:
Unsurprisingly, Isaac, an architecture major at Cornell University, is very active on social media. His byline? “The [Z]ionist your professors warned you about.” Most recently, Isaac took a strong stand on Twitter against the politically-informed portrayal of Jews, especially Greater Sepharadim, in the proposed California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum’s (ESMC’s) 3rd draft, writing: “Jews are not defined by antisemitism, discrimination or oppression. We are defined by our culture, resilience, truth, and morality. I vehemently oppose the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum’s aim to define us in this way and seek to create division. They are wrong.” The ASF’s Board of Directors agrees.
The union of De Castro, Weiss, and the ASF could be expected, given how the institutional juggernaut Jewish Insider featured the former back in December as an important young HASBARAH voice:
https://jewishinsider.com/2020/12/jews-students-israel-instagram/
After reading that article, I found one on De Castro’s “roots” trip to Spain, which was published in SHU 982:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/HeQ9hQuYchg/m/HQXpxwZnDAAJ
The article shows us what an abysmal job Sephardi institutions have done in preserving our heritage:
https://medium.com/jewish-on-campus/a-day-in-toledo-finding-my-jewish-roots-in-spain-109a57cdd690
It brings to mind the similarly impoverished piece from former Forward writer Josh Nathan-Kazis, which I discussed in the following Jerusalem Post article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vp5rE42EEjUthm_2XU8tXy8kIwcVrr5fF2nFzOyGpiU/edit
Here is the original Forward article:
Both articles, whatever their authors’ ultimate political leanings, present the abject failure of Sephardim to educate their children in our history and culture and religious values.
For many years the ASF has been at the forefront of erasing the classical Sephardic heritage and supporting the institutional Ashkenazi racism against us; as it continues to promote the “Dead Sephardim” trope, the Arab Jewish Refugee issue, as well as the “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit that ultimately trivializes our heritage:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/nW2DNWUl9Dk/m/5oaSDp1sAwAJ
What we are seeing today is the result of a decades-long process which has estranged Sephardim from their cultural heritage, allowing the Ashkenazim to gaslight us as they continue to promote their toxic White Jewish Supremacy.
Central to this process is the erasing of Sephardim from the Jewish institutional discourse, as I presented it in my special newsletter in honor of the late Rabbi Jose Faur; a figure whose work remains unread by Jews and unknown to young Sephardim:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
I recently read a book by the Anti-Zionist Marc Ellis which provides a Left Wing example of the phenomenon:
https://www.amazon.com/Encountering-Jewish-Future-Heschel-Levinas/dp/0800697936
In his blatantly racist and deeply ethnocentric book Ellis deploys five intellectual figures as exemplifying Jewish Modernity: all are Ashkenazim.
Indeed, in a discussion that focuses specifically on religion and theological matters, he shows us the difference between the Mizrahi Radicals and their Ashkenazi counterparts: religion has become central to the current discussion on Israel, and yet when we look at the Sephardic contribution, there is nothing that would engage the matter on similar terms.
My recent article on Rabbi Joseph Dweck makes the point that there has been no actual engagement on the issue of Jewish Modernity and Sephardic thought:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d9D5dXU_9WgFa2Chna1m_byzPUe1WaW3VbR1Qk_zQWs/edit
I added to that an article on his disciple Sina Kahen and the Sephardi Habura:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFWVQTzB3GLzpYLhl8YCF2Q5d9c8yrlYu-yHxWyf38E/edit
Yoel Pimentel has written an excellent piece on Dweck’s duplicitous understanding of the Sephardic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LUsZA48zpKtgkOB2YWRtjC4R0Y2Nt6tw4KHlbe2rRpE/edit
We are now living in the “New Sephardic Jewish Binary” as I have called it; a situation that can clearly be seen in a new edition of the Haggadah that I first learned about from Lyn Julius and David Suissa, two of our favorite Self-Haters:
For those who would like to see it, here is the full megillah:
The Hebrew/Aramaic text is the Ashkenazi version published by Sefaria:
https://www.sefaria.org/Pesach_Haggadah?lang=bi
The virtual Haggadah is the brainchild of the Yemenite Israeli expatriate Zion Ozeri and his very profitable photography business:
He is fully hooked into the White Jewish Supremacy, having been a presenter at LIMMUD New York in 2019:
https://limmudny2019.sched.com/speaker/zion_ozeri.1z29kix0
His Jewish Lens curriculum initiative is very HASBARAH:
As can be seen from his slick website, Ozeri is institutionally very savvy, as he does not go in for that nasty Mizrahi Radicalism. That would be very bad for business.
His Haggadah is very Orientalist primitive; many of the pictures are part of the Zionist demotion of Arab Jews as exotic and backward.
Ozeri’s pictures are redolent of the Orientalist racism that could be found in the demeaning book One People: The Story of the Eastern Jews by Dvora and Menachem Hacohen:
https://www.amazon.com/One-People-Story-Eastern-Jews/dp/0915361183
Here are some examples of their Orientalist primitivism.
Jews in Caves:
https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/561261172283053757/
Jews blessing mezuzahs:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/336081190919449989/
And here is a full gallery of such images:
https://www.pinterest.es/pin/405253666448325168/
Ozeri is an Arab Jew that the Ashkenazim can definitely embrace, and his virtual Haggadah speaks fluently the language of institutional White Jewish Supremacy, as we will soon see.
Its editors are both Ashkenazi:
Ozeri, along with Sara Wolkenfeld and Josh Feinberg, curated “Pictures Tell: A Passover Haggadah,” a Haggadah that is completely virtual (can be utilized at home or in a classroom) and celebrates the traditions and cultural experiences of the Jewish Diaspora. Ozeri told the Journal that a major goal of “Pictures Tell” is using imagery to tell the story of the Jewish people.
Ms. Wolkenfeld works for both Sefaria and the Shalom Hartman Institute:
https://www.sefaria.org/profile/sara-wolkenfeld
https://www.hartman.org.il/person/sara-wolkenfeld/
Feinberg is a museum professional:
But the key giveaway is the listing of outside participants, mixing SHI White Jewish Supremacy and Self-Hating Sephardim:
Along with the traditional prayers, text and modern photographs, readers will find short entries by contemporary Jewish thinkers — including Rabbi David Wolpe, Rachel Wahba, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Rabba Sara Hurwitz, Dr. Mijal Bitton, Yossi Klein Halevi and Karma Lowe, to name a few. These supplements add another perspective to the rich conversation of Jewish rituals, reflection and diversity. Ozeri also embedded links to multiple melodies of prayers not often popularized at seders to show how tunes vary at seders around the world.
Here are the Self-Haters; all of whom should be familiar to you by now:
Rabbi Daniel Bouskila
David Suissa
Rachel Wahba
Mijal Bitton
And here are some SHU favorites from the world of White Jewish Neo-Con Supremacy:
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch
Yossi Klein Halevi
Daniel Gordis
Rabbi Joshua Berman
Rabbi Bouskila has long been on the SHU radar for his acquiescence to YU Modern Orthodoxy:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/bOWM0fZrZks/m/wKlZzFf2AQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/t8H5Ql09xnw/m/BbICyUdWCAAJ
His remarks in the Haggadah are drenched in a form of Arab Jewish nostalgia, but which end up affirming the current Trump-Kushner Gulf HASBARAH:
For me this Judeo-Arabic chant evoked images of my grandfather Rabbi Yosef Pinto sitting at his Seder in Marrakech, dressed in a Jalabiya with a scarf on his head, breaking the middle matzah and recounting the Exodus to my father and the other children at the table. Because it’s in Arabic, Ha’qda Qssam L’lah reminded me of what my father always told me – that Moroccan Jewry had cordial relations with its Muslim neighbors. Thank God we are seeing that return today.
Meaning that Morocco has capitulated to Zionism via the Trump family:
Bouskila’s “colorful” Orientalist portrait is matched by his good friend David Suissa.
We have lambasted Suissa many times before, none more pointedly than here:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/iIXLxvBZExU/m/TiJV8KuVAwAJ
After recounting the cold drabness of his youth in Montreal, he returns to Morocco:
Perhaps as a nod to nostalgia, my parents would wear colorful jalabas. Of course, they could never recreate the open-air Mediterranean atmosphere of Passover in their cozy and noisy Jewish neighborhood of Casablanca. But for one night at least, they turned an isolated apartment in frigid Montreal into a glorious and intimate sanctuary that their son would write about a half-century later.
Suissa has deep ties to the Ashkenazi-run HASBARAH group JIMENA, who have taken The David Project’s Arab Jewish Refugee documentary and turned it into an attack on the California Ethnic Studies curriculum:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/-kLsi6o2ssk/m/JY9NCio7BAAJ
A Haggadah piece by JIMENA’s Rachel Wahba beings us closer to that deep Self-Hatred that we have come to expect.
She brings us back to her father’s Cairo, where copies of Mein Kampf appeared in the local bookstores:
In my family, fleeing Mitzrayim was concretized. My father left Egypt after seeing Mein Kampf selling out in Cairo’s bookstores in 1939. He had let go of ties to his native land going back generations after generations. My mother fled Iraq after the Farhud when mobs descended upon Jews in 1941.
I grew up stateless in India and Japan – my parents were my country, Jews my nationality, Zionism my creed, Israel my homeland, Resilience our dance.
None of this should come as a surprise to SHU readers, as we have long been tracking her anti-Arab fanaticism and lack of rudimentary knowledge of our cultural heritage:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/EQSW1owUVaA/m/Fqp0LMSuWwEJ
She is a regular contributor to the White Jewish Times of Israel:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/rachel-wahba/
Here are some of her greatest hits:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-are-not-white/
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-arabic-jews/
And let us not forget that ultimate HASBARAH talking point, the Farhud:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/farhud-day-remembering-the-screams/
As a corrective to all this vitriolic hatred, I have presented the work of our late friend Nissim Rejwan, an admirer of Edward Said (his enthusiastic blurb continues to adorn copies of Orientalism), and a proponent of Arab Humanism in the spirit of the Nahda:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HhJQ1jwvbrGvU3t0Ts6CiufNdjyldWTN0At0vPWS9js/edit
Specifically, there is his eyewitness account of the Farhud:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/152mzNuyZzR5UWpohF6vmWWheMnoQefygNHp4-8CK-_8/edit
The final member of Ozeri’s Sephardic contingent is our dear friend Mijal Bitton and her “objective” Social Science knowledge of the Brooklyn SY community:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8InDVESFuJs/m/37KvpqkmAQAJ
We have repeatedly seen how she has parlayed her loyalty to the White Jewish Supremacy in a series of very upwardly-mobile career moves:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/DX2nwC4r6OI/m/_62mcnyLBgAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/DyNyQeNDSIA/m/tTi-9HmGBgAJ
Her contribution to the Haggadah is interesting because it does not present any memories of the “Old Country”; rather, she presents a charming family Seder scene replete with kids dressing-up and stuffing matzahs into pillowcases.
And, again unlike the other Sephardic contributors with their dogged attempt to provide a sense of the past, Bitton cites Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed in a desperate attempt to be hip and au courant:
The impetus to show ourselves as slaves – to relive and perform the exodus – symbolizes Passover’s memory covenant. As Paolo Freire put it in his insightful Pedagogy of the Oppressed, true liberation occurs when human beings cease to think of themselves as objects of history and instead become subjects of history.
Bitton does a fantastic job mugging for the White Jewish Supremacy, as she seeks to present herself as a relevant Modern Jewish Thinker who speaks in the language of her Ashkenazi peers. She always seems to be auditioning for her next White Jewish Supremacy job. And she usually gets it!
https://pasyn.org/calendar/pre-passover-learning-0
And so it is that three of the Sephardim in the Haggadah present the past, either in nostalgic terms or Arab-hating vitriol, and one who is forward-thinking enough to know that being authentically Sephardic is intimidating to the White Jewish Supremacy. Cashing checks is all that matters; the classical Sephardic heritage be damned.
It is indeed quite a contrast with the many other rather staid and conservative presentations by Ashkenazi Neo-Cons such as Elliot Cosgrove, Daniel Gordis, Joshua Berman, Ammiel Hirsch, Yossi Klein Halevi, and David Wolpe; all of whom are firmly in The Tikvah Fund orbit.
But more than any of them is Jonathan Sarna, who has spent his career erasing Sephardim from American Jewish History, and making sure that his wide Jewish readership and many Brandeis students understand who is really in charge of things:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Dy3LfHJHKHg/m/_3bSJd-nAQAJ
In his article on the infamous 1883 HUC Trefa Banquet he found a way to defend Isaac Mayer Wise and Reform Judaism against Jewish law and the Sephardic heritage:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/bq7PnLBnpQg/m/1K8qWNtEAQAJ
Which he had also done in the case of the Judah Touro monument controversy:
https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/The%20Touro%20Monument%20Controversy.pdf
Sarna’s comment on the Nirtzah section of the Haggadah, which closes the Seder, contains an interesting coda to our discussion:
The phrase “le’shanah ha-ba’ah bi-yerushalayim” provoked enormous anxiety in 19th and 20th century Haggadot. Some discarded it, some left it untranslated, and some distorted its translation to protect the community’s reputation. The history of the phrase’s appearance, disappearance, translation, illustration, and interpretation testifies to it significance not only within the Haggadah, but also within the larger religious, cultural, and political life of the Jew. “Next year in Jerusalem” echoes one of the oldest traditions of the Jewish diaspora and recalls centuries of ancestral longing. Yet it also reverberates with a question that seemingly every generation of diaspora Jews has pondered anew; what is my Jerusalem and where does it lie?
As we consider the nature of HASBARAH, Sephardim, and the thorny issue of Israeli expatriatism in a Diaspora context, Sarna, as has become routine for him, inserts his Ashkenazi understanding of American Jewish History into the current Zionist problematic. It is in the end all about the Ashkenazi sectarian dysfunction.
It is in this context we see the sad and demeaning fall of the Sephardim, who have largely chosen to limit their historical memories to a form of exotic Orientalism with its concomitant undercurrent of Arab hatred and reactionary politics.
As Sephardim we have lost all sense of the intellectual grandeur of our past, and the central role we have played in Jewish History.
While the Ashkenazim optimistically affirm their White Jewish Supremacy in ebullient notes, completely secure in their hegemonic identity, the Sephardim are left picking at the scraps and struggling to find a place – any place – in the current Jewish institutional world, as they bow and genuflect to their racist oppressors.
David Shasha