Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really, really big questions that people ask about Judaism, about Israel, about the Jewish experience. We don’t have it all figured out, but this show is our way of trying to figure everything out together, to wonder together and ultimately to grow together.
Mijal, I am going to be asking you some questions about something that you were very involved in as it relates to research and the story of this Sephardic experience in the United States.
Mijal: Yes. I directed a study.
Noam: Yes, tell me about this study that you directed. What’s the name of this study?
Mijal: So it’s a study that I directed based at NYU. Uh, I did it as a visiting researcher at the Wagner School of Public Policy. It was commissioned by an organization called JIMENA. Um, and it involved a team of researchers from around the world and academic advisory committee, practitioners, all of that. And it’s, um, basically the first of its kind, like a study that wants to understand at a national level, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States, not in Canada. So not North America, but in the United States, okay
Noam: So it’s kind of a big deal.
Mijal: I think so. I think it’s a really important contribution.
Noam: So this is what I wanna figure out with you. You and I have been talking about this for a while. Like you’ve been excited for this to come out and you’ve been working hard on it for a while and I’m sure a lot of people have been working hard on it. So it really is a big deal. And I wanna understand first and foremost, what was it that you were trying to figure out?
Mijal: So maybe I’ll take you to a story that I wrote about in the introduction to the report.
Noam: That’s great.
Mijal: When I was just beginning my graduate studies, maybe, I don’t know, 13 years ago or so, I remember very clearly going to this important lecture by a world renowned historian. And it was a seminar, wasn’t a huge crowd. And he had this big whiteboard in front of him, and he was going to describe to us the big trends shaping Jewish modernity. Where we came from, what were our big issues, what were our disagreements, our divergences, where could we be going? And it was masterful. He was just going from place to place and charting. It was a two-hour thing.
And I remember the whole time waiting patiently, not because I thought I was entitled to it from my own identity, but because I was like, makes sense, he’s going to get there, that he was going to talk about Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, about Jews from Spain, Jews from the Middle East, about the way that we’ve approached modernity, what we contribute to the Jewish story right now.
And he never got there, Noam. He never got there. And I sat there and I…
Noam: How long ago was this?
Mijal: 13 years ago, but that experience repeated itself and it just made me realize it wasn’t only that there’s like a gap in the scholarship, it was that there was almost like ignorance that there is a gap in the scholarship. So you can have people who are telling this amazing sweeps, you know what I mean, of history and I felt that this wasn’t just like a problem for me as a Sephardic Jew, but as somebody who wants to understand the Jewish story and who wants to help Jews understand where we can go, what the possibilities are in front of us. If you’re missing major, major parts of that story, you can’t do that. So I felt this was like a real problem that had to be addressed.
And I ended up writing my doctorate on a Syrian Sephardic community. They are realizing how little scholarship existed. And I’ll say, sorry, it’s a long answer, but one more thing. I kept, especially after the murder of George Floyd and questions around race and identity in America came up, I would just get nonstop emails from lovely, generous rabbis, heads of schools, principals, camp directors. And they would tell me, we really want to be more inclusive. Can you help us?
And my challenge was that, of course, there is some valuable scholarships and books here and there, but I couldn’t offer them a centralized resource that would introduce them to who Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are and that would help them think better about what it means to include them.
Noam: So what you were trying to accomplish in this study was making sure that what happened to you 13 years ago wouldn’t happen again because there would be this moment of, there can’t be ignorance anymore. Now we have a study to actually go through the history, the understanding of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews.
Mijal: Yeah, would say the study is not comprehensive. It would be tragic if it’s like the last, the first and last one, you know? But a lot of it is trying to establish like foundational knowledge, like very, very basic things that are important for scholars, but also for practitioners.
Noam: So I have empathy for this teacher who taught 13 years ago because I can imagine myself when I was teaching in schools that…
Mijal: No, he should have known better. Okay.
Noam: Okay, fine. Should have known better, but I’m saying I can imagine making that mistake, is what I’m trying to say. And there should be a reckoning for those kinds of mistakes, but not a reckoning and not just like self-flagellation, but a commitment to learning about this and understanding it. And I think that maybe that’s something that’s taking place over the last five to 10 years. Would you say that that’s improved?
Mijal: I would say that especially in the liberal parts of the Jewish community, there has been a recognition that we have to do better. But by the way, I’ll say one more thing here. Part of what I wanted to do here, Noam, is that I felt that in many efforts towards greater inclusion, diversity, a lot of it used to be under the umbrella of DEI in many spaces. I felt and saw very clearly that those efforts were not built in a way that could actually accommodate and include Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. So part of this was an intervention, both in terms of some foundational knowledge and also in terms of saying inclusion needs to be done a certain way.
So we heard, for example, in our interviews, we would have individuals who said, we don’t fit into those inclusion efforts, or those inclusion efforts really treat me in a way that I don’t want to go back. So some of this is really trying to take that seriously.
Noam: You keep using the terms Sephardic and Mizrahi.
Mijal: Yes.
Noam: So I think I have a good understanding of the differences between the two. But I think a lot of people don’t. I mean, a lot of people just will make the mistake of using these terms interchangeably. Maybe that’s because it happens very often.
I’ll just tell you a quick story. I was giving a talk in Seattle and I was gonna talk about the Mizrahi experience. I was like, oh, I get you guys. Yeah, in Seattle. And it’s a big Turkish Sephardic community there. I was gonna, I said, I’m so excited to give a talk about the Mizrahi experience in Israel, in Seattle. And they’re like, no, no, no. Not happy.
Mijal: Wrong topic, not that it’s just not relevant for us. We’re not Mizrahi, we’re Sephardic.
Noam: So what is the difference between Sephardic and Mizrahi?
Mijal: Yeah, so this was actually one of the trickiest things to really take on because a lot of this… we often look at social categories and we treat them as though they are fixed, but social categories evolve. So I would say that both these categories, Sephardic and Mizrahi, are categories that are still a little bit unfixed even right now. But Sephardic is a term that comes from the Bible, book of Ovadia, it’s there.
Noam: As in the minor profits?
Mijal: Yes. And it was originally used by Jews living in Spain, in the Iberian Peninsula. They saw this word, Sepharad, because of the way it described a certain diaspora. They said, is talking about us. And they began using it for themselves.
The term Sephardic becomes, so it becomes used for space, a geographic space, a civilization, and it also begins to be used as a way of talking about like a halachic school of thought. I’m talking about Jewish law and Jewish customs.
So in medieval times, you have emerging two centers of Jewish law in the world. Okay. So you’ve got Ashkenaz. So, you know, like a France and Germany, and you’ve got.
Noam: Ashkenaz is the term for Germany. Right?
Mijal: Ashkenaz actually means Germany. I’m talking about the rabbis that emerged in those places. So you begin to, so again, you’re beginning to use the word Sepaharad not only about a country and a civilization, but also there’s this two legitimate centers of Jewish law and this is one of them. Okay, Sephardi.
Then because of migration, right? So you end up having Jews migrating from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, all over the world. So you’ve got some of them end up in Italy, in Amsterdam, in England, in the Ottoman Empire, all over the Middle East, North Africa. Many of them bring very strong Sephardic traditions and end up influencing their surroundings.
So for example, in Syria, which is the country that I studied most, had the native Jews were Musta’arabim. They had lived there for a very long time, but then you’ve got
Noam: Otherwise no explain what Musta’arabi Jews really means, translate.
Mijal: Most likely it was like the way that to speak locally about the Jews that had lived in Syria, a community lawyer said they had been there since biblical.
Noam: It sounds like hey’re integrated into Arabic society is that not
Mijal: Yes, in some ways, many of these communities had cultural integration but social segregation between Jews, Muslims and other minorities. But the point that I’m trying to make, Noam, is that you’ve got a Sephardic group that ends up going there, right, after the explosion, and they end up having a very strong cultural influence. So there’s a very long way of saying that today, Sephardic refers to individuals who see themselves either as descending from Sephardic Jews or as belonging to communities that have Sephardic law and customs, or in some cases, it’s become an umbrella category to say not Ashkenazi.
Noam: Right. OK. So you’ve got a lot.
Mijal: OK, now let me say Mizrahi and then we can we can tease this out. The term Mizrahi did not exist the way that we talk about Middle Eastern Jews before the 20th century.
Noam: That’s interesting.
Mijal: Right. it’s a totally different ballgame. Sephardic, again, it’s a biblical category, really rises in medieval times, but Mizrahi is a very, very modern term, and it emerges specifically in Israel. And it emerges in Israel, again, the history of it is complicated, but in a very shallow way. It is the way that the Ashkenazi hegemonic majority looks at these Middle Eastern and North African Jews, and they say, these are communities from the east, Edot hamizrach.
It’s not a geographical statement. It is a values statement. Morocco was like in the West of Israel. It’s a value statement of basically saying, you know, the West is more enlightened, you are less. Eventually becomes reappropriated as Mizrahi.
And today in Israel, so most Middle Eastern North African Jews would speak of themselves as Mizrahi. They might also say they’re Sephardic when talking about Jewish law and custom, right?
And especially if they’re Haredi. So my Haredi family in Israel, that’s Middle Eastern descent, they don’t use Mizrahi, they say Sephardic. It’s a more traditional way to talk about yourself. The reason you had an issue with the Seattle community, Noam, is that Turkish Jews and Jews from the former Ottoman Empire, they moved to America before the term Mizrahi even emerged. Same thing with the Syrian community in Brooklyn that I studied. So they never went through the Israeli experience that made them think of themselves as Mizrahi.
The last thing I’ll say on the last of this monologue is that in some places, the term Mizrahi has caught on. So it becomes a little bit tricky right now. Like I can’t, I wanted to just say in America, use Sephardic, can use Mizrahi. But I couldn’t because number one, there’s some places where people are beginning to use Mizrahi for different reasons. Number two, there are some studies that have used the term Mizrahi in a way that if I want to take data from them, so for example, UJA Federation study of New York Jewry, put Sephardic and Mizrahi as one category. So if I want to use data from their study, I can’t say it’s just Sephardic because they combine the categories.
Noam: Do you identify, if someone says to you though, Mijal Bitton, are you a Sephardic Jew? You would say, if someone says to you, Mizrahi Jew? You would say.
Mijal: Yeah. No, I did not grow up with that category.
Noam: Also, just a question that I’m just thinking of, tell me if I’m totally wrong. Does Sephardic carry a connotation somewhat of dignity and Mizrahi have a connotation of the Mizrahim, the Mizrahi Jews that moved to Israel and were integrated into Israeli society. They had discrimination, they had challenges of being and this is in the study to this day, they have challenges of full integration into Israeli society. So is there an element of Sephardic character? I think of, when I think Sephardic, I think of Maimonides. That’s what I think, that’s what comes to my mind. There’s this dignity of, when I think of Sephardic also, I think of the first Jews that moved to the US and built synagogues in the Western hemisphere. That’s how I think of it. And when I think of Mizrahi, this is what comes to my mind, it’s I think of this integration into Israeli society.
I think that Israeli society kind of caught on to it and it became very popular now. It’s 50 % of Israeli Jewry is Mizrahi, in your study you had 10 % of American Jews are Sephardic. It’s just like… Mizrahi. Oh, or Mizrahi, right.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I think that that makes sense. Now, let me add one more thing to what you’re saying. It’s not just about, you know, more traditional dignity. But part of the reason why some people like Mizrahi in America, and I’ve seen this especially in activist progressive circles, is that they associate Mizrahi with an activist struggle. So they want to use Mizrahi because they want to associate themselves with an activist struggle against the hegemony.
So that’s partially why I think like in very progressive spaces, especially you will see Mizrahi really emphasize that.
Noam: Interesting. Okay, so the different communities that you studied, you had South Florida where I live and that you studied the Latin Sephardic community there. In LA you studied the Persian community there which is popular. In Queens you studied the Bukharian Jewish community and in Brooklyn you studied the Syrian Jewish community.
Mijal: Yeah, so I’ll just say the study had some national aspects, so like quantitative data, some theoretical descriptions and history. And then the second part of the study was doing in-depth community portraits. So for each of these communities, like you mentioned, Noam, we went in, we interviewed people, we did site visits, and we tried to do like in anthropology, we would call it like a thick description of a particular community.
And really, it was really important to me, Noam, that I had some principles to the research. So one of my principles was that I wanted to highlight diversity within diversity. Because very often, like I find, like I speak as a Latina, for example. So you’ll have people who speak about Latinos as if they’re all the same. We’re talking about millions of millions of people and different cultures and different countries. So it was important for me to construct the study in a way that highlighted diversity without making it very shallow and pretending everyone’s the same. So we wanted to do like a thick description of communities.
Noam: So could you give me a top line, I don’t know if this is painting people with a wide brush, like what you just said not to do, what, like I was just in New York, I took my son to get a haircut and it was a hair, it was a, the whole store was Bukharian Jews giving my son, giving a haircut. Popular profession.
Mijal: It’s popular profession.
Noam: We, Unpacked, made a video about the history of Bukharian Jews. I had him watch that video while getting a haircut. It’s a very popular video. They thought it was fascinating. didn’t care. were like, oh, whatever. Jews have a lot of diversity. Sephardic Jews have a lot of diversity within the diversity. Could you give me a top line distinction between, I know each of them in the study, I read this, each of them fled in certain… Or left. Or either fled or left, but it seems like there was a lot of fleeing challenges in Iran, it was 79, the Islamic Revolution, Syria, there were challenges of being fully integrated and there was a lot of discrimination. The Bukharian Jews also the same thing. The Latin Sephardic community, I didn’t understand if they were fleeing something outside of like economic turmoil. so.
Mijal: So, you know, when we talk about immigration, we talk about push and pull factors, right? What pushes you out of a certain place, what pulls you in, let’s say, to America. It was important for us to highlight that each of these communities came in a different way. Some of them, like you said, the Iranian community, most of the people we interviewed described themselves as fleeing.
Noam: Interesting you said the Iranian community, not Persian.
Mijal: Sorry, I should say Persian.
Noam: No, the reason I say that is because I grew up in Baltimore Yeah, and I never heard the term the Persian community, I I always heard the term the Iranian community in Baltimore. And then when I moved to LA I only heard about the Persian community
Mijal: That’s a good catch actually. So it’s funny because we had to make a lot of choices. So historians, for example, will often write Iranian. But when we interviewed people, they said, we prefer to use Persian because that is like our internal language to describe the Jewish experience.
Noam: Interesting.
Mijal: So there were lot of nuances because we really tried to capture… Right, …internal language. But, so South Florida, the reason that… I chose these four communities and one unifying thread is that all four of them have been shaped by post-65 immigration. So 1965 is the year in which immigration policy becomes more liberalized in America. So a lot of the diversity that we know of in America today in terms of immigration is post-65. But that was interesting because it was a secondary migration. So you’ve got…
My family is similar. We didn’t go to South Florida, but my family left.
Noam: Yet.
Mijal: Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to happen. No, I think I’m allergic to Florida. My, my, my great grandparents left Syria and Morocco and they moved to Argentina. And eventually we moved to America. So we we met a lot of individuals whose families came from from Turkey, from Morocco, from Syria.
And many of them moved to Latin America either for business opportunity or because America’s doors were closed. And many, some of them were fleeing persecution. Some went because of economic prospects. And then they end up, many of them face political instability or economic challenges and they moved to South Florida. So it’s like a double migration.
Noam: So that’s the distinct one is South Florida. But are you able to say, again, like Bukharian Jews have from the study of either economically or more like this, Syrian Jews are more like that, Persian Jews are more that, also like integrated into broader Jewish society? I don’t know that’s even.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I mean it is there is a difference between quantitative and qualitative tools.
Noam: You’re bringing me back. Sorry. me back to grad school, you’re doing this?
Mijal: So instead of, so we don’t have like, you know, a representative poll in which I can do perfect comparisons, but we spent enough time talking to people that we felt comfortable describing a culture. So for example, some things that the Syrian community in Brooklyn emerged very clearly as maybe one of the most institutionally advanced communities. They’ve been here the longest also. So they have built very strong institutions and they are very independent, fiercely independent. The Bukharian community is a much more recent community and we learned a lot there about the family networks that sustain it. And also there’s a lot of efforts right now to try to figure out we need infrastructure. And sometimes they build their own and sometimes they want, let’s say, social services from Federation, but if Federation doesn’t understand how Bukharian Jews think about particular issues, right, you need some translation there.
Noam: The Persian community in Los Angeles, to me, was really interesting. I’ll just say one thing, that it’s one of the only Sephardic communities that I know of that truly has a lot of denominational influences from all denominations.
Mijal: So denominations are Ashkenazi. Most Sephardic Jews, we didn’t have them in our country. So let’s say the Bukharian and Syrian community, have traditional and then you have Orthodox. in LA you could be Persian and then be a big part of the conservative synagogue.
The Orthodox. Right. Right. So that is pretty unique to that community. And also you have a lot of people who identify as secular in a way that you wouldn’t have in some of these other communities where they would say traditional. South Florida was less of a community and more like a population concentration. That sounds right. With a lot of synagogues that end up becoming anchors. South Florida.
Noam: That feels like that’s on par for… That’s a south… That feels very south-farn.
Mijal: Right. And Chabad also was a very, very big part of the story.
Noam: Okay, so I want to ask you about something about a perception that I have It comes from the study so it’s not so much a perception. But you you mentioned that 10 % of American Jewry is Sephardic or Mizrahi. Which means around anywhere from six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand depending on your
Mijal: Yeah. And that’s an estimate, by the way, that we have. We didn’t do like original quantitative research, but we did a secondary analysis of existing data. And so that’s like a working estimate, yeah.
Noam: So I was wondering why the following, here this comes up in the study. One, higher rates of communal participation than the rest of the Jewish community. That Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, broadly speaking in the U.S. have higher rates of communal participation. Number two, stronger connection to Israel than the Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. Number three, being Jewish as part of your daily life is more prominent than in Ashkenazi communities and number four is lower intermarriage rates.
Now it sounds, tell me if I’m wrong that the first three would lead to the fourth in many ways but why are these communities more in each of these areas than my Ashkenazi communities?
Mijal: And I would say those are figures from quantitative data that we have. And if you look at the community portraits, you see that on steroids. So I’m saying that’s even just talking about all Sephardic Jews across America. And then when you go to some communities, you will have much more of everything you just said.
So this is me just offering my hypothesis of the way that I think about this. But I think that Sephardic Jews because of a lot of historical reasons, including the countries that our families lived in, including the fact that we didn’t go through emancipation and enlightenment in the same way. So there’s a lot of reasons for this. But we, and you see this in Israel, we have a Judaism that is much, much more collectivist. It’s much more about being part of a group than it is about like an individual faith.
Noam: Which is more Protestant.
Mijal: You can say that in this context. So there’s it’s much more collectivist. One way to think about this. There’s an anthropologist called Richard Shweder. Sorry, I’m going to bring you back to school again.
Noam: This is Richard Shweder.
Mijal: Thank you. But when he looked at cultures around the world, he said we can divide them into three, depending on what is their most like significant moral kind of like framework. So he said some are in some the individual rights are very individualistic. Okay. In some, it’s all about divinity and God. And in some, it’s about the collective, right? The group.
So I would say that many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have an identity that is very collectivist. It’s about the group. And when it’s about the group, it leads to a lot of implications about what it means to be Jewish, what your responsibility is. There’s no question about a commitment to Israel because it’s a commitment to your family who just lives in a different country. So there’s something there. In all of our interviews, by the way, what came across the board is the paramount importance of family. Again, I don’t want to generalize too much, but in many Sephardi communities, children choose to live next to their parents, which is not…
Noam: Do they not go to university far away as often as Ashkenazim also?
Mijal: Depends on the community. In some communities they won’t. They’ll stay nearby.
Noam: I remember that back in my principal days, our Persian students in LA were much more reluctant to either go, this is interesting, either to go to Israel for the year, which is something that a lot of Ashkenazi Jews do, after they graduate high school they go to Israel for the year and study before they go to university, and the Persian Jews were much more reluctant, the parents.
And then when they went to university in LA, they would go to either SMC, Santa Monica College, or UCLA, or USC, somewhere local. And they often didn’t leave the house as well. They would still live there. In the Ashkenazi community, that was incredibly rare. And again, I’m gonna do the caveat. Painting with a broad brush, whatever the phrase is.
Mijal: Yeah, but I’ll say like, part of, in the Syrian community in Brooklyn when you go to shul and they say shul by the way I see You see like grandparents and children and grandchildren sitting together in shul. Yeah, and it’s a thing. That’s amazing and it’s like It’s a it’s a it’s it’s different model for how to live life
Noam: I can’t even imagine that. My grandfather is in Jerusalem, was in Jerusalem, my father is in Baltimore, and I’m wherever I’ve been in my life. Like, we don’t even think that way. Maybe we should more. Maybe we should more.
Okay, my last question for you from this study, just something that I found surprising. So, I, in the past, I know we’ve spoken about this, but in different communities, different conferences I’ve been to, I thought that Mizrahi Sephardic Jews were considered Jews of color or used the term Jews of color. This study made me think I got that wrong. So they don’t like, not they, they, and again, individuals are individuals, but broadly speaking, from what you found, Sephardic Mizrahi Jews in the U.S. do not like being called Jews of color.
Mijal: So we found a lot of consensus in both quantitative research and in the interviews that we did that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews generally do not use Jew of color or person of color. It doesn’t mean by the way that they all are white. You can have, I’ll include myself here, right, that I don’t check off white.
Noam: What do you check off?
Mijal: Usually other.
Noam: Other’s an option? I gotta pay more attention.
Mijal: Yeah. But and the census might change, by the way, to allow for like a Middle Eastern or North African category.
Noam: What would I be? Noam, not.
Mijal: What would you be?
Noam: Yeah.
Mijal: That’s a big question.
Noam: I know, I’m asking you what your answer is, I’m asking you for the answer.
Mijal: I would ask you, would do what I did in my interviews, which is in our interviews we actually brought the census questionnaire and we said, what would you choose? So we asked about the racial and ethnic options from the census and we also asked
Noam: People would be offended by that I asked that question. They’d like you’re white, you moron. So that’s what you should.
Mijal: That’s what I should say.
Noam: No, I’m just saying I just so that the viewer doesn’t or listener doesn’t make a mistake of calling me a moron, I called myself that first so that they don’t have to.
Mijal: Right, as first and only. Yeah.
Yeah, what we found is that the overwhelming overwhelming majority of the April we interviewed and Many of them never heard of the category of Jew of color, right? And then the other thing that was really interesting to me, Noam, is that many of them, there were some people that we interviewed that were annoyed at the question. They’re like, why are you asking me about race? I had this person from South Florida on the phone and he was asking me, what kind of questions are you gonna ask? So I gave an overview and I said, we ask about this, we ask about that, we ask about race and ethnicity.
And he’s like, that is such an East Coast elite question. We do not care about these things. We do not think of ourselves in these divisions. Why are you trying to divide us?
And there was something very interesting there because part of what this represents to me, Noam, is beyond like the empirical finding that we found that most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from the data that we have do not identify with this term is also that a lot of the language used, I’m going to say, in more progressive academic and activist circles doesn’t actually capture the diversity of the people that we were studying.
I’ll give you one more example, if it’s OK. We had people saying, I don’t want to go to this inclusion things because they treat me like I’m a victim. I’m not a victim. Yeah, fine, you don’t include me the way you should, but I’m not a victim. Don’t treat me like that.
Noam: Pride.
Mijal: Yeah, like you come and learn from me. I’ll have what to teach you. So one of the things that we did, if anyone is more interested, is we have in the recommendations, we actually have like five paradigm shifts that we recommend for anybody who wants to do diversity work. So one of them is, for example, don’t just think about race and ethnicity, think about multiple vectors of diversity, like migration, right? Or don’t just assume that everybody has the same values, let’s say liberal and progressive values.
Most of the people we interviewed were very deeply socially conservative. And if you do inclusion efforts that are only progressive, going to capture them. You’re going to alienate them. We had people who said that they walked away from partnership with Ashkenazi institutions because Ashkenazi institutions were using DEI frameworks, ironically, that were meant to include them, but they felt excluded by those frameworks.
Noam: Complicated stuff. Okay, so my last question is what now?
Mijal: Like, are we hoping to get from this? I think, I’ll tell you my what now. My what now is a lot of people don’t know who Jews are. Right. What Jews are.
Yes. they disagreed
Noam: They don’t, a lot of us, within the Jewish community and outside the Jewish community, I think that this study, having read it, thank you for giving me the homework to read it, having gone through it, studied it. I think like, okay, now I have a much, and I’m like, I study Judaism seriously, I have a much richer appreciation for and understanding of Jewish life in the US, broadly, because until this study, I had, my understanding of the story of the Jewish life in the US, but this study helped me say, okay, let me broaden this, let me understand it better, and then as a result of that, it’s not that I understand Sephardic Jews better, I understand Jews better.
Mijal: Yeah, that’s what we hope, that’s what I hope for. Yeah, I think there’s some efforts underway to help different organizations figure out how to apply this if they want to not just be better informed, but be able to think seriously about what it means to make spaces that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews feel at home in. So that’s the hope. Thanks, Noam.
Noam: Thanks, Mijal.