New Article: "Building a Community of 'Idiot Sephardim': The Yeshivah of Flatbush High School Book Day 2015"
David Shasha
Building a Community of “Idiot Sephardim”: The Yeshivah of Flatbush High School Book Day 2015
The Yeshivah of Flatbush was founded by visionary leader Joel Braverman back in 1927. A High School was built in 1950:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshivah_of_Flatbush
Dr. Braverman, along with Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, was one of the central figures in the development of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox pedagogy here in New York:
http://www.ramaz.org/about/history/index.aspx
The Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn founded the Magen David Yeshivah in 1946:
http://www.magendavidyeshivah.org/about_2.html
The school was built after Isaac Shalom had terminated Hakham Matloub Abadi and instituted a new curriculum based on the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Shalom
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/dpebJezm5Ic/rvQ82UnIALkJ
Many of us who grew up in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community were sent to the Flatbush High School as Magen David’s cut-off was 8th grade. The Magen David High School was not built until 1990.
Since Dr. Braverman founded the Yeshivah of Flatbush the fortunes of Modern Orthodoxy have waned. Over time, the Ashkenazi population of the school has declined due to the ongoing encroachment of the Ultra-Orthodox and an exodus of Modern Orthodox Ashkenazim to places like the Five Towns on Long Island.
The following article from The Forward provides some information on the increased presence of Sephardim in the school:
http://forward.com/articles/130141/a-peaceful-coexistence-remains-despite-student-tur/
A more recent article by Alexandra Hootnick sharpens the picture:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/hootnick/davidshasha/UZ9tN7Z2TAY/8pk5tGyNP4sJ
It is important for us to understand the historical process of Ashkenzification that has taken place in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn and New Jersey. This militant Ashkenazi revolution was pushed along by rabbis like the late Ezra Labaton, Moshe Shamah, and Raymond Harari; the latter is currently heading the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/labaton/davidshasha/ASZ9YE5oJSE/fCqSmRp4PN8J
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/1YDG73IxkgI
This Ashkenazification process has led the Brooklyn Sephardic community into a cul-de-sac when it comes to knowledge of its own culture and history; a process that has created what I have called “Idiot Sephardim”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/HWE675C8-No/VxmT4bkxZlcJ
With this background in place we can look at a Book Day announcement just sent out to YOFHS parents and students:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXOHNDZXpjSktTZFE/edit
There are many interesting things about the Book Day program that must be discussed.
The choice of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus is interesting not only for its Holocaust-related thematic, but for the choice of outside speakers who will be presenting their views at the event.
One person who was not invited to attend the event is Spiegelman himself!
A simple Google search shows that Spiegelman is indeed represented by an agent and does give lectures:
http://barclayagency.com/spiegelman.html
His Wikipedia page indicates that he lives in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman
Last September The Forward published an article discussing Spiegelman’s views on Israel and Zionism and how that fits into his understanding of the Holocaust and Jewish history:
http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/205222/art-spiegelman-breaks-his-silence-on-israel/
So when we see that Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is giving the keynote presentation at the YOFHS Book Day, we should not at all be surprised. Spiegelman’s view of Israel does not comport with the accepted wisdom of the school and its hard-line ideology.
We should note that there is a strong contingent of institutional Ashkenazi Jews who have been invited to speak at the program, but we do not similarly see any Sephardim involved.
While the YOFHS does have a number of Sephardic teachers – all of whom it seems are in the Judaic Studies faculty – there will be only one presentation dealing with Sephardic matters; that of Rabbi Moshe Tessone which is entitled “The Forgotten Refugees: Displaced and Persecuted Jews in Arab Lands in the 1930s and 1940s.” It is a curious subject that does not have any formal connection to the Holocaust, though it does have a connection to The David Project’s film of the same name that is a favorite in HASBARAH circles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Refugees
We have seen the uses to which this theme has been put by self-hating Sephardim like JIMENA:
http://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
I have addressed the problem in my article “How to Answer the Hysterical Self-Hating Sephardim”:
The nomenclature of Rabbi Tessone’s lecture title is itself very ambiguous: Who are the “refugees” and what Arab countries are we talking about during a period when the Sykes-Picot agreement placed England and France in charge of the Middle East and North Africa? We do know that the king of Morocco and the government of Turkey attempted to save Jews from the Nazi scourge. Anti-British forces in Iraq perpetrated the anti-Jewish Farhud which has been discussed in the eyewitness testimony of Nissim Rejwan in his seminal book The Last Jews of Baghdad:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/152mzNuyZzR5UWpohF6vmWWheMnoQefygNHp4-8CK-_8/edit
But the unsettled era of World War II does not allow us to clearly assess Jewish life in an Arab world subjected by Europe, or to determine the actual nature of “displaced” or “persecuted” persons under Imperial regimes whose political identity was tied to the military conflict and its ideological predilections. But we are well aware of the abiding concern of Zionism to place the Arab world in a sharply negative light and the use of the term “Forgotten Refugees” is one that plays into this larger ideological agenda.
The YOFHS Book Day program has been constructed in a manner that those of us who have attended the school understand very well. Students are trained in the “holy trinity” of Jewish identity: Israel, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. All Jewish learning is somehow connected to these three basic themes; thus creating in the students a profoundly alienated sense of being Jewish that can be seen in Fern Sidman’s article on a recent YOFHS solidarity mission to Israel:
The Flatbush student is not only alienated from their Sephardic heritage, but is indoctrinated with a deeply paranoid and aggressive sense of their Jewish identity. The world is eternally hostile to the Jewish people and it is the students’ responsibility to act as warriors for the faith.
Over a decade ago I received a phone call from YOFSH Jewish History chair Miriam Wielgus regarding the issue of Sephardic Jewish history and culture in the school. Ms. Wielgus, who will be speaking at the Book Day event on the subject of hunting down Nazi criminals, was referred to me by a member of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community in order to assist her in preparing materials on Sephardic history for a one-week addendum to her usual curriculum which, as she admitted to me, did not present the Sephardic tradition to a student body of mostly Sephardic students.
Sadly, I never learned whether Ms. Wielgus used any of the materials I forwarded to her, or what the status of Sephardic history is in the school’s current curriculum. Given what I presented in my original “Idiot Sephardim” article, it would seem that the situation has not improved as students continue to remain completely ignorant of the basic issues of Sephardic history and its vast literary tradition.
I would like to point out that I believe that Art Spiegelman’s Maus is an excellent piece of work that is one of the best personal studies of the Holocaust experience that we have.
I would also point out that the way the book is being used is not to give the YOFHS students a better understanding of the Holocaust, but as we see from the titles of many of the presentations listed in the Book Day flyer, to reinforce the basic dogmas of the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox “holy trinity” of Jewish identity.
Even more than this, there is another graphic novel that could have been chosen for the Sephardic students that would deal with their own cultural history in a direct manner:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/sfar/davidshasha/YupE-S4SELM/MhFD-N3yRGwJ
Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat is an excellent presentation of the many complexities of the Arab Jewish culture and might provide the students with an entry-point into the basic issues of their history.
But this is indeed not at all the purpose of the Book Day program which seeks to continue the indoctrination process that has led to such profound alienation and ignorance of the Sephardic heritage among our young people.
We have seen a similar intention at Brooklyn’s Sephardic Community Center and its upcoming Jewish heritage trip to Poland:
http://www.scclive.org/pages/detail/996/Jewish-Heritage-Trip-to-Poland
How it will be possible to ensure the continuity of the Sephardic heritage in the Sephardic community is anyone’s guess.
In spite of the fact that the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox system is losing ground to the Haredim, we continue to see an aggressive push by institutions like the YOFHS of a failed religious ideology that has sought to erase the Sephardic heritage from our community.
While we do continue have our food and music traditions as well as that of ritual customs and liturgy, the intellectual content of the Sephardic culture and our illustrious history have been removed from the curriculum. In its place we have the usual Ashkenazi chauvinism and its bullying posture. There is no knowledge of Jewish Humanism and the great Sephardim who contributed to world civilization; a matter that I have detailed in a list of resources for the study of our history:
What we ultimately see in the YOFHS Book Day program is the ongoing assault against the Sephardic tradition that has been promulgated by a united front of Sephardim and Ashkenazim who believe that the ways of the past are dead and buried. This process has led to a pervasive ignorance in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community which is best known for its predatory business practices rather for scholarship and learning.
When students are denied access to their cultural heritage they are left without any true sense of whom they are and where they come from. In this context the pedagogical process plays an important role in breeding generations of “Idiot Sephardim” who will continue to perpetuate ignorance and bad manners.
David Shasha