This Week in the Self-Hating Sephardim (3/14)
David Shasha
Checking in with the Do-Nothing YU Sephardic Studies Program
I was struck by the following article from JTA on Iranian Jews:
The ZOOM program featured an interview with Tehran’s Jewish leader Arash Abaie and two YU Ashkenazi machers, Jacob Schachter and Yaakov Glasser.
The point of the program was obvious to anyone who knows the YU HASBARAH mantra:
The 50-minute program on Sunday focused on what Jewish life is like today in the former Persia. The unspoken context for the discussion was that the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world is able to live in peace as long as its members steer clear of political involvement or showing support for Israel.
What is fascinating from our perspective is how the YU Sephardim were not asked to participate in the program, even though YU’s putative Sephardic Studies program has an actual Iranian Jew on staff:
https://www.yu.edu/faculty/pages/tsadik-daniel
Tsadik had just done an event with the do-nothing ASF:
It is also worthwhile to take a look at all the members of the Sephardic Studies department to see who else was left out:
https://www.yu.edu/JLL/Sephardic/faculty
For those who have never looked into the department, it is critical to note that the head of it is an Ashkenazi, Herbert Dobrinsky, who fancies himself an expert on Sephardim:
https://www.amazon.com/Treasury-Sephardic-Laws-Customs/dp/B000F6R58E
Naturally, Cantor Moshe Tessone has worked under Dobrinsky for many years; reminding us that music and not intellectual substance is key to the program. The putative “Sephardic” literary and historical scholar is an Ashkenazi, Ronnie Perelis.
More than this, the department is structured around three rabbis who teach Sephardic legal texts in the larger context of the Ashkenazi rabbinic program at the school, whose “mashgichim” are there to control the Sephardim. We can also see our friends Hayyim Angel and Richard Hidary, who both have no fidelity to the Sephardic heritage.
That is how YU does an Iranian program – with no Iranian Jewish members of their faculty.
Checking in with the Do-Nothing ASF
We have already seen ASF Jewish “Unity” in an event they did in Germany:
This week we learned that they will be doing even more Jewish “Unity”!
https://mailchi.mp/asf/beyond-the-curriculum-a-jewish-communal-discussion?e=9f39c396e1
Here is the event description:
Bringing #AllJewsTogether
Are Jews defined by antisemitism or our proud history, traditions, and
resiliency? Much of the debate about California’s Ethnic Studies Model
Curriculum has been divisive for Jews, especially Sephardim, whose identities
are being exploited to further rigid, simplistic, and destructive narratives.
We, as a community, need to face what has become a national issue that has
profound implications for the post-Pittsburgh and Poway Jewish future in
America. Join the American Sephardi Federation’s Young Leaders for an open
conversation with young Jewish activists who have had the courage to speak out.
Stand with us as we discuss what positive steps to take to ensure the Jewish
experience continues to undermine and defy bigotry.
And here is a list of the presenters:
ASF Young Leaders President Lauren Gibli
Isaac de Castro
Blake Flayton
We have already become aware of Isaac de Castro, who is well on his way to being a major player in HASBARAH world.
On Friday we learned that he is also part of the Lyn Julius world of self-hatred:
Blake Flayton, similarly, is on the Bari Weiss Cancel radar:
That means both De Castro and Flayton are in the “Clubhouse”:
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/xp9QE9Dj
It is of course another attempt to support the HASBARAH efforts of many White Jewish organizations, including the Ashkenazi-run JIMENA, to attack the California Ethnic Studies curriculum:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/-kLsi6o2ssk/m/JY9NCio7BAAJ
When we see the phrase “Beyond the Curriculum” we are once again reminded that the Ashkenazi-run ASF has no curriculum initiative; preferring instead to seek control over a Sephardic community that knows nothing of its intellectual-literary heritage.
But it is very much a part of Jewish “Unity”!
Mijal Bitton: The Self-Hating Sephardi Loved By the Ashkenazim
We have learned that Dr. Bitton will be the only Sephardi who is participating in the HUC program “Jews and Civil Society”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/DyNyQeNDSIA/m/tTi-9HmGBgAJ
This week I learned that Bitton will also be bringing her Teutonic Sociology on the Brooklyn SY community to Hunter College:
Her talk will be called: “What Can the New York Syrian Community Teach Us About Sephardim in America?”
As the SY community knows nothing about American Judaism, outside of YU and Lakewood, and certainly knows nothing about the classical Sephardic heritage, it should be an interesting talk!
Here is the event description:
Sephardic Jews who immigrated to America from Muslim-majority countries are woefully understudied in the scholarship of American Jews.
In this talk, Dr. Mijal Bitton will share findings from her research on the Syrian Jewish Sephardic community in Brooklyn. Dr. Bitton will demonstrate that a careful study of groups such as this one destabilizes normative assumptions about the relationship between America and its Jews.
Dr. Mijal Bitton is a Scholar in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She is a sociologist of American Jews with a research focus on the experiences of contemporary Sephardic American Jews from Muslim-majority countries. Mijal is the co-founder and Rosh Kehillah of the Downtown Minyan and was selected in 2018 for inclusion in New York Jewish Week's '36 under 36'.
Indeed, it is all about Jewish “Intersectionality” and the way that the Self-Hating Sephardim objectify their own community, as they climb the ladder of White Jewish Supremacy in the institutional world.
Arielle Angel: The Post-Sephardi as White Jewish Supremacist
I always enjoy reading the Jewish Currents Shabbat Reading list each Friday afternoon:
https://mailchi.mp/6b36abed2960/shabbat-reading-list-6209223?e=b5c10b85f6
For those who might not be aware of JC editor Arielle Angel – she is not much on Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Q82jUjKiHMk/m/EYOCbUQAAwAJ
Here is her reading list this week, with a nod to the White Jewish Supremacy – though her Ashkenazi text does mention Egypt!
This week, I’ve read a story or two from Grace Paley’s
1959 collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, every night before bed. I’m
embarrassed to admit I’ve only ever read her “greatest hits” (“Conversations
With My Father,” “Wants”) so I was pleased to find her first collection in one
of those cupboard-style free libraries in my neighborhood. There is a wildness
about these stories; they are libidinous not just in content (one story deals with
a 13-year-old’s seduction of her aunt’s adult boyfriend), but in form. I can’t
tell you how many times a sentence has stopped me in my tracks out of sheer
strangeness. But the story I want to tell you about now is called “The Loudest
Voice,” about a New York public school Christmas pageant with a cast full of
first-generation Jewish children. (You can hear Paley read it herself here, in the voice of the old Jewish Bronx.) The narrator,
Shirley Abramowitz, is cast in the lead role because of her “particularly loud,
clear voice” (the 6th grade teacher who acts as casting agent asks her during
the impromptu audition if she can get a bobby pin or a ribbon to tame her “too
messy” hair for the role). The Yiddishe parents are deeply ambivalent about
their childrens’ enlistment in Christian myth-making. I won’t spoil the end of
the story, where the narrator hears her own parents discussing the meaning of
it all. But I can’t help but share this extraordinary moment:
“In the morning it snowed. On the street corner a tree had been decorated for
us by a kind city administration. In order to miss its chilly shadow our
neighbors walked three blocks east to buy a loaf of bread. The butcher pulled
down black window shades to keep the colored lights from shining on his
chickens. Oh, not me. On the way to school, with both my hands I tossed it a
kiss of tolerance. Poor thing, it was a stranger in Egypt.”
(follow Arielle: @ArielleNAngel)
Looking through the other entries, I see the inclusion of Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri by one of the Ashkenazi staffers, but such inclusion does not include Arab Jews!
Norton Juster at Formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel
Those of us of a certain age grew up with The Phantom Tollbooth, but its author was not someone of any great renown – until this week:
I knew the book but not Mr. Juster.
It was hard to avoid him this week – he appeared in every Jewish media publication that I am aware of.
And, naturally, he appeared prominent in the SI Friday Night Lights source sheet:
https://files.constantcontact.com/9a50190d001/df2ec18c-6a1f-48ca-b626-7820dc4386f3.pdf
Without casting any aspersions on Juster or his Yiddish reading – I am sure he was a fine man, in spite of all the White Jewish Supremacists lauding him – I was struck by the text from Rabbi Lamm:
We live in a world where, unfortunately, the Rasha reigns supreme. It is not enough, in this kind of environment, to emphasize the Hakham alone. For while it is true that wisdom is indispensable both to general life and Jewish living, it is equally true that beyond all the complexities and subtleties that tantalize man's mind and confound his understanding there stands the simple and sublime truth of the One God, Author of all. What we need is the Tam, one who can include wisdom in his personality and transcend it, who can possess scholarship without displaying pretentiousness, who can develop his intellect and yet, in the moment he turns to his God, abandon his self-consciousness and serve his Maker with wonder”
The text is of course a comment on the famous Four Sons of the Haggadah – with an excellent Tikvah twist!
We live in a world where the Evil Son reigns supreme.
I could not agree more!
It once again brings to mind the students under Lamm’s watchful eye who were abused by his teachers:
But the text has an even more pernicious element, as it attacks “pretentious” scholars.
For those who have read Soloveichik’s work, and have seen his many associations, it is a cruel irony indeed:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2017/12/AP17342065547859.jpg
Indeed, the hits just keep on coming.
David Shasha