Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, the son of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants, believes most Ashkenazim know little about Sephardic Jewish life beyond food and dress. It’s a problem he labels the “folklorification of tradition” — meaning the vast religious and cultural universe of Sephardic Judaism has been reduced to folklore.
“Sephardic Judaism is not a museum exhibit, but a vibrant tradition that has produced some of the greatest writers, thinkers and intellectuals,” Bouskila said.
That’s why the rabbi, director of Jerusalem’s Sephardic Educational Center, joined the editorial advisory board of Distinctions, a new quarterly, online-only journal from San Rafael-based nonprofit JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa).
Distinctions aims to “elevate the voices and talents of Sephardi and Mizrahi scholars, researchers, artists and activists,” according to its website.
The inaugural issue, published in July, centers on the theme of antisemitism, particularly in the Muslim world, and purposely includes essays and articles written only by women.
Sephardic Judaism is not a museum exhibit.
“That, in and of itself, was a great way of launching the journal,” said Bouskila, who is also spiritual leader of the Westwood Village Synagogue in Los Angeles. “It’s something I’ve tried to do in my own work, to promote women’s voices.”
“Sephardi and Mizrahi women hold many influential leadership positions within the Jewish communal professional workforce,” JIMENA executive director Sarah Levin wrote in a publisher’s note. “So we decided to devote this inaugural issue … to them by elevating the voices of several outstanding women who are fighting antisemitism.”
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the historian who now serves as U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, wrote an introduction for the first issue. In it, she described her visit to the historic El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia the day before a terror attack there in May killed six people. “Sadly, many people don’t think of the struggles that Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have faced in their homelands throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Iran,” Lipstadt wrote.
In her essay, Sharon Nazarian, founder of UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, described the experience of living in exile from her native Iran and the anti-Jewish sentiment she believes to be pervasive among Muslims from the Middle East. Her experiences motivated her to work for the Anti-Defamation League for five years and become a national board member earlier this year.
Syrian American Jew Rena Nasar First’s essay detailed her experience confronting antisemitic and anti-Zionist activism at American colleges, a subject she understands well in her capacity as executive director of campus affairs with the pro-Israel advocacy nonprofit StandWithUs.
And Israeli Irit Dallal Zalayet wrote about her father, artist Nessim Zalayet, who fled his native Baghdad after the Farhud, a 1941 outbreak of mob violence that killed hundreds of Iraqi Jews. The article includes reprints of his artwork memorializing the disaster.
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Ty Alhadeff, JIMENA’s director of education, said the antisemitism theme allowed the writers to focus on its specific effect on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. “How does it look if you came from Iran after 1979 or as a Syrian Jew working with StandWithUs? I feel we covered a lot of ground,” he said.
Alhadeff, who lives in Seattle, which has a sizable Sephardic community, traces his lineage back to the Jewish community of Rhodes. Though his ancestors immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, Jews who remained on the island suffered during World War II at the hands of the Nazis. Only 151 of the 1,767 Jews of Rhodes survived the death camps, according to Alhadeff.
Those are the kinds of stories he has tried to elevate through his work with JIMENA’s Sephardic Leadership Institute, which promotes development for Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish community professionals. He also worked with the University of Washington to launch a Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, which includes hundreds of books and manuscripts in Ladino.
JIMENA, founded in 2002, seeks to raise awareness of the history of the nearly 1 million Jewish refugees displaced from Muslim countries since Israel’s founding in 1948, as well as promote the cultural and religious contributions of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews.
Bouskila has worked with JIMENA for years, primarily as a rabbinic scholar-in-residence at programs and workshops. He plans to write for Distinctions in the future and said he hopes the journal, and the broader work of JIMENA, will deepen appreciation of the contributions of Sephardim to world Jewry.
“Up until the 18th century, the majority of Jewish communities lived in the Middle East and North Africa,” he said. “Most Jews spoke Arabic and Ladino. Hopefully, the work we’re doing at the Sephardic Educational Center, JIMENA and others will, if nothing else, raise awareness and educate the general Jewish world.”