MAYA SHEMTOV: Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I'm really excited
to see you all here. And we're going to get started
because we only have one hour. And I want to make sure we
give as much time as possible for the conversation. So I'm going to
start just saying a few words about the
Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and
Israel Studies, which is hosting this event. I'm the Assistant Director
of Student Programs there. But the Institute has h the
law school at UC Berkeley and organizes academic
events and programs, brings visiting
faculty from Israel and engages students in a
variety of ways on campus around Israel and
Jewish Studies. So I'm really excited to
see some new faces, as well as a lot of the students that
we work with at the Institute. So I want to firstly
introduce Ben Diwan, who is an undergraduate
fellow at the Institute and a political science major
graduating this semester. And I'm really excited
to have Ben here. He was really the driver
behind this event. And it's because
of his hard work that we were able
to make it happen. And I'm going to give a
very brief introduction, really not doing it
justice, but just a bit of context about what
we're talking about today. And then I'm going to
turn it over to Ben to introduce our speakers. So I think, as many
of you probably know, we're going to get
into the definitions with a bit more specifics soon. But Mizrahi Jews are Jews
from the Mena region. And tomorrow, we'll go
into detail in a moment to clarify more about that. And I just want to
note that these are Jewish communities that have-- many of the Jewish communities
around the Middle East. And North Africa
have lived there for thousands and
thousands of years. And now most of these
communities have been displaced or people have relocated to the
US, to Israel, and to France. And just to give some
more demographics. In Israel, the Mizrahi Jewish
population is around 50%. So there are a lot of
Mizrahi Jews there in the US. It's very different. There are about 300,000 to
500,000 Mizrahi Jews in the US, and around 6 million Jews,
which is a completely different number. But there are really
large, vibrant communities in LA and New York
and elsewhere. However, even in
Israel and the US, there's not quite as
much representation in Mizrahi Jewish stories. And history are often absent
from Jewish cultural spaces, religious spaces, history books. So I am going to turn it over to
these amazing speakers-- to Ben, to introduce our
amazing speakers who are going to go into a lot
more detail about the story of the Mizrahi Jewish
population focused on the US. So, Ben, take it away. BEN DIWAN: Hi, everyone. As Maya mentioned, I'm Ben. I'm an undergraduate
fellow at the Institute. I study political science and
I'm graduating in a month. I kind of incepted
this idea for the panel as someone whose family is from
Lebanon and with a big presence in North America. And seeing that in
recent years, there's a big discussion going on
among Sephardis in America about our place in
the Jewish community, and how we relate to the
greater Jewish community and how they relate to us. So we came up with these
three amazing speakers that will each have their own
very interesting and unique perspective about things. So with no further ado, I'll
start by introducing them. The first is Rabbi
Danielle Bouskila. He is the director of the
Sephardic Educational Center, an international
organization based in the old city of
Jerusalem, promoting classic Sephardic Judaism,
traditional, modern intellectual philosophy. His speciality is
translating and teaching the legal and philosophical
writings of classic Sephardic rabbis and thinkers. But outside of COVID
times, he usually splits his time between
LA and Jerusalem. Our second speaker
is Hadar Cohen. She is a multimedia feminist
artist, writer, and dancer originally from Jerusalem. She is a fellow at Abrahamic
House, a multi-faith incubator for social change
based in Los Angeles. And we also have Tamar Zaken
who is the Chief Program Officer at Hamakom, the place
which is, for some of you who know, in the basement
of Berkeley, Hillel. Tamar grew up in Oakland and
moved to Israel as a teenager. For many years, Tamar directed
service learning programs at Mi'mizrach Shemesh,
the Center for Social-- Center for Jewish Social
Activism based in Jerusalem. She graduated from
the joint program at Columbia University
and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. And received an MSW from
the School of Social Work at Yeshiva University. And most recently, Tamar
served at the Shamash residence at the JCC of the East Bay
and as an interim director of the New Generation at the New
Israel fund in San Francisco. In her spare time,
Tamar translates Sephardic rabbinic texts
to expose English speaking audiences to their inspiring
message of inclusion and justice. So I want to start and
dive right into this. MAYA SHEMTOV: But before. Sorry about that. Just throwing in a
quick before that, Tamar is going to tell us about
the terms just so we don't-- maybe that's what
you're going to say. TAMAR ZAKEN: Hi. Thank you so much, Ben. And I'm so happy to see
so many of you here. And some familiar faces. So yeah. So I wanted to just give a
bit of background on the term Mizrahi and Sephardi. Mizrahi is a sociopolitical
term that describes Jews from Arab or Muslim lands. So that includes Jews from North
Africa, from the Middle East. And it actually, I mean,
it's a term we use often now. I think we use it often
here in the States to describe Jews
from these countries. And also it's a pretty
much an Israeli term. It's a term that the Ashkenazi
establishment in Israel coined in the 1950s when they were
responding to the large waves of immigration that were
coming from Arab countries. And so for some of you probably
know that the word Mizrahi actually means Eastern. And it's interesting to think
about that because Moroccan Jews are not from the East. They're West of Israel. And it's a term
that in some ways can be othering
because it's pushing all of these diverse
groups of Jews who are very different from
one another into one group. So that's like the term Mizrahi. And I think it's
interesting to think about as we discuss today,
each of the speakers has a different relationship
with that term probably. But after I learned what
the background of that term, I stopped using it like. And I use more Sephardic. So let me explain
what Sephardic is. So Sephardic or
Sephardim literally means the Jews from the
Iberian Peninsula that-- Jews that left after
the Inquisition in 1492. And were dispersed to
places in Africa and Asia. And so it also describes
the religious practice of these Jews. And I think one of the reasons
why Sephardic and Mizrahi have become terms that are
sometimes interchangeable is because many of
the Sephardic Jews emigrated to these Arab
countries and blended with the local population. And so that might be the reason
why we interchange these terms. But just we wanted to give that
background before we begin. And now I'll hand it back to
Ben to start us off or Maya. BEN DIWAN: All right, everyone. We're just going to go straight
into this now after that really good explanation. Honestly, we can
have a whole hour about how people relate to
terms of Sephardic and Mizrahi. So if you want to know more,
contact one of us after and we can all happy to
talk to you about it. So here's this
question that's going to go for all three speakers. Let's start from the basics. I want to-- we really
want to know why you came to this kind of conversations. Tell us-- we want to tell
us more about the work you do, how it intersects with
the Mizrahim or Sephardim in America, and how did
you come to do this work? So let's start off with Hadar. HADAR COHEN: Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank
you so much, Ben and Maya, for organizing this. This is a great question
because I actually wanted to start off by
just naming how important this conversation is to me. And just so glad that
there are more spaces to have this conversation. So for me personally, I
was born in Jerusalem. I grew up in an all
Mizrahi-Sephardi home. My mom's side is Persian
and my dad's side-- my grandma has been in Jerusalem
for over 10 generations. And my grandpa is from
Syria, from Aleppo. And yeah, I think
like growing up-- I mean, I grew up in Israel. So there was definitely an
awareness around racism or just like othering that I just kind
of grew up with those stories. But I never really
understood them until honestly, like
a few years ago, I was living in the
Bay Area and I just started doing a lot of
my own deep healing work around identity and
family and ancestry. And the more I was
diving into that, the more I was realizing
that my story isn't told and my story isn't seen. And like whether it comes
from Jewish institutions or just people on
the street asking me, how could you be also
like Jewish and Syrian? And how does that
make any sense? And just having
that all around me, it's sparked me to go into
more of this internal journey with it. And the more that
I was doing that, the more that I was actually
finding that there were many people like me who were
feeling similar things and wanting to talk and
express and share and also push the Jewish and non-Jewish world
to see the story of Mizrahi Jews and to really
understand our history. So I've been organizing. I run a project called
Feminism All Night, which is a feminist educational project. And over the last
year, we've been doing a lot of work centered
on Mizrahi identity. We did a big event in
Tel Aviv this last year in January that was specifically
focused on Mizrahi identity. And then also here
in the states, we did a very big virtual
educational series around Mizrahi identity. So I feel like over
the years, it's been-- I've kind of through just
diving into my own lineage, into my own family,
and to my own identity, I've started building
with other people and creating community
events and realizing that this is really
a conversation that many people want to be part of. And now I really see myself
as navigating and creating a bridge between the
Mizrahi community in Israel and the Mizrahi
community in the States. And how we can build more
connection and understanding with each other. BEN DIWAN: Awesome. Next, same question
goes to Bouskila RABBI BOUSKILA: Thank you. Shalom. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a great
pleasure to be here. Thank you for organizing this. I also agree it's wonderful
to have the opportunity to express these ideas in the
context of friends and people who have similar interests. I usually would just speak
off the top of my head. What I'm going to
do in this case is I'm going to read
you a short paragraph because I was asked to address
this in a very long essay that I composed a few
years ago in a volume aptly titled Sephardi and
Mizrahi Jews in America. And while I 100%
agree with Tamar on her understanding of the term
Mizrahi, I think it's spot on. It's a term that I never
heard of growing up in the United States. I never heard of it in my house. And growing up as
a Sephardic Jew who prayed from a wide variety
of Sephardic prayer books that came from Iraq, that
came from Morocco, that came from Yemen, that came from
all over the Sephardic, Middle Eastern, North African,
Iberian, Peninsula diaspora, I never saw the
term Edot HaMizrach. We have to understand
that Mizrahi is the secular use of that term. The original term
was not Mizrahim, was Edot HaMizrach, which means
sort of tribes from the East, which again, is what
Tamar was talking about, is very much an indication of
a particular cultural elitism within Israel that looked
down on those tribes. And it viewed them as
tribes from the East. That was a very Eurocentric
Western civilization way of looking at Jews that
came from Arab lands, whether it was
geographic or whether it wasn't-- because it's not
accurate geographically, like Tamar said. It's Moroccan Jews
come from our Mugrabi. They come from the West. So I never saw that term
until I came to Israel when I was 17, when I
came to study and serve in the army in Israel. Suddenly, I started
hearing Edot HaMizrach. And I saw that I didn't
understand what that meant. Why am I being called Eastern? I grew up on the West coast. So I looked at it. So I'm going to actually
just read to you very quickly this paragraph. And I think it will
define sort of my identity and why I do what I do. So it'll give you my background. This is when I write
about this, even though I do this for a living,
professionally my work is very personal. It comes from a personal place. My parents were born-- were North African Sephardic
Jews from Morocco and Algeria. They came to Los
Angeles in 1961. I was born three
years later, making me a first generation American. Growing up, French
was my first language. I did not know English
until I was five. We spoke French at home. And my parents spoke Arabic
at home to one another. And the Judaism we
practiced at home was deeply rooted in Moroccan,
Algerian, Sephardic traditions that my parents brought here. Despite being born
and raised in America and educated in very mainstream
Ashkenazi day school system, when asked about my
Jewish affiliation, I never used
denominational titles like in American Judaism-- Orthodox conservative reform. Instead, I express my
identity, watch this-- French, Moroccan, American,
Sephardic Jew, or in short, a Sephardic Jew. That's my identity. This description is born out
of the unique form of Judaism that we practice
in my home, which was rooted in our customs,
our tradition, our language. And I believe a way
of life, a way of life that was nondenominational,
that really did not look at life through necessarily
denominational debates, but instead looked at Judaism
from a tradition of love, of happiness, what I called
Judaism of the desert, Judaism with sunshine, with
life, with singing, with joie de vivre, with tunes in Arabic
that were always celebratory. This is the Judaism
that I grew up with. And I could talk a
little bit more about it a little bit later,
because I feel that the rabbis that
I spend a lot of time teaching and translating
their Jewish philosophy was very much just a more
sophisticated expression of what I experienced around
my Chabot table or around my [HEBREW] seder. And I think that's a
narrative of Judaism that we don't find so
often in our day schools or our Jewish institutions. And my life's work with the
Sephardic Educational Center is to bring that, not only
two Sephardic Jews, who think I've been robbed
of that experience, but to bring that to the
Jewish world in general. To me, Sephardic
is just a title, but it's a Judaism
that I want to bring to a much larger audience-- Sepharadim and Ashkenazim. And even Mizrahim, if they
want to identify with that. Thank you. BEN DIWAN: Awesome. Thank you. And same question to Tamar. TAMAR ZAKEN: Yeah. Thank you. I'm happy to be
here with everyone. And it was great to
hear Hadar and Bouskila. Thank you. Yeah. So, I mean, I was
born in Oakland. And I went to one of
the Jewish day schools that Hadar, Bouskila mentioned. I always was proud that
I had Sephardic roots. My dad was born in Zakho, which
is a town in Iraqi Kurdistan. And he moved to Israel
when he was three. And my mom is from Oakland
and of Ashkenazi descent. Even my grandma was
born in Oakland. So we've been in Oakland
for several generations. But I was always proud of it. And I didn't feel-- and I think it was
because I was little. So people were like, your
food is so good and yummy. And like, I was like, oh, yeah. I was kind of proud of that. But I think my-- and similar to Hadar,
my realizations around what it means
to be Sephardic or Mizrahi in Israel and in
America came much later in life. I had the opportunity to
join an organization called Mi'mizrach Shemesh, which
Ben mentioned in my bio. And this organization brings
the texts and writings of Sephardic rabbis
to Israeli society to fight back what we see--
often we see it in our community here that when we think of
Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, we think of, oh, they have
really good food and really good music. And kind of trying to
expand our horizons so that we realize maybe that's
true, but there's so much more. And so, I mean, I really see in
our community, on the one hand, especially in the
Bay area, we really want to give everyone a voice. And we want people to-- we're all about diversity. But I feel like specifically
Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, we don't really know
where we fit in, in the spectrum of Jews of
color or what kind of diversity are we? Like where do we fit in? So yeah. So I think one of
the reasons why I'm passionate about this
work is that it's part of me. It's part of my story. And I don't know how
to speak Kurdish. I mean, it's not called Kurdish. It's like Judeo-Aramaic. But I don't know
how to speak it. My dad didn't speak it to me. And this generation, like all of
my cousins, most of us don't-- even in Israel, most of us don't
know how to speak this language. And I think it's a symbol
of how important it is to continue this tradition
that was passed down to us from our parents. And to not let it die out. And I think there is a risk
here because people don't always know who they are or
where they came from. And one of my
passions is to bring these writings and this
kind of lenient perspective that Hadar, Bouskila talks about
to learning spaces in America. That's it. MAYA SHEMTOV: Thank
you so much, guys. So just really briefly, I'm
curious to hear from all of you. Most of you touched on
this to some extent, but I'm just curious if
you can give us just a few more words on who the
communities that you're working with are. Who is your target
audience for your events? Is it Mizrahi Jews in the US? Where from? What ages is it for the
greater Jewish community? I know a lot, you've
kind of touched on this, but if you could
just go into a few more details about who
you've been working with. RABBI BOUSKILA: Any of us. MAYA SHEMTOV: And maybe
also on that vein, how different, for example,
the Bay Area, Mizrahi community versus LA versus New York. RABBI BOUSKILA:
So I can tell you that my work is in
the United States. I mean, while I do
live in Los Angeles, the Sephardic
Educational Center works with communities all over North
America, Mexico, Turkey as well. And we also work-- Tamar worked for many years. That's how I know Tamar is she
worked with Mi'mizrach Shemesh, the organization. So for the last almost
eight years, we partner, the Sephardic Educational
Center with Mi'mizrach Shemesh and HaRav Shawki, the
head of the Beit Midrash, and running a rabbinical program
in Israel that teaches Israeli rabbis the Sephardic philosophy
and the Sephardic writings that they were never taught
growing up in Israel. They heard a little
bit here and there, but they never learned it. So why do we teach it to
rabbis, Is because rabbis, it empowers rabbis to bring
this to their communities. And primarily these
are not rabbis that are working in Tel
Aviv or in Jerusalem. They're working in what
they call in Hebrew, the peripheria, the peripheral
communities, the border towns, the development
towns where there are heavy populations
of Sephardim, Mizrahim, call them what you will. But even that program,
we've had Ashkenazi rabbis that are in the program
who are very interested in this because there
is a depth of knowledge and a breadth of
knowledge that really we feel it's been our opinion
all along that these-- while these rabbis-- Rabbi Uziel, Rav
Massas, or of others, while they were originally
considered Sephardic rabbis. If you look at all of the
questions that are the burning issues of the
Jewish people today when it comes to women's
issues, when it comes to conversion, when it
comes to the Agunah, when it comes to Jewish
dialogue with Muslims, the Arab-Israeli
conflict politics, you will find built in to these
rabbis answers to just about or potential solutions to just
about every one of these issues. So it's like I say, you know,
classic Jewish problems, classic Sephardic answers,
just find them in the texts and bring them to
the Jewish people, because they were not
writing for Sephardim. They were writing for everyone. So my audience is pretty
global in that sense. MAYA SHEMTOV: Thank you. Maybe Tamar, if you
want to say a few words. TAMAR ZAKEN: Yeah. I mean, I agree with Bouskila. I mean, at Hamakom,
our population is an adult population. But I feel like the
writings of the Hakhamim of these Sephardic sages are
really relevant to everyone because they're like the premise
of many of these writings is that everyone should
be included, like people. It doesn't matter who you are. You're part of the community. And we're not going to-- And That value of
community is very strong. I do feel that,
like I this year, through the-- like I
taught a Wexner fellow and I taught her like
Sephardic sources. And that was like she's my
friend and she wanted to do it. But I don't think
that people realize that this is something that is
missing from their learning. And looking at academia, looking
at our rabbinical schools, I don't-- I think there's a big-- you know how the more you
know-- the more you learn, the more you realize
you don't know. And I don't think that people
are in that perspective. They don't get that this
vast library of writings is missing from what they do. So one of the things I'm
trying to do at Hamakom is to encourage all
of our educators to include in their curriculum
sources from Sephardic rabbis or from Mizrahi poets to
diversify what they're teaching. HADAR COHEN: I love that. Yeah. So for me, when I first
started Feminism All Night, it was based in the
Bay Area in Oakland. And the target audience was
mostly Jews in their 20s and 30s who were looking for spiritual
feminist experiences. And as it's grown
and as I've grown, I realized that I'm
really functioning on two axes like the
spiritual and the political, which I think are really
important when we're talking about Mizrahi, because on
the one hand, it's like, yes, there is-- I mean, for me, I experienced so
much pain and loss about that. There's so much deep,
deep beauty coming from Mizrahi and Sephardic
lineages that are just me as a Mizrahi woman
who wants to deepen my learning around that in the
US, like there's very little places for me to go. Whether it's like
rabbinical institutions or just like spaces of Jewish
education and learning, they're not really integrating
the Sephardic and Mizrahi world. And that to me is
like a huge, huge loss because I think there's
such deep richness there, and particularly around
Jewish mysticism. I always joke that when there's
so much attention about Kabbalah all the time, but it's usually
taught from a very Ashkenazi space. And we're not actually investing
in the Sephardic originations of Kabbalah. So I definitely see my work as
trying to also bring that forth. And I think also from my work,
I've learned a lot of my work is also in the
multi-faith community and in the racial justice world. And I think one of
the things that I feel really grateful
living in the US is that there's a lot of really
interesting conversations between different
groups of people that we can have
that are probably not possible in a lot of
other places in the world. And I think, in
particular like doing a lot of Jewish-Muslim
solidarity work has been really
important for me here. And I always joke around with
my Muslim housemate, who's also Arab and I
identify as Arab too, that a lot of the
initiatives that we see about Jewish and Muslim
relationships are actually not including Arab people in it. It's like Ashkenazi Jews and
Muslims from different parts of the world. So it's a little bit like,
well, you're not really getting to the core thing here. And why is it that there's
still that missing piece? So because I identify as being
both Arab and being Jewish, like I feel like there's
kind of two conversations that I'm having. It's like one with the Jewish
world around my Arabness, but it's also in the Arab
world around my Jewishness, because l I think
one way that I see it is that Arabic feels like a
very important language for me and my people and my family. My grandfather would sing
Jewish prayer music in Arabic. And that's just
what I grew up with. And that's what I love. And that's what I want
to share with the world. But so often, like Arabic
is seen as like, Oh, it's like an Islamic thing. And the Jewish connection
to it is missing. So how do we also bring it
forth in a multi-faith place that Jewishness is actually
not just Ashkenazi-centered, but is more expansive? And then the last thing
I'll just like weave in around the racial
justice piece, which I think is really important,
like right now I'm taking a course for artists
around the intersections of anti-Semitism
and anti-Blackness, which I've been learning a lot. And it's been really interesting
bringing the Mizrahi voice there because I think it's
actually really important. And especially I
grew up in Jerusalem, and I definitely had this
notion like a lot of Mizrahim are thought of and talked
about as being Black in Israel. And with the Black
Panther Party that formed there in collaboration-- in inspiration with the
Black Panther Party here. So like, there's a lot of really
interesting connections there. And it's been really
fascinating working with the Black
non-Jewish community here and bringing the
Mizrahi struggle, too. And just weaving in if we're
talking about this bigger racial justice work, I think
the Mizrahi narrative is really important and ties into also
how we talk about anti-Semitism because so often, the
conversation about anti-Semitism is very Holocaust-centric. And that's really important. And also there's I just am
noticing that for myself, like I want my Jewishness to
be acknowledged in the broader Arab, Muslim world that
is beyond just what it is right now. MAYA SHEMTOV: Thank
you so much, Hadar. There was so much richness
already in the answers that the three of you
gave to that question. I feel like we could go into
so many different conversations here. But I want to just
acknowledge and thank you all for bringing such different
ways of engaging with Mizrahi identity that, as Tamar said,
is beyond food and culture. It's really beautiful to see how
many different initiatives are going on. And building off that and
maybe bringing in, please feel free to respond
to each other as well. And ignoring my question. But I wanted to ask, I
know that in Israel there's often a kind of
perspective that there's been so much progress
with Mizrahi and Ashkenazi bringing the
communities together that it's no longer important
to focus on Mizrahi community-- Mizrahi community issues are
thinking about these things. I think many of us
don't feel that way. But I'm curious
what you feel has-- what progress has been made in
terms of institutional change. I think we've heard
about what you're doing, but a bit more generally, what
progress has been made there. And then what still-- why is this still important? And what more needs to be done. RABBI BOUSKILA: First, if I
want to make a quick comment regarding the Kabbalah. So just as an
informational piece, which reflects on what
was said about that, I recently in the
last couple of months taught an eight-part series
called from Spain to Safford, from Spain to Tzfat, the
Sephardic origins of Kabbalah and mysticism. And I taught it from-- everybody has to understand that
Kabbalah was born 16th century, Kabbalah was born due to
the expulsion from Spain, not due to anything else. The Kabbalists of Tzfat were
all Spanish Jews, Cordovero and Cairo and so
on and Alkabetz, they're all Spanish
Jews paradigm. And that's how
Kabbalah was born. And when I advertised
that class, I got here on these
same little Zoom screen that I'm looking at
about 100 to 150 people a week who were intrigued
and who had never, ever heard of Kabbalah being taught
from that perspective, because it's usually either
taught from a very a pop culture perspective or from
academic perspective. But the Sephardic
origins of it, the fact that every single one
of the rabbis, other than rabbi Yitzchak
Luria, the Ari, who himself was of mixed
heritage, but primarily identified with the
Sephardic tradition, this was a completely
Sephardic Spanish product. The Zohar was written in the
13th century in Spain by Moshe de Leon. So it's very, very important
for people to be aware of that. Beyond that, when you
talk about Israel, so I'm going to tell you
just a quick story if I can. And when you talk about
institutional changes, so I don't live in Israel. So I don't want to start
commenting on how Israelis, for example, completely ignored
the biton committee that they had a few years ago. But that biton where they
made a lot of noise about, the famous Sephardic poet. Erez Biton is going to be
the head of titular, head of a committee,
and they're going to incorporate Sephardic
teachings and rabbis and poems and visits to Sephardic tombs
and all sorts of business. And it's all on the shelf and
there's nothing happening. But I'll instead tell
you an interesting story. There is an institution
in Jerusalem called the Mahon Hartman,
the Hartman institute. And have a very
dear friend who's been living in Israel
for many years. He's a famous writer and author. His name is Josi Klein Halevi. His book recently was Letters
to my Palestinian Neighbor. He's a very, very close
personal friend of mine when he comes to Los Angeles. Often stays in my home. Very close friends. He's created an-- in
the Hartman Institute. He's a fellow at the
Hartman institute, and he created something called
the MLI, Muslim Leadership Initiative. Just like Hartman
brings rabbis to Israel for two weeks every
summer to study, he decided he wanted to do the
same thing with Muslim leaders from the diaspora. Bring them to
Israel for two weeks and get them in on the
conversation about Israel. Not to try to-- it's not an advocacy for Israel,
pro-Israel type of a thing. But just to engage them in
the difficult conversations about Zionism, the
Arab-Israeli conflict. And to do so from
that perspective. And he called me after I think
the second cohort that he had. I happened to be in
Israel that summer. And he said, can
you do me a favor? Can you come and speak
to this group of people? Because I've unfortunately
noticed something, because my colleagues here
at the Hartman institute, they're very well-intentioned. And they helped me
create the curriculum. And they created a
curriculum about Judaism to these Muslim lay
and religious leaders from all over the world. Not just from North America,
but from all over the place. He said they created a
curriculum that is entirely and exclusively Ashkenazi. There is nothing Sephardi
or Mizrahi at all. And here they are in all places
in Israel where, like you said, a good 50% of the Jewish
population of this country, let alone, of course,
the Arab population and the Druze population and
the Palestinian population were in the Middle East. If you spend the 10 days
at the Hartman Institute and the Muslim
Leadership Initiative, there is nothing about
the Sephardic tradition or about the Mizrahi tradition
or the lifestyle of the Jews that come from countries
where many of these Muslims originally come from or
their families come from. So he asked me to come
and try to rectify that in an hour and a half. So I came. And I just want to tell you
very quickly what I did just to make the point, because we
spoke about the Arabic language. When I was a child, I remember
when I was in day school, we had in The Ashkenazi
school that I was in, we used to have this thing
called mock Seders when we were little kids. And we had to practice
the Seder and do so and come to school
a week before Pesach and have a model stay there. And our parents would
come during the day and they would see
all the kids perform little parts of the Seder. So when I was a child in
fourth or fifth grade, I was given the part-- the last song of the Haggadah. That was going to be my
part in the model seder. Had gadya. That's the part I was given. And they said, we want you
to come and to perform it the way you do at home. We want to hear how
you do it at home. And so I'll never forget. My mother was there and
my father was at work. My mother was there. This was back in the 1970s. Fathers worked. Mothers were at home. All the mothers came
to watch the Seder. And we went through the
portions of the Peskov. Said they were singing Ma
Nishtana and all those tunes. And then finally, the
finale, they said, Daniel will now lead us
to conclude Had Gadya. Everybody, please turn to the
last page of the Haggadah. We're going to sing
Had Gadya together. And I did it exactly
the way I grew up doing Haggadah in my house. And I was, I don't know, ten,
11 years old or nine years old. And I started by
saying, [NON-ENGLISH]. Now, they were shocked. They didn't understand
what that was. I'll never forget the
teacher said, what is that? I said, that's the
way my parents do it. What language is that in? I said, it's in Arabic. And I will never forget
that the teacher said, OK, Jews don't speak Arabic,
because at the time, remember, one of the issues about speaking
with an Arabic accent in Israel, those who grew up
in Israel understand that suddenly in the context of
Zionism, when you were speaking with [HEBREW], Hebrew
pronounce properly, you sounded like the enemy. The fact that Maimonides spoke
Arabic and wrote in Arabic and [NON-ENGLISH]
and all the others, this was overlooked
in the world. So when I came to
these Muslim leaders, I decided to open with
Jewish prayers from Shabbat. And they sounded like
this, [NON-ENGLISH]. When I did that, one
of the Muslims did, they opened their hands
and started to pray. And they said,
this is maqam rast. It's exact same tune that
we hear in the mosque. I think sometimes we do a lot of
talking and not enough culture. And through the cultural
language that we have-- food, music,
[INAUDIBLE] and so on, we could probably have made
peace with the Arab world a long time ago, then
all these discussions that have in Washington, D.C. or
in Camp David that lead nowhere. They have the wrong food
also when they serve them. MAYA SHEMTOV: Thank
you, Rabbi Baouskila. It's really beautiful. And I really appreciate
you sharing that story. I want to give Tamar and Hadar a
chance to both respond, but also want to throw in one last
question before we move to Q&A. So maybe if you could
kind of tackle both. I think that in the US
context, it's quite unique. There's different questions
of identity, of ethnicity, of culture. And I wanted to also before we
shift to audience questions, touch on how Mizrahi and
Sephardi Jewish identity overlaps and differentiates
from Jews of color conversations in the US. So please feel free to respond
to the previous question, but also touch on this. And then we'll
shift to open Q&A. TAMAR ZAKEN: So OK. So we should respond to that
question or the one before? Can I just say one thing-- MAYA SHEMTOV: Feel free
to say a few words. TAMAR ZAKEN: No. I was just thinking, like, what
kind of institutional change needs to happen? I don't think that right now
most of our-- like I think, and this actually is a great
segue to the Jews of color question because I feel
like after George Floyd and our Jewish community
maybe realize-- I mean it's been going
on for hundreds of years. But I think George Floyd
was a turning point. And I feel like right now,
the Jews of color issue is front and center. And it's made me think
a lot about, who I am. And am I like, where do
Mizrahim and Sephardim fit in? And one of the things
that I've recognized is how important it is that
we teach these sources. I just remember when I was
in la a couple of years ago with HaRav Buskila,
and it was a Friday night. And Rabbi Marc
Angel was teaching. And I remember he
asked the group. And most of the people
there were Sephardic, he asked them like, what
do you want to preserve from being Sephardic? And what do you want to
pass on to your children? And they all said bourekas. And I was sad. That made me sad. And I feel there's
something very, very [HEBREW], what's the word. [HEBREW] Very special that is going to
be lost if there isn't a change. And so that's one
thing I wanted to say. The other thing about Jews
of color is I think maybe now is an opportunity to come
together with Jews of color and work together at this
intersection of identity to find solutions to
bring all of these voices to our community. I think one of the things that I
learned from the Sephardic sages is that, yeah, another
person can join the table. I mean, we're all-- and it's
not even joining the table. The table is incomplete
without all of the voices. And so I think that's
like my main goal. And hopefully, I'll do
some more working together with Hadar and HaRav
Buskila on these issues. And I'm glad that there's
such wonderful people working on this together with me. HADAR COHEN: Yeah. Thank you. I really resonate with
that, like preciousness that can be lost if we
actually don't engage seriously in this work now. And yeah, about like-- so for me, I feel
like, a lot of times that the way that people
talk about Mizrahi identity is like a cultural thing. It's like, oh, well,
Jewish community. But Mizrahi people do things
culturally in a different way. And I actually think
that's very incomplete because there is racialization
that is happening. If we're talking particularly
about Israel, of course, Mizrahim are
racialized as other. And I think in terms of what
institutional change, it's like, yeah, when Mizrahim actually
have political power, when there isn't issues of housing
and economic like scarcity and all these issues
are so important there. But when we're talking
in the American context, like I think one of the things
that's really interesting here in the US, it's like a
conversation about race is very Black and White. It's like there's White
people and there's Black people and
actually a whole lot of people who are
neither don't really know where their place is. And I think Mizrahim are
part of that question. And for me, instead
of seeing, I think it is really important to
engage in the racial paradigm that the US has created, and
to understand anti-Blackness and how it functions
in all communities. And I think the work
that I'm trying to do is like, well, how do we
deconstruct this understanding that Jews are one way
and actually understand that Jews as a global people
are actually multiracial. We always have been and we
always probably will be. And how do we actually
understand Jewishness as a multiracial thing? And with that, I feel
like there really is two separate avenues
when we're deconstructing this Jew of color conversation. There's one that is about
Whiteness and passing, not passing. And that's kind of
its own conversation. But then there's another about
Ashkenormativity, which to me, I feel is a form of
racism for sure. And I think the Jewish
institutions largely don't see it as such,
even though it is. We are talking about
intense amount of loss that is happening. And I think that
Jewish institutions aren't really real about that. I don't think they have
really fully confronted what's at stake here. I don't think they
have really understood how much Mizrahi
and Sephardi Jews are so left out
of so many things. And I think we're beginning
to scratch the surface of that and something that will take
many, many years to unpack both like the
racial implications, but also the spiritual revival
of these incredible traditions that we come from. RABBI BOUSKILA: If I
could just very quickly, just a one minute
addition to that. I think one of the very,
very key problems that we have to overcome here
in the United States is that I think Sephardy,
Mizrahi, Jewry is to an extent racialized
here in the United states, because every single
time my experience has been when I bring these when
they're interested in having a cultural day. When they want to bake
Sephardic foods and all that. And we dress in
very ethnic colors and wear the colorful
Judaism, for a day or like Black History Month. So we're going to have
Sephardic week in a day school, that kind of a thing. Otherwise, if we bring
the texts like Tamar was talking about that we want
to bring to the day schools and we say, [INAUDIBLE]
said this and this and this, what's their
answer always going to be default,
that's for Sephardim. That's a Sephardic thing. It's not for the Jewish people. That's a barrier that we have
to overcome because they've not only made things
Ashkenormative, they've made things Ashkeexclusive. And unless Sephardim open
their own day school, Sephardic studies
at best will be a week when we want to
have fun and, you know, make noise and
dress up in costumes and not be Western
Jews for a week, see what those other
Jews live like. Otherwise, we're
back to studying Rabbi Soloveichik and
Heschel and Lebowitz because that's
normative Judaism. And that's the biggest
hurdle we have to overcome. MAYA SHEMTOV: Thank you
so much for joining us for this amazing conversation. There's so much to talk about. And I think we managed to
talk about so many things in such a short period of time. So thank you all.
