·E114
Sephardi/Mizrahi Therapy
Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I will be your host for today. Today, this is a podcast almost exclusively, I feel like, for my benefit. The title of this is “Sephardi/Mizrahi Therapy,” and we're going to be talking today about Sephardi Mizrahi identity, what it means in the present, and reclamation in the present, and maybe this is a gimmick, maybe not, but specifically with my resistance to that project. I have three esteemed guests to help me work this out. Laura Elkeslassy is a singer of Judeo Arabic music based in Brooklyn. Her latest project, Ya Ghorbati: Divas in Exile, unearths the music and stories of Judeo Arab divas from midcentury North Africa. She's a community leader with the egalitarian Sephardi Mizrahi Kehilla in Brooklyn and has been involved in cultural and spiritual organizing in the Arab Jewish left for a decade. Welcome, Laura.
\n\nLaura Elkeslassy 1:10
\nThanks for having me.
\n\nAA 1:11
\nDevin Naar is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies and chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hi, Devin.
\n\nDevin Naar 1:19
\nHi. Thanks for having me.
\n\nAA 1:21
\nOren Yirmiya is a scholar of modern Hebrew literature with a special focus on poetry, piyyut and Mizrahi studies, and he will join the University of Toronto as an assistant professor this fall semester. Thanks, Oren, for being here.
\n\nOren Yirmiya 1:33
\nHello.
\n\nAA 1:34
\nSo this conversation actually came out of a conversation that Devin and I were having that became a conversation published in 2020 in Jewish Currents (I'll put it in the show notes), “Are We Post-Sephardim?,” which really came out of Devin's persistent heckling of me for my failure to bring in the Mizrahi and Sephardi context in situations where its absence—at least its absence—should otherwise be remarked upon, and my reluctance to step into that role. As some listeners might know, on my father's side, I came from Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors from what was, before the war, the great Sephardic Jewish city of Salonica. On my maternal grandfather's side, I come from Arabic-speaking Palestinian Jews from Haifa. But so little of that actually remains in the present, and for so many reasons (that I'm sure that we'll get into in this podcast), I've been really wary of what it might mean for me to claim this identity publicly. I mean, I don't speak Arabic or Ladino, and I often feel like I have actually so little of the customs or life ways of my family. Devin and I talked about this in a conversation called “Are We Post-Sephardim?”, attempting to bridge the divide between the fact of this erasure and, from Devin's perspective, the necessity of this reclamation work. We always planned on doing a part two of that conversation, and then recently, at the JVP conference—which Oren, and Laura, and I all were at in Baltimore—there was another opportunity to have this conversation. There's a lot of Sephardi Mizrahi organizing, SWANA organizing, I guess people are calling it now. At the conference, there was a lot of special sessions. Some of them were totally packed to capacity, and I couldn't even get in. Some of them, I was like: I'm staying super far away from this; I don't actually want to go do it. A mutual friend of ours said: You should talk to Oren about this. And Oren quickly said: Well, you know, disavowal is also a form of—what exactly did you say?
\n\nOY 3:40
\nDisavowing it is also affirming a connection to it.
\n\nAA 3:44
\nRight. And so, that reopened this question for me and Oren. I recently attended a Shabbat Siyum, which is a Kabbalat service that Laura led with a group of students from the local Sephardi Mizrahi Egalitarian Kehilla that she leads. And we've just been continuing these conversations, so I'm really excited to have you all here. Laura, of course, also performed at the JVP conference, and it was rapturous for all involved. So, we're going to get into all of this. I wanted to start, actually, with both Laura and Oren. Both of you are Moroccan; both of you guys have entered this work of Moroccan reclamation through your ancestry, and so, I was hoping you could bring us into the way that's played out in both of your work.
\n\nLE 4:37
\nSo in 2019, I was really interested in the relationship between maqam (Arabic music mode) and Jewish liturgy in the Moroccan tradition, which I come from. I was studying maqamat music theory in Jerusalem, and I asked my teacher: Is there a book where I can find the correlation between Arabic music modes and Jewish liturgy, piyyutim, Jewish liturgical poems? And he said: Yeah, you should look into this book, which is called the Shirei Yedidut. It's the anthology of Moroccan piyyutim, and you'll recognize all the music modes there. So, I went to the Sephardi bookshop of Jerusalem, and I found the book, and I read the preface, which was written in old Talmudic Hebrew. And as I was deciphering through it, I realized it was written in the 1920s by a certain Abraham Habidbol. Abraham Habidbol is my great-grandfather. As I dug more into it, I realized that the first edition of that book was published by my grandfather, Efraim Elkeslassy, who had a print shop in Marrakesh. And then, I discovered that my great-great grandfather, Shlomo Habidbol, had actually written a series of piyyutim, of poems, back in the 1880s that were using the tradition of bakashot. So what is bakashot? It's a Moroccan—and Syrian, actually—tradition of retelling the story of the parashah every week in the form of poems. In Morocco, they used to do it during the Winter Shabbatot, and they used to sing, every Shabbat, poems on the parashah of the week in a different maqam that would follow the cycle of the Arab Andalusi nubahs, the musical suites of medieval Islamic Spain. And so, everything was coming together, because I was like: Oh, wow, I can actually learn all of Moroccan maqam through this book, and I can also learn pretty much all of Moroccan liturgy, piyyutim, through this book, and apparently, my family is very connected to it.
\n\nAA 6:52
\nOren, do you want to jump in?
\n\nOY 6:54
\nYeah, I can jump in. I think that my entryway into this discourse was a lot more through the political sphere. Maybe I should start by saying that even though I have a Moroccan heritage, most of my family is Ashkenazi. My Moroccan family history is different than what you assume with Moroccan Israelis. My family came from Morocco to Palestine in the mid-19th century, settling in Tiberias. However, my grandmother herself was removed from her family in high school, taken out by the social works of Mandatory Palestine by the British authorities. She was raised in an Ashkenazi normative space in the 1920s, 1930s. And then, she married my grandfather, who is this very Zionist type of person—Ashkenazi Zionist type of person—when she was fairly young, and my father was raised in a completely Ashkenazi education.
\n\nOY 7:55
\nHowever, as I was entering high school myself, I had the very good fortune of leaving Zionism behind at a young age, when I was 15, 16, or so. I had some friends, they were leftists, anti-Zionists, post-Zionists. They took me to demonstrations and all of that. However, I always felt weird, as I think a lot of anti-Zionist Israelis do, about a notion that anti-Zionism is very anti-Jewish. And weirdly also, in Israel, if you call someone Ashkenazi, you’re kind of implying that they are lefty and vice versa. And at that point, or a few years later, the Moroccan side of my family got an email from this scholar who discovered the writings of my great-grandfather, Hayyim Ben-Kiki. Hayyim Ben-Kiki, who died very young, published, in the 1920s, a series of works in daily newspapers, kind of blowing up what Zionism is, pointing out the Orientalist and—in our language, the anti-Mizrahi bias of Zionism—as they start to make their way into Israeli hegemony. And at the time, for me, finding out the writings of my grandfather—the Mizrahi one, the Moroccan one—and finding in them the most powerful critique and truly Jewish in its values, heritage, language, and just like understanding that there's another way to make sense of this ideology that is not an adaptation of a universal, Western-led type of postcolonialism but a Mizrahi anti-colonialist, in real time, argument—that really refocused my identity, how I understand my family. And after all that, I entered Mizrahi studies more seriously. I ended up writing a lot about Mizrahi poetry and Mizrahi piyyut. And that brings us here.
\n\nAA 9:50
\nThere's two things I want to focus on here. One is: Laura, for you, you're growing up in Paris, and the Mizrahi milieu in Paris is quite strong. But Oren, you're growing up in an Ashkenazi milieu in Jerusalem. And, for me, for example, I grew up in Miami. It's a very Mizrahi community, and a lot of my friends were Mizrahi. But my family went to an Ashkenazi shul. I had one Ashkenazi grandmother, but she was the dominant Jewish driver in the family. Like, she was the one that cared about Jewish participation in a certain kind of way. And so, that's what set the tone in the family. What does it mean to reclaim something where the connection is so tenuous?
\n\nDN:\n10:34\nWell, I didn't feel growing up that the connection was that distant for me because I grew up in New Jersey with my grandfather, my nono from Salonica, and there were 10 siblings altogether. The oldest was murdered in Auschwitz with his family, but the other ones were in New Jersey, and there were cousins—I mean, huge family reunions. I heard Ladino growing up. We went to the synagogue that my great-grandfather was the founding rabbi of. I learned liturgical—some of the maqam style, in the Salonican style—and we had bakashot also. So I became familiar with some of that stuff as well. And so, it was both this sense of intimacy and alienation because it was like going for a trip to another world, in a certain sense, when I went to visit my grandfather’s brothers and sisters. And so, for me, I feel like I did have some of those threads. Some of those kernels were there, and they were left for me to do with them what I wanted. I remember my great uncle was the hazzan at the congregation, the Sephardic congregation. He was the only guy I know who was born in the 19th century. He was a real Ottoman Jew, a Sephardic Jew, a Ladino-speaking Jew. And in preparation for my bar mitzvah, which wound up taking place at a Conservative Ashkenazi synagogue with a Reconstructionist rabbi, I incorporated the Salonican liturgy into my bar mitzvah. And I went, and I did recordings with my great uncle, and that's what he said. He said: These are for you—if you want them, you use them, and if not, you listen to them and you'll remember us. So it wasn't a mandate—you have to do this or else—it was, if you feel like it.
\n\nOY:\n12:14\nNo, I do connect to that notion of freedom and choice about all of this. And I also think it demands of us to put an asterisk next to reclaiming. It cannot be the same action for all of us. Also: What am I reclaiming? I am always very hesitant about reclaiming Mizrahiness as a whole for myself; it's just saying I'm Mizrahi. And also, there's the double context of Israel and the United States or North America. Where in Israel, for me to say I'm Mizrahi, it feels very awkward and weird, and I don't do it really, because in Israel, the relation of Mizrahi identity to a very specific moment of history, of historical oppression of Mizrahim in the mass migration of the ’50s and ’60s and later, coming to Palestine and basically being put in transit camps, in ma'abarot—none of that happened to my family. My family was already there. My grandmother was, in the ’50s, living in Jerusalem in a nice apartment. So, I don't know about claiming it, but, yeah, when I go to the States, and I talk about Hayyim Ben-Kiki, and my heritage, and about Mizrahi poetry, there's suddenly a much more Mizrahi affect to how I feel about myself. So, I don't feel like I can reclaim everything, and it does feel very contextual. I think we don't need to reclaim everything that everyone can reclaim in order to reclaim what we feel comfortable to reclaim for ourselves. There's some parts of it that work for each of us, and together, we can have different pieces of the totality of it.
\n\nAA:\n13:46\nYeah, I like that a lot. I think the thing that I've been struggling with from the beginning is that I feel like I don't have anything to hold on to. My grandfather died when I was young, but my grandmother lived until my mid- to late twenties. She basically didn't speak English toward the end of her life, and we communicated in a mixture of Spanish and Ladino. It was my father's first language. The food in their home was food of the Jews of Greece. But, even in Miami, where there were Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, there were never any Greek Jews. I didn't meet another Greek Jew, I think, until I was in my mid-twenties. You know, Devin, after my father died—this is like a beloved, cherished memory for me—you came to my house and you had done some family research for me as a gift, and I really was moved by that. But also because of the fires in Salonica (there was a fire in Salonica in 1917), and also because of the Nazi destruction, there's very little record that my family exists. And, in fact, when I was looking into trying to get European citizenship, I went to the Greek consulate and gave them all the information about my grandparents and their parents, and they said: These people don't exist. Devin was able to find one marriage license from my grandfather's first marriage. His wife was killed in Auschwitz. And that was it. That's the only proof of life in Greece. You know, I don't know what political stances they had, what kinds of political communities they belonged to. I don't know anything about their cultural practice or their religious practice. After the war, they really kept their heads down, and they did not engage in anything religious. They just worked. That's all they did. And so, for me, I really am struggling with: What am I reclaiming? I mean, it's the same thing with Jewishness in general. Whenever we're asked to do political work with an identity, even if it's just Jewishness, there has to be some content there in which you have ground to stand on in order to work with it politically. Otherwise, it's just some kind of exploitation. I struggle with this a lot, and I'm just curious: What are the entry points, and how do we build the loss into our discussions about these kinds of reclamation efforts?
\n\nDN:\n16:08\nI would say you’re offered two entry points, at least right now. One is the conversations with your grandmother. And so that compelled you to hear, and to articulate (to the extent that you could) something in Ladino. So right there, for me, that's something that's real, it sounds like, and it's more than a lot of people have, of our generation. And the second entry point is actually the black hole of erasure. I mean, I think that that's something that you can begin to mine and try to uncover that which has been hidden. I don't think you need to replicate it. I don't think anybody here is saying: Well because our great-great-grandfathers had this political position, we're going to take this political position. I mean, it maybe happens in the case of Ben-Kiki, who's very unusual. You know, he was one of the few very prominent writers of the time. Yosef Castel and him were among the most strident critics of dominant Ashkenazi versions of Zionism in the 1920s. But there's not a replication of that same politics. It's a different place; it's a different time. I think it's a question of trying to root ourselves in some of those histories because it helps us also bridge to something that is bigger than us as individuals. And I think you mentioned this is sort of a therapy session for you, but in some ways, it could be a therapy session for the Jewish left in general, for Jews in general to think about all of that which has been erased, or subordinated, or deemed not worthy of contribution, or participation in whatever the politics is. And so, I think that can become an opportunity for activating different threads of history and bringing them into a current politics that makes sense for us today.
\n\nLE:\n18:00\nYeah, I resonate a lot with that, Devin. I just went on a trip to Andalusia, and I was really expecting to see there a lot of Arab Andalusian music at every corner. I was expecting to see Jewish houses and synagogues and mosques everywhere, et cetera, and what I found was mostly erasure. There was pretty much nothing left of the 1500 years of Jewish life there. The Muslim past was very present visually, but in the way that it was told, in like the touristy audio guides, et cetera, it was also somewhat erased historically. And so, I had this very strong reaction that I didn't expect, which is that I think I had, like, PTSD from the Sephardi expulsion. There was a lot of Catholic iconography inside the churches and in the streets, and they were talking about the edict of expulsion all over the place, et cetera, and then you could not see anything Jewish. I mean, no, I should say one thing, which is that I took a random tour, and the tour guide basically told us: Well, there's nothing left in Sevilla of Jewish physical presence. The only thing that was left was a cemetery, which was destroyed into a parking [lot] in 1992. And then she said: We're going to go down to the parking lot now, and you're going to be able to see the last tomb that remained. And we literally went down a parking lot and saw a tomb there in front of a BMW. And I was so shocked. I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean, I had just returned from trips to Morocco, where millennia-old Jewish cemeteries are preserved. And I couldn't believe that in the ’90s, basically, in Spain, they still had a policy where erasure was active.
\n\nLE:\n19:52\nAnd my PTSD reaction was to say: Why did we call ourselves Sepharad for 500 years after this? You know, it's crazy to think that we maintain this identity, which literally means Spanish, when we were completely erased from the collective memory. Actively erased. What is that about? And to me, it always comes down to maintaining a sense of self. Obviously, knowing where you're from, where your family is from, gives you a sense of who you are. And so, going back to the psychoanalytical framework of this conversation—to me, cultural reclamation work is about staying sane. It's about avoiding dissociation. Because I feel that the wars, the ethnic cleansings, the displacements, et cetera, they act as a dissociative force, meaning that they summon us to reject a part of ourselves. So, in the case of Arab Jews, to reject the Arab part; in the case of Muslim Arabs, to reject the Jewish part. And when there's massive trauma that happens generations before, there are mechanisms that basically force us to push down those parts of the self. I think that suppression is a cause for insanity, quite literally. I think we're now in a phase where we see this insanity at work. And so, to me, art and culture gives a pathway to reverse the emotional pain, to traverse the loss, and to offer an exit on the other side that feels a little more whole.
\n\nAA:\n21:37\nI really appreciate that, and I feel like your work is doing that for people. I think that for me, I feel very comfortable staying in the loss and staying in the grief, and I have more trouble finding myself as a Sephardi person doing that work. Like, I feel like I can be the receptacle of that loss and almost the monument to that loss, but my way of inhabiting that is almost as a person that inhabits the absence. And that also means inhabiting the nothingness of it—the honesty or the hard truth of that nothingness on a certain level. Which is not to discount the threads, Devin, that you're bringing up: the recognition of the language, the stories of my family, which I carry. But the active work to bring back is the piece that I am still having trouble with.
\n\nAA:\n22:32\nI wanted to specifically circle back to your work, Laura. So right now you are, I would say, one of very few people in the United States, particularly on the left, doing a certain reclamation work. The work that you've been doing with the Sephardi Mizrahi Egalitarian Kehilla, or the Egal Sephardi Mizrahi Kehilla is truly amazing and really nourishing for me in the moments where I've gone. But also, this is a group of people, right, that's from Syria, from Iraq, from Tunisia, from Algeria, from Greece, all over. And right now, we're all Moroccans because you are the person leading this effort. And to a certain extent, there's a way in which, right now, Mizrahi reclamation work seems to be being homogenized into a Moroccanness. Maybe it has to do with the identities of the people who have been doing this work most publicly. What does that mean? What would it mean for me, for example, to say: Okay, I want to get really involved in my local Sephardi Mizrahi community? And what does that mean? It means being trained in Moroccan liturgy.
\n\nLE:\n23:45\nYes. In the last six months, yes. I totally hear your question, and it makes me laugh because it feels like it took a decade to get to this point where we have a vibrant Moroccan service that you were able to attend.
\n\nAA:\n23:58\nNo, it's a triumph.
\n\nLE:\n24:00\nIt's a triumph.
\n\nAA:\n24:01\nIs it my triumph? I don't know.
\n\nLE:\n24:04\nI think that the place that I'm coming from is that, as I said before, I wanted, at first, for myself, to dig deep into my own heritage because I could feel the depth of the loss and the risk of loss that was at stake. When I started doing that, I realized that basically, we're losing worlds. We're losing universes. And that grief that you shared, I feel it too. I mean, we're basically the first generation after the fourth exile. That's what it is. The repercussions of the Sephardi exile, in a way, we're living through it now with the exodus from Arab lands. And so, there is a sense that we are losing something that's massive. So what I'm offering is a very small, super tiny part of what it was. I wanted to do that in the way that was the most authentic, meaning in a way that was really aligned and whole. And so, I embarked on that, and I offered that to the community, and we grew from there. That said, I think that what we actually need to do—and what we are doing because I'm not the only one doing this work—is that we are building a field. That's what we're doing now. So I see the Shabbat that you participated in as a proposition that models how we can do that for different Mizrahim, for different identities. What I dream of having is basically to be able to recreate a field where not only those heritages would be represented but that we would live them again, probably in a different way. Probably there will be a lot of loss, and there will also be a lot of creation.
\n\nAA:\n25:57\nYeah. I also just want to say, I don't think there's something inherently wrong with that. I mean, when I brought this up with Oren when we spoke, you were saying: This isn't that different than what the Yiddishists are doing. Like, they're homogenizing on some level in terms of different kinds of reclamation. American Yiddishism, some of it is very specific, but the language that they're speaking and the way that they're speaking it, it's for this community right now, here, right? Maybe this is what we have to do in order to survive, in other words. Maybe some homogenization might be necessary in order to bring what is American Mizrahiness or American Sephardiness into the next phase.
\n\nOY:\n26:38\nI think that we need to go back and think about: What do we mean when we talk about identity in identity politics or identity discourse, and what do we mean when we talk about imaginations? I think there is this utopian, almost messianic notion of identity discourse; that if we just work hard enough on recovering, on reclaiming, on understanding ourselves, we will get to this very stable, very static form of identity that is truth in an objective way, undeniable and unchanging. I think that is the danger of identity discourse, and we've seen some of the bad places it can go with the Mizrahi label in Israel, where a lot of right-wing actors have co-opted the word Mizrahi in order to justify what nowadays is a genocide and was always an ethnic cleansing. And they're doing it in the name of Mizrahi identity, right? Because they have that notion of: Mizrahi identity is us, we are Jewish Zionist Mizrahim, and therefore, when we do this, we are doing it as part of the Mizrahi identity. And it's scary, right? They don't have the reflexive notion of actually looking at their history and so forth. So we need to take away that utopistian, messianic, static notion. We need to think about it as about identity on a personal and collective level, I think, as this longer, dialectic, unceasing process. And in the dialectic of it, I think that we do have this—and I'm going to use Hebrew Kabbalistic term, [Hebrew]—this widening where things become bigger, but for them to become bigger, they must first shrink, become smaller, become more reductive. We saw that happening in Israel, again, with the Mizrahi label. There was a huge imagination around the word Mizrahi in the ’60s, ’70s, where all those different languages of Judeo, Arabic, Persian, and more disappeared for a while. But that first stage of shrinkage, of becoming just Mizrah—which was never just Mizrahi, but talking as if there's only just Mizrahi—allowed for the next generation, where those actors or descendants of those actors could claim other venues, other trajectories within the Mizrahi identity, bring back what was lost as it was transformed. I think that we're seeing the beginning of a similar process in the way that Americans descending from the Jewish communities of the Muslim world are now thinking about themselves. And it does go through this narrowing, but that's not the end goal, and it cannot be the last station. It's only one stage.
\n\nDN:\n29:15\nYeah, I mean, I agree that understanding identity formation as a dynamic process is absolutely key. I wouldn't want to extirpate any sense of a static or an authentic place that we can return to. That's not what this is exactly about here, but I think multiplicity is actually very, very important here. I would resist homogenization for a number of reasons. Arielle, you alluded to the Yiddish homogenization that may have taken place, or the consolidation of a particular brand of Yiddishism. What is Yiddishism oriented around a language, a single language that is shared as a cultural through line that has its own history. Like the Jewish left in the United States was the Yiddish left; the Yiddish left was the Jewish left. Yiddish means Jewish in Yiddish. There was no way to disentangle the two from each other historically, and there was very little room for the integration of other non-Yiddish versions of Jewishness in that framework in the United States. I think if we're thinking about the homogenization of these categories that were slipping between Sephardim and Mizrahim, which have overlap but also some elements that are different—like, I don't feel like I can claim Mizrahiyut at all, even though my forebears came from the Muslim world and were considered in the United States “oriental.” That was the term that was used to describe them: “oriental Jews.” I don't have, say, Arabic-speaking forebears in the time that I know. And so, I think what we need to recognize are the multiplicity of cultural nodes that can constitute a range of political and historical elements that can help shape ideological and political visions for the present and the future. So, there's the Ladino space; there's the Maghrebi, Arabic-speaking, but also there's the Spanish and the French component to that; there's the Mashriqi, like, the Eastern Mediterranean element can bring us into Syria and maybe into Iraq beyond there. They have their own distinct histories, and liturgies, and cultures. And then there's the Persian Jewish world. And as long as we're only willing to mush all of those non-Ashkenazi identities into this category of Mizrahi, or Sephardic, or whatever, I think we're replicating the pattern of marginalization and hegemony. Eurocentrism retains the position of power, and for me, that's the part that needs to be called into question.
\n\nAA:\n31:57\nI don't disagree with any of that, Devin. But when I'm thinking pragmatically: What are my options right now, as a person who has both Sephardi and Mizrahi background (and Ashkenazi, but that's no problem, I can figure out how to get involved there if I need to)? What are my options for actually getting involved? What are my options for how I'm integrating this into my spiritual life and how I'm integrating this into my cultural life? In New York, my spiritual life is Laura Elkeslassy. Like, that's where I can go to do something connected to some measure of my identity. And politically, I can go to JVP and be part of a caucus that has all of these backgrounds represented and gives space to all of those different backgrounds but, for the purposes of political utility, mashes them all together. Those are my options right now. The only place that I can deal with the specificity of my heritage is in relationship to you, and that's why my relationship to you is so important to me. But let's look at the numbers here: Pew says that, in the United States, 3% of Americans identify as Sephardi, 1% identify as Mizrahi. We're not talking about a lot of people here, and then when you're talking about the left—the political community that I feel comfortable being Jewish with—we're talking about a subset of a subset. And so literally, just on the pragmatic level of how few people we're talking about, I don't actually see how we recreate, except in relationship to one another, and in relationship to one another, we have to almost grab some kind of—you know, I mean the big Mizrahi event in New York every year is the Mimouna, and that's where everyone gets together, and sees each other, and it's really beautiful. And I don't have a community that could help me do that with both my Palestinian identity and my Greek one.
\n\nLE:\n34:00\nYou're being impatient, Arielle, because we are building this. So I invite you to come and build this with us because we are literally—first of all, I'm really not doing this alone. Like, this is a whole grassroots community of people who have been building this for a decade, starting from the JFREJ Mizrahi Caucus and then the JP Caucus, the Kehilla, etc. It's dozens of organizers who have given their time, love, and labor to make this possible and happen. And it's emerging. It's emerging. Our grand vision is that we should have Shabbatot in different sahim. We should have holidays in different traditions. We should train leaders. We should have support in order to train new leaders. We should have a festival of SWANA music that's not co-opted by the state of Israel in New York. We should have more Mizrahi scholars, writers, artists platformed on Jewish Currents. We should have all of that. We need to build a field for ourselves, and the only people who can do that is us, including you. So, you can't wait for it to happen and show up to the event. We are building what we need.
\n\nDN:\n35:13\nYeah, I think it's about also providing space to do that. I think that's contingent upon those holding positions of influence or power to open up those spaces. So, like Laura, as you're saying, I really like your vision of incorporating a range of nuschaot in your liturgical practice. And you might do a Shabbatot like this, and another one like that, or Asher Shasho Levy in San Francisco, he brings together many different nuschaot into one Shabbat and helps you hear and feel the range. So, there's that dimension as well. But I think it's like, as long as you're denying, Arielle, the possibility of engagement, it's not going to change. So I think a lot is on you: Open it up. You're uniquely positioned here, in terms of your role and in terms of the reach that you have, to invite those kinds of voices and to call people in to help you build whatever it is you might be looking for, or at least to provide pathways forward. And let's pretend that you have no Sephardic heritage: It's maybe even more beholden upon you, or just as much, to recognize the participation of you as part of that dominant class of Jews that have been complicit in the excision of the multiplicities of non-Ashkenazi or non-European Jewish expressions—liturgical, political, and everything in between. Like, it's not only upon us as the Sephardim and the Mizrahim to do this work. We have to do it because this is our heritage, but it is also beholden upon the broader Jewish community to open up that space and to help us lift these stories up. My advisor's advisor was a well-known scholar of Spanish Jewish history, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. He's very famous, writing about Jewish history and Jewish memory, and he writes a very fascinating reflection in the 1970s about his own family's encounter with Sephardic Jews, and how they denigrated them, and how they didn't see them as real Jews. And he's interested in Sephardic history because this is the work that he needs to do as an Ashkenazi person, as a Jewish scholar (and he was also a rabbi). You have to delve into that history. You have to delve into that culture to acknowledge the prejudice, acknowledge those ingredients of exclusion. And he described that work—apropos to the title of the podcast—as pleasant and salutary therapy for the Jews, not only for us, right? So I think this is a way to bridge the personal to the broader space that we inhabit.
\n\nAA:\n38:02\nI'm definitely more interested in it in those terms. It very much interests me as part of the holistic project of what we're doing—and, in fact, doesn't interest me at all if it's not part of that project. I like the thought experiment of thinking about what it would mean for me, not as a Sephardi Mizrahi person but as the editor in chief of Jewish Currents, what it means for me to build that space. I will say, to your point, Laura, “I'm being impatient”: I'm not being impatient. I was born after the erasure happened. I guess what I'm trying to say is the time scale here feels very fraught, in the sense of how much time can pass before there's truly nothing to reclaim. This is the thing that I'm really struggling with.
\n\nAA:\n38:51\nAnd also, I just want to say, just because we're speaking so personally: There is an element of anger and resentment at having to do this extra work, frankly. I mean, on the one hand, it's like, for the three of you, you have found a way to make it your life's work, and on a certain level, it feels to me like that is almost the only way to do it. Like if I were to actually do this, it would have to become my life's work in a certain kind of way. I mean, for me right now, it's like: What's the biggest problem? The biggest problem is the genocide and the fact that we have a Jewish community that very much supports it—in certain communities more than others. And certainly, that's changing, at least in the United States. And to the extent that this history is fighting back against this in some way or helps us—like, when I see the political potential of your work, Laura, and the way that it creates this new possibility, bodily. Watching Mosab Abu Toha dance to your music, I feel like I needed this. I needed this injection of some kind of possibility. I mean, I cry every single time I see you perform, like there's something in there that's just—ah! We need this! And that interests me.
\n\nAA:\n40:03\nAnd when I think about what it would mean for me to learn Ladino—what it would mean for me to actually try, not to go into my own family history, where it doesn't seem like I'm going to find anything, but to go into the broader world of the history of Salonica and pre-state Jews in Palestine and those localities—I think: Man, I'm pissed off. I'm pissed off that this was taken from me. Or I feel angry about the work that is required. I feel angry that it's not easier, I guess, or it seems like it should be easier—like once you want to open that door, you can just open it, and it's there. I mean, one of the difficulties in sourcing more Sephardi and Mizrahi content in Jewish Currents is that a lot of it is nascent, especially in the American context. You have a lot of academic work that's happening, you have some cultural work that's happening, but there's actually still real scarcity in terms of like, work that is far enough along in its exploration to say something more than, “We're here.” And you see that at the beginning of identity formations, that you get a lot of work that's like, “We're here.” And I want more from it.
\n\nDN:\n41:16\nI mean, two ideas come to mind. One is: We have a history of invisibility insofar as we have the converso experience. And in some ways, each of us, in different ways, are like neo-conversos, insofar as we've had to subliminate, forcibly or by other means, the threads that connect us to the Sephardic identity and have been subliminated in different ways to the dominant Ashkenazi culture, the dominant Israeli culture, the dominant American non-Jewish culture. And so, that was a process of reclamation that took place over several generations because many of the Sephardim had been converted after the expulsion or at the time of the expulsion, and they reclaimed their Jewish heritage. So there is that precedent on the one hand, and on the other hand is: How do you rebuild it? Maybe you’ve got to incubate it. In other words, where is the fellowship? Where is the call? Where is the gathering? Who's going to do that organizing work? Who has the resources? Who has the capacity to do that? And there are reasons—political reasons, historical reasons—why, in some ways, a magazine like Jewish Currents has played a key role in excluding those voices historically.
\n\nAA:\n42:36\nYeah, it was a Yiddishist-aligned magazine.
\n\nDN:\n42:38\nAnd that doesn't mean that Yiddish thread needs to be removed. I think there's an opportunity to bring in these other threads and to make the tapestry broader, and bigger and, more enriched. So maybe that's something to think about, to proactively, at the institutional level, at the level of whoever has the resources to build and to make those spaces and to be the ones that had been previously, maybe motivated by inertia, or prejudice, or I don't know what the factors exactly may have been—now it's time to open it up.
\n\nOY:\n43:10\nI want to add, also thinking in terms of multiplicity, that we don't all have to have the same job in this project. I think that more than just the work, which is this very individualistic thing, this notion of, “I need to find the work that works for me,” I think about it in terms of just being with people, right? Am I alone in this, in this feeling, whatever this feeling is? Maybe it's anger, maybe it's other things. Or am I with people? And I think that, if you are with people who feel something similar for long enough, if you are entering spaces where those feelings are discussed, or if you're generating this podcast—you created this space for us to talk about it, you're not alone, and that is already doing the work. You're placing yourself in this context that is generative, that is generating something, and it's about creating more and more spaces like that, where different people can do different parts of the work. Life is with people. That's a saying, right? And I think it's true about this type of project also.
\n\nAA:\n44:15\nYeah, I'm glad you brought up the converso history, Devin. It's something that you brought up in our last conversation as well, and you said, specifically, when they were allowed to come out as Jews, they had to recreate themselves, not as they were before but as they were at that point. And you asked at the time, basically: What does it mean to recreate ourselves as Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in this moment, in full view of everything that we've lost? And so, I guess I want to put that to each of you—if there's some way that you think about what it would mean to recreate ourselves as we are now, and how you think about that in particular toward a forward-looking project as opposed to, primarily, a backward-looking project? Because I know each of you are thinking about that, in your own way.
\n\nOY:\n45:01\nI want to start with another historical comparison. When I think about the erasure, the lack of connection that a lot of people from Jewish communities of the Muslim world feel, I actually think a lot also about early 2000s German-speaking Jews that had very similar affinity or lack of affinity to the Yiddish-speaking world. I'm thinking mostly about Franz Kafka’s very famous story about a person coming to the city seeking to see the law, to meet the law itself, and having a guard telling them that they cannot enter until the day they die. And when the person who comes to meet the law dies, the guard is telling them: Well, I'm going to close up this gate. It was only here for you. Now that you are dying, it's going to vanish. What does it mean to have an entryway, that the only relation you have to it is the fact that you are not allowed to enter? So I think we need to sit with this feeling of both opened and closed, both entry and a lack of entry, both gated and destined only for us, and see what comes up when we think about it and hold on to that.
\n\nDN:\n46:10\nI think, in terms of a forward-looking vision, if you're very focused on Palestine and Palestine liberation, I think that that project will not be able to reach fruition without grappling with and addressing the exclusion and marginalization of Sephardim and Mizrahim in Israel and in the Jewish experience more broadly. They're really intimately integrated and connected. The same discourses manifest in very different ways, but echoing discourses—I mean orientalist discourses, Islamophobic discourses that have subjugated Palestinians have also impacted and contributed to the denigration of Sephardim and Mizrahim in Israel. And also, the same structural oppressions in the United States have had their impacts on Sephardim and Mizrahim as part of American Jews trying to navigate a system that is articulated in the framework of white supremacy. And so, I think there is a political or an ideological imperative to try to do some of this work. Otherwise, it's not going to go in the direction that I think you want it to go.
\n\nDN:\n47:25\nAnd so, I think that becomes a very important point, and I think it may suggest possibilities for different pathways for the future. I mean, Oren mentioned the gate. Mentioning the gate makes me think of the famous figure in the Ladino folktale tradition, Joha, who is the Sephardic Jewish version of Nasreddin Hodja, who exists in many different Islamic societies. The legend about Joha is that his grave (allegedly somewhere in Anatolia) is a gate with no fence around it. It's just the gate, and it's a gate hanging there. And what does that mean? I think it's a variation of the theme that you just described, Oren. What do you do with the gate? You can't go through it. You can go over it, you can go around it. You could dig a tunnel underneath. There are many different ways to surpass it. But you still have to grapple with the gate itself. The threshold remains impenetrable, in a certain sense.
\n\nDN:\n48:20\nAnd it reminds me of one of the Joha tales. And it's a tale over a conflict of land. And there are these two guys, they're neighbors, and they're arguing over a plot of land. And this, I'm translating from Ladino. One guy says: No, this is mine. And the other guy says: No, it's mine. And they get into a fight. So they go to the juzgador of the kazal, the judge of the district, who is Joha. And Joha decides that he's going to have to investigate—to whom does this contested land belong? So he goes to the land, lies down, he puts his ear to the ground, and he asks the land: To whom do you belong? And he gets the answer. And he stands up and he makes his pronouncement. He says that the land has spoken. He says: “Yo non apartengo ni al uno ni al otro—son eyos que apartienen a mí.” “I do not belong to this one or that one—they belong to me.” And I think that this is an interesting metaphor to thinking about: What is the future in Palestine/Israel? That's going to have to grapple with the reality of Jews and Palestinians in that space, and maybe there's a possibility for some of the Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, stories, histories, liturgies, to help us think creatively about getting there.
\n\nAA:\n49:50\nBeautiful, and beautiful modeling of taking Oren's Kafka reference and finding a Ladino-speaking reference to answer it. I admire the mastery. I know it's second nature to you, but it's amazing. Laura, I want to end with you.
\n\nLE:\n50:08\nWell, I've been asked this question, actually multiple times, about visions for the future. I must say that, in the time that we're in, it feels very, very difficult, actually, to imagine a future in the midst of genocide. I'm really feeling the rage around the fact that what we're witnessing right now is actually closing the gates for a potential advent of justice and ultimately of peace—
\n\nAA:\n50:39\nAnd of bridging.
\n\nLE:\n50:40\nYeah, and of more wholeness. So, for all that I've said throughout this conversation of how important I think this work is, it's mostly felt impossible in the last couple of years. Like what I was talking about before—about the parts of the self that are being dissociated from one another—it felt to me like we were in the worst historical iteration of that process, which started 100 years ago and had different horrific iterations, starting with the Nakba in 1948, but it felt to me, actually—from October 8th basically, I thought: Okay, this is the second Nakba. It's been ongoing, and they're going to do what they said they would do, which is that they will raze Gaza, they will ethnically cleanse it, and they will kill everybody there. And that's exactly what they did. So, from that moment on, I felt that my objectives—my goals in the 10 years prior to that was to bridge the gap, bring people together, do reconciliation work for lack of a better word. But in the last two years, it's really felt like an impossible task.
\n\nAA:\n51:56\nJust to put a finer point on it, it seems like what you're saying is: You've been trying to bring back together the idea of Arab and Jew as not an impossibility, and on a certain level, just in the same way that we talk about the way that Jewishness and Zionism have been conflated to the point where it feels very difficult to assert that they are not the same thing; because on the ground, they are the same thing. It sounds like you're saying: I'm reaching the reality that Arabness and Jewishness have been cleaved, and that there isn't a real way through that in the present.
\n\nLE:\n52:28\nYeah. And it also felt that: What could artists do in front of a bulldozer? That's the reality that I think many of us are facing. That said, I must say that at that last concert, actually, that we did at the JVP NMM, I felt hope again for the first time because I felt like there was a path toward building work that was culturally anchored, culturally grounded, and that was moving toward the work that the Palestinian solidarity movement is doing, and that there was a little bit of a contribution that we could do as Jews. But it's been very, very difficult. Now, to answer your question more specifically, a lot of the work that I do and that I do with my collaborators is about digging into the past. But I don't only see it as staying in the past. I really see it as retro-futurist work. Meaning I'm not trying to go back and recreate what was, because that's lost. We're trying to create a reality in the present that can give a vision for the future—for a pluralist future, for an equal rights future—and to me, I see it as offering a vision for politics of return, I call it. Meaning that the Zionist movement talks a lot about Yishuv—that the Zionist project was to return, et cetera—but in fact, it was a project of exile. It was a project of exile for Palestinians, and it was a project of exile for J-SWANA folks. There were massive population displacements across the region.
\n\nLE:\n54:15\nAnd so doing this work for me is, in a way, offering a vision for a politics of return. Not in a proposition where we're being told that we're exchanging the population, which is basically what the Zionist governments have been saying for 75 years: We're exchanging Palestinians against Mizrahim. And now, the whole reclamation of Mizrahi history in the last 20, 30 years is about building this narrative, right? Saying: We did exile Palestinians, actually, but Mizrahim were also exiled from Arab lands, so we're even. So it's a zero-sum game. I am hopeful, and I find sustenance and inspiration, in projects of return in terms of supporting the right of return of Palestinians and also supporting the idea of having the possibility for Jewish life to exist again in the SWANA region. What does it look like? What does return look like? It won't look like the 1900s. It won't look like the 1800s or anything before that. It's for us to build that vision (and, inshallah, that reality) in the decades and centuries to come.
\n\nAA:\n55:28\nThank you guys so much for this conversation. It's really meaningful for me, and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate Devin putting up with me and shepherding me through this process patiently over many years. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. If you like this episode, please share it, rate it, like it, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.
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