Most American Jews trace their families back to Eastern Europe and Russia. The history of these Ashkenazi Jews included shtetl life, pogroms and the Holocaust.
That is not the history of most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, who make up about 10 percent of America’s adult Jewish population. Looking back, they recall the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion, centuries of life in North Africa and the Middle East and then mass exile from Arab lands after 1948.
A new, groundbreaking study, led by New York University and commissioned by the Bay Area-based education and advocacy group JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, examines this population. The study describes how Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews differ from the Ashkenazi majority and outlines how including their history, culture and traditions in Jewish schools, synagogues and mainstream groups is both necessary and long overdue.
“Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews in the United States: Identities, Experiences, and Communities,” released Aug. 18, is the first nationwide examination of this minority within a minority, according to JIMENA. (Jews make up about 2.4% of the U.S. population.)
The study found that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the U.S. hail from multiple countries but share many characteristics. These include a deep commitment to both Jewish unity and their local Jewish communities, as well as strong family ties and a traditional but flexible approach to religious practice.
Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews tend to be more socially and politically conservative than their Ashkenazi counterparts and more economically vulnerable, the study found. They intermarry less often (25% vs. 36%), are more likely to be members of synagogues (44% vs. 27%), and more often say that Israel is “somewhat” or “very important” to them (77% vs. 69%).
The study was led by sociologist Mijal Biton and her team at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Policy in cooperation with the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and Rosov Consulting. It was funded by a number of philanthropic groups including the S.F.-based Jim Joseph Foundation.
Researchers analyzed data compiled by the Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of Jewish Americans, seven community studies from the Cohen Center and a UJA-Federation of New York-commissioned study of its Jewish community. They also conducted in-depth interviews in four major Sephardic-Mizrahi communities — Brooklyn, Queens, Miami and Los Angeles.
Academics and advocacy groups like JIMENA have been stymied for years by a lack of hard data about Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the U.S., JIMENA executive director Sarah Levin told J.
“This study is for all of us to understand who we are as Jewish Americans,” Levin said. “It’s for the entire Jewish communal landscape. It’s for synagogues, it’s for Jewish service agencies, it’s for communal organization. It’s for everyone, and it’s to understand who we are as a people.”
That deficit of information hurts the community itself, but also deprives Ashkenazi Jews of the richness of the broader Jewish culture.
“Sephardic Jews are often absent from the dominant narratives of Jewish life, and their absence is often itself overlooked,” Biton wrote in a letter introducing the study results. “Even well-meaning efforts to include Sephardic Jews frequently rely on historical archetypes, popular imagination, and assumptions, rather than engaging with living, evolving communities.”
Biton, a Sephardic-Mizrahi Jew who calls her work on the study as “personal,” recalls attending a graduate school seminar with a well-known scholar of American Judaism who described the arc of global Jewish history without including anything at all about Sephardic Jews.
“I remember sitting there and, to be honest, I thought he was going to get there. I thought, there’s no way that he’s going to ignore such a significant historical trajectory, Middle Eastern Jewry and what happened to them,” she told J. “I was really expecting that he was going to get there. And then I was in shock because he just didn’t. It was a very shocking moment for me because of how unaware he and everybody around me were of that gap.”
Biton and Levin note that this study is the first to give a quantitative picture of the country’s Sephardic-Mizrahi population. Researchers estimate that about 10 percent of American Jewish adults, or about 591,000 people, identify as Sephardic or Mizrahi.
The labels “Sephardic” and “Mizrahi” are significant themselves, and in flux, Biton said. The first Jewish communities in America, in the 17th century, were Sephardic, meaning “from Spain.” That is still the most-favored term within the community in this country.
Israeli Jews whose families emigrated from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, by distinction, tend to call themselves “Mizrahi.” That comes from the Hebrew word “Mizrah,” meaning “East.” The description has grown in popularity in America — mostly among younger, more progressive Jews and more often on the West Coast.
Biton isn’t sure why they have started using that term but speculates that it’s due to the influence of the large Iranian Jewish community in Los Angeles, as well as recent Israeli arrivals in Silicon Valley.
The study confirms that Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews eschew denominational labels. They tend not to identify as Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, but rather take a “traditional” approach to Jewish law and practice that transcends the denominational divides of Ashkenazim. Some Sephardic synagogues align themselves with the Orthodox movement, often as a way of marking themselves as not Reform or Conservative. But most call themselves “Masorti,” Hebrew for “traditional.”
“Too often as Jews we define one another by what we do differently, like this person keeps Shabbat and this person doesn’t, this person keeps kosher and this person doesn’t,” said Adam Eilath, head of school at Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City.
“In the Sephardic community there was always a desire to put the people first, as opposed to the law or fidelity to any principle, to try to find a way to stretch the doors of the community as much as possible so that everyone feels welcome, without harming the stability of the entire house,” said Eilath, whose mother was born in Tunisia.
The study found that most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews don’t identify as Jews of color. Perhaps, Biton suggests, they find the label too “progressive.” But more likely, she opines, they don’t see race as a relevant category in their self-identity.
Because this study is largely aimed at educators and communal professionals, it contains a detailed list of recommendations to help future study of the population and to help integrate its history and culture into mainstream Judaism.
For example, it suggests that Jewish population surveys shouldn’t force respondents to identify by denomination, should add “Sephardic” and “Mizrahi” as categories and should permit multiple boxes to be checked, reflecting the overlap of identities within this community. One might identify as Sephardic and Conservative, for example, or Mizrahi and secular.
Overall, the study says, new paradigms are needed to understand the Sephardic-Mizrahi community and to see it as part of, not in opposition to, what the study calls the dominant “Ashkenormative” lens.
Instead of assuming Yiddish as the primary language of Jewish tradition and ancestry, the study points out that 10 percent of the American Jewish population comes from places like Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Morocco and that their parents and grandparents speak Ladino, Persian and Judeo-Arabic.
In other words, not every Jew enjoys pastrami at Katz’s. Some prefer bourekas.
The best place to start this work is in Jewish spaces like day schools, the study suggests. Jewish educators should learn this history and teach it to their students. To that end, JIMENA sponsors teacher training seminars, has just launched the seventh cohort of its Sephardic Leadership Institute and offers an online toolkit to help educators incorporate Sephardic-Mizrahi elements into their curricula.
Levin credits the support provided by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation in these endeavors.
“San Francisco is like the guinea pig for us to take our work and expand it nationally, and much of that is really, truly thanks to Federation understanding that this is beneficial, not just for our community, but for Jewish communities around the United States,” Levin said.
Eilath, who is listed as an adviser on the new study, has been adding Sephardic and Mizrahi themes into his curricula for years, first at San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay, and now at Wornick.
When he got to JCHS more than a decade ago, the school marked Israel’s Day of Remembrance for Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East every November with a weeklong focus on Sephardic-Mizrahi food and music. That was all well and good, he said, but over the course of his tenure he “worked hard” to add “more substantive” content, bringing in speakers and exploring Sephardic literature.
Jewish educators are rarely equipped to teach this, he said, which is why resources like those JIMENA offers are so critical.
“There’s a perception that between 1492 and 1948, nothing happened to North African Jews, like they somehow were expelled from Spain and then re-emerged when Israel said, ‘OK, we’re ready to accept you,’” he said. “Actually, there was remarkable literature produced.”
At the high school level, he introduced the poetry of Emma Lazarus, highlighting her Sephardic identity and the rigorous education she received. He would have students examine legal responsa from North Africa and the Middle East to show how the dynamics in those communities differed from those in Europe. In 11th and 12th grade, when the students studied traditional Judaism’s encounter with modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries, he brought in the Sephardic-Mizrahi experience, describing “really creative solutions” introduced by North African rabbinical authorities to the problems presented in the modern age.
At Wornick, which goes up to eighth grade, most of the Jewish studies teachers come from Israel, Eilath said. Many are Mizrahi and they bring their culture with them, sharing it with the students.
“Our teachers are very, very careful about putting pictures around the wall that reflect the diversity of the Jewish people. Right now we’re in the month of Elul, and if you come to our school for tefillah, you will hear our students singing North African and Middle Eastern tunes,” he said. “So I think the students appreciate ‘seeing’ themselves in those pictures and in that beautiful literature and songs.”
Biton said she hopes that the new study launches further investigation into the Sephardic-Mizrahi experience in America and that future community profiles will go beyond the four included in this paper: Brooklyn, Queens, Miami and Los Angeles.
Levin hopes so as well.
“San Francisco probably has one of the most recent and largest Sephardic immigrant communities, because of the influx of Israelis, that we’ve experienced in the last 15 years or so,” she said. “I think it would be of service for the entire Bay Area Jewish community to have research on who are the Sephardic, who are the Middle Eastern, French and Israeli Jews who are here.”
On a national scale, Levin said, a growing awareness of the Sephardic-Mizrahi piece of Jewish heritage and identity could help heal the pain of increased antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment, providing greater resilience to all American Jews.
“I think what we’re experiencing right now is the impact of what happens when the entire Jewish story isn’t told to Jewish American children,” Levin said. “That lack of awareness and knowledge has created holes, real holes, in their understanding of Israel in the Middle East and of themselves.”