Walking through the crowded shuk on a Friday morning in Ramleh, an Arab and Jewish town in the center of Israel, I heard a familiar tune blasting from a dated boom box up ahead. I was suddenly taken back to Magen David, the Sephardic and Mizrachi shul I went to as a kid. I looked over at my friend to see if she was having the same reaction to the guttural cries of “Aneinu,” the tune I looked forward to hearing every Yom Kippur. Absorbed in the spice rack, Rebecca experienced it as just another taste of the market.
At that moment, as I was jostled by hordes of pre-Shabbat fruit and vegetable shoppers, I remembered why coming to Israel continues to be so powerful for me. In the States, experiences infused with Middle Eastern culture do not present themselves the way they do in Israel.
In Israel, a Jewish state in the Middle East, the two usually conflicted aspects of my identity can finally merge. I hear Arabic-inflected Hebrew the way my grandfather spoke and prayed in it. I buy machbouz cookies on the streets, almost as good as the ones my grandmother baked every Friday morning.
Living as a Mizrachi Jew in America has proven to be quite alienating at times, given that the majority of my Jewish peers are Ashkenazi. When people ask. I tell them that I’m Jewish, but that my parents are from Iran. I say “but” instead of “and” because for most people who haven’t had the good fortune to come from Great Neck, NY or Los Angeles (aka Tehrangeles), Jews from a Muslim country seem a massive contradiction.
Even my own identification as a Persian Jewess is complicated given that all four grandparents were born and raised in Iraq until they were pushed out, between 1948 and 1951, upon the establishment of Israel. People are often surprised that people “like me” even exist, and are then jealous that I can eat corn and rice on Passover. That is what being non-Ashkenazi means to them.
Culinary tastes aside, I never got the sense that my peers related to Judaism the way I did. Along with the rest of the Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews in my area, my family went to an Orthodox temple, even though we were hardly even practicing. While all of my Ashkenazi friends goofed around outside services at their Conservative synagogues, I sat in the basement of a converted house on the side of a busy road, at the only Sephardic synagogue around, and played cards and hopscotch with the little kids to pass the time.
Being a first generation American only added to my sense of misplacement. Most Mizrachi kids of my generation were also the first of their families born in the US. I vividly recall the hyperactive redhead in my ninth grade geometry class calling my dad Saddam Hussein while everyone else laughed. They still didn’t see the irony when I explained how Saddam feels about Jews.
But was it Gingy’s fault that he didn’t know about the rise of anti-Semitism that coincided with the Holocaust and then worsened upon the establishment of Israel, when “Zionist” was equated with “Jew”? By ninth grade, after all, I didn’t even know my own history. Despite ten years of Jewish education, everything I learned about the Jews of North Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America came from home.
And despite the blissful affirmation I felt in the Ramleh shuk, I know better than to be swept away by nostalgia. Mizrachi Jews who came to Israel with promises of green plots of land and Jerusalem of Gold were plopped down in the middle of the night for months on end, in desert tent colonies. This lowly beginning allowed for continual discrimination against Mizrachi Jews, who largely came from trade or agricultural backgrounds and lacked the educated sophistication of their Ashkenazi counterparts.
Such prejudice continues to be a shameful part of Israeli society, as the periphery of modern Israel continues to be populated by Mizrachim. The stratification is seen in common parlance, and is seen in the racialized slang term “arsim,” which refers to young Mizrachi troublemakers. Despite the musical and culinary bliss of Ramleh, my time in Israel has been a constant reminder of the Mizrachi/Ashkenazi divide. In Israel, the music, food, and art that remind me of home are categorized as “ethnics,” a Hebraicized English word that means “everything that is not white European.”
Yup, that’s me.
