“I cringe every single time I look at it,” said Layla Rudy, a student at Concordia University. Rudy, who is Syrian Jewish, is talking about an article she wrote about her heritage for the Jewish pop culture website Hey Alma. Now, she regrets it, saying she wrote a “preachy” article because that’s what she felt editors expected from her.
“What bothers me more than anything about this piece is that it caught me at the beginning of an ongoing process of reframing the way I think and talk about my identity,” the writer said. “There was so much I didn’t know.”
When the article was published, Rudy disliked the headline that was placed on it: “When Will Sephardic Syrian Jews Be Part of the Conversation?” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which shares a parent company with Hey Alma, republished her article with a first-person headline, and she disliked that one even more: “The American Jewish story needs to include more non-Ashkenazi Jews like me.”
“It just feels like I’m asking people to listen to me, and not showing them why, which is what I wanted to do,” Rudy said. “I wanted to show you why I’m a voice worth listening to.”
The headlines present a tautology; they refer to a “conversation” and an “American Jewish story,” as if the editors who wrote them aren’t the very same people guiding that conversation and telling that story. By virtue of the fact that this article was published, Sephardic Syrian Jews are “part of the conversation” – the real question is how to advance it.
Rudy’s experience speaks to the sometimes crude way that Jewish media outlets engage with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish stories. Outlets don’t cover non-Ashkenazi communities often enough, and when they do, critics say this coverage rarely lives up to what these communities really care about.
New Voices Magazine spoke to writers and editors — mostly in their 20s — who’ve written or edited for Jewish media outlets about what the problem is and how it might be solved.
Editing personal essays by non-Ashkenazi writers
Personal essays are, by definition, sensitive pieces — and they require sensitive editing. This is especially true in the case of Hey Alma, which focuses on personal essays and might have a more ethnically diverse set of writers than any other Jewish outlet in the United States. In addition to coming from marginalized communities, these authors are often young and eager to get published. (That includes me, the author of this article. I wrote two pieces for Hey Alma two years ago at age 20.)
Molly Tolsky, the editor of Hey Alma, said it’s normal to look back at old writing and cringe. “That’s the nature of writing for the internet,” she said. “I’ve certainly published things that are still out there when I was 20 that I wish weren’t out there, but they are.”
Even so, there are ways to improve the editorial process. Rudy’s editor could’ve told her in advance what headlines they intended to put on her article and given her a chance to express concerns or suggest alternatives. Otherwise, they could’ve pulled a direct quote from her piece for the headline, or written it in the third person rather than the first so that it wouldn’t sound like she’s the one who wrote it.
Tolsky said it’s uncommon for outlets to show headlines to writers before their stories are published, and doing so would slow down the editorial process. There have been times that Hey Alma has changed headlines after publication if the author of the story didn’t like them, but writers rarely express this dissatisfaction.
“You can’t get the entire point of the piece into a headline,” Tolsky said of Rudy’s desire to show readers why she’s a voice worth listening to. “That’s why you have those 1,000 words that come after it.”
Still, Tolsky was open to the idea of sharing headlines before publication. “It’s something I’d be happy to have a conversation with our team to hear if we feel like we should adjust the process at all,” she said. But for writers to dislike the headlines on their stories is very rare. “For now, the standard practice is what’s working for us.”
Editors “definitely could’ve encouraged me to make a pitch out of a topic, and not just preach,” Rudy said. “It’s partly my fault, but also partly theirs.”
“We are not a college publication,” Tolsky said. “I don’t think we’re in the role of teaching people how to write personal essays.” Young adults are still adults and thus capable of making decisions, she said; if someone pitches her a story, she assumes they want to write it.
When Ethiopian Jewish writer Isaac Ofori-Solomon started writing for Hey Alma, he said it was the first time he ever got paid for his writing.
At age 21, Ofori-Solomon wrote a Hey Alma article about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Ofori-Solomon said that even though editors didn’t explicitly ask him to make his story more personal, he believed that sharing his own traumatic experiences would make the story more appealing to editors. “It feels like very often, as a Black person in Jewish spaces, unless you’re willing to really efface yourself, no one’s going to give a shit,” Ofori-Solomon said.
Tolsky said that neither Rudy nor Ofori-Solomon ever voiced these feelings to editors at Hey Alma in the two years since their articles were published, and that she was surprised to hear them. “We take this stuff really seriously,” she said. “I really would have been happy to have these conversations with them.”
‘You never get to just exist as yourself’
Personal essays constitute one type of story, but there are other types, too, in which media outlets often portray Sephardic and Mizrahi communities in a similarly reductive way.
“I think we’re past the point of saying more Mizrahi content needs to be out there. I think we all see that,” said Sophie Levy, the editor of Zaman Collective, a magazine founded in 2019 to tell stories about Middle Eastern Jews. “I think the issue shouldn’t just be representation; we also have to think of the quality of the journalism, not just if a story relates to a certain community, but if it actually elucidates a more complex, layered understanding of that community.”
“When Middle Eastern Jewish topics appear in a lot of publications, generally they tend to concern food, or a horrible experience of persecution, like the Farhud, or Jews being murdered in the Iranian revolution,” Levy said. “That tends to take up the most space.”
“There’s only so many times someone can be like, ‘Here’s 20 Sephardic cookbooks,’ before I feel really sad,” said B., a young Jewish writer who, for fear of retaliation, agreed to speak to New Voices only if she could be identified with her middle initial.
Writing about Mizrahi history also gets tied up with politics. “Some journalists try to advocate for Israeli statehood just by picking up stories of Mizrahi immigrants to Israel,” Levy said. “Conversely, when people want to combat that, they idealize Jewish pasts in the diaspora, which also feels like it has political motives.”
Sometimes, B. said, these outlets paint an overly rosy picture of interreligious solidarity that can get in the way of deeper engagement with troubling parts of history. “I appreciate progressive publications so much, but they have difficulty engaging with Muslim antisemitism,” she said. “You feel personally responsible for proving something or disproving a stereotype, and it becomes tiring because you never get to just exist as yourself.”
“I don’t see a lot of great reporting on things that would be interesting to people in the Sephardi and Mizrahi world,” said Arielle Angel, editor of the progressive magazine Jewish Currents.
For Angel, whose magazine often criticizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, one important reason to cover Mizrahi communities is to push back against an extreme Zionist notion of Middle Eastern Jewish history. She also wants to offer Mizrahi readers a model for how to retain community ties while holding political views that are unpopular in their communities.
“In the op-ed space, I see a lot of weaponized Mizrahi identity, particularly weaponized against other people of color and against Palestinians, often saying things like ‘we’re the real indigenous people, and by extension all Jews are indigenous,’” she said.
B., on the other hand, wants to see more non-political coverage. “Something I find missing from a lot of mainstream American Jewish media is Sephardic philosophy and oral history that doesn’t serve a particular political talking point,” she said.
Freelance writer Nesi Altaras, an editor of the Turkish-language Jewish news site Avlaremoz, said a high standard for timeliness can be a barrier to Sephardic stories.
“A lot of the stories I’m interested in writing about are things that happened that just weren’t reported on at the time, and I find it frustrating that we’re not allowed to go back to those,” he said.
Recruiting Sephardic and Mizrahi writers
Angel, the editor of Jewish Currents, said she feels “continually unsatisfied” with her outlet’s coverage of Mizrahi communities. She said that three things prevent her from being able to recruit more Sephardic and Mizrahi writers: the small size of these communities in the U.S., their relative lack of institutional representation, and the fact that people who share Jewish Currents’s progressive politics are often pushed out of these communities in such a way that may prevent them from writing for Jewish media outlets.
For Angel, recruiting Mizrahi writers means finding academics and people who live outside the U.S., such as in Israel or Europe. Angel keeps up with Sephardic and Mizrahi activism at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace, two groups that align with her magazine’s political mission. She said she’s thinking about how to recruit people without writing experience if they have an important story to tell. But for now, Angel said that as far as she knows, Jewish Currents doesn’t have any regular Sephardic or Mizrahi reporters.
Currents’s recent Soviet-themed issue featured a somewhat unusual note in its opening letter. “Although the committee made efforts to bring in more non-Ashkenazi voices, these stories remain underrepresented in this issue, and deserve more treatment than afforded here,” the letter says. While the note is an admission of failure, publishing it reflects genuine care.
However, efforts to find Mizrahi writers for that issue were not entirely fruitless. Instead of waiting passively for Mizrahi writers to pitch her, Angel spoke with an Ashkenazi writer who’d pitched a story related to Juhuri, the language of Mountain Jews. The story pitched didn’t suit Jewish Currents, but the writer put Angel in touch with young Mountain Jews whom the magazine then featured in its Office Hours section, a section that usually focuses on older people.
Tolsky, the Hey Alma editor, was also active in reaching out to Jewish writers from diverse backgrounds. “We had to search for writers who were already writing about these things, maybe on their own personal blogs, or people who were tweeting about these things. I’d reach out to them and say ‘hey, I saw you tweet about this — would you want to write an article for Hey Alma about it?’”
Another way editors might find Sephardic and Mizrahi writers is by recruiting student-journalists from universities with diverse Jewish communities, such as CUNY, UCLA, Yeshiva University and more.
“We’re talking about a niche of a niche of a niche,” Angel said. “It doesn’t mean people aren’t out there; it just means that it’s harder.”
Levy, the Zaman editor, said that Jewish media outlets need to build relationships with non-Ashkenazi communities, not just reach out to potential writers individually. This way, outlets will not only have more Sephardic and Mizrahi writers, but also readers to engage with their work and potentially offer news tips.
“What has to happen isn’t just reaching out to individual writers but making more of an effort to integrate a community into a publication’s broader readership,” Levy said. “That’s how people start to trust a journalistic outlet.”
“If you have a writer who does have a connection to that community, don’t just ask them to write for you. If you hire them, work with them to have events open to that community in their city, form partnerships with Jewish institutions they’re more familiar with, and work with their synagogues,” Levy added. “There’s an ecosystem of ideas that should be open there, and that’s cultivated more deliberately with Ashkenazi communities than with Mizrahi communities.”
Altaras, the Avlaremoz editor, has worked with publications to help them improve their coverage of Sephardic communities. “Once you establish a relationship with a publication, sometimes they will come to you with questions, and that can be tokenistic,” he said. “But there are good ways to do that as well. It shows a really good intentionality of wanting to be inclusive, and as long as creators and consultants are paid for their time, I think that’s good.”
B. wants to see Jewish publications connecting with more Sephardic institutions and hiring more Sephardic women, partly because Sephardic communities might be more willing to open up to journalists who share their background.
“The question is, are you willing to put money into that? Are you willing to fund that?” B. said. “I think the answer, for the sake of journalistic integrity, should be ‘yes.’”
B. suggested connecting with Sephardic communities through the American Sephardi Federation; Levy suggested the Sephardic Brotherhood. Even a public library in a neighborhood with a diverse Jewish population could be a good partner for events, shoutouts or special subscription offers.
Rudy said she thinks representation is important, but it can do only so much.
“I would feel so much better if there were Sephardic and Mizrahi people that I could turn to, like having a professor that’s Sephardic or Mizrahi, or being able to talk to an editor that’s Sephardic or Mizrahi,” Rudy said. “It’s different because there’s that foundation of knowledge that we all have where I don’t need to explain to you what being Syrian Jewish is or why it’s important to talk about being Syrian Jewish or non-Ashkenazi.”
At the same time, having just one person of a certain group represented can put undue pressure on that individual.
“I feel limited, but also pressured to say everything,” Rudy said. “I’m not a representation of anything except for myself, really.”
Altaras also pointed out that just because someone is Sephardic or Mizrahi doesn’t mean they’ll be able to express that identity in a way that improves an outlet’s coverage. “People are so thoroughly Americanized, and being American means being Ashkenazi,” he said.
Angel, who has Greek and Palestinian heritage, said something similar in an introduction to an interview with Sephardic studies scholar Devin Naar. “Naar contacted me to point out instances of what he calls ‘dissimulation,’ moments when I’ve missed an opportunity to assert a Sephardic or Mizrahi perspective… thus erasing myself—and those like me,” she wrote.
So while one thing Jewish outlets can do is hire more Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, the solution is a bit more complicated. Trusting News, a project aimed at helping journalists earn the trust of communities they cover, offers a list of interview questions hiring managers can ask applicants to better understand how they think about diversity and how their identities might inform their coverage.
It’s up to writers and journalists from all backgrounds to help expand and improve Jewish media coverage of non-Ashkenazi communities. Often, Jewish immigrants in these communities get their news from unreliable sources such as WhatsApp and Facebook. They can just as easily read Jewish news outlets if these outlets incorporate them into their idea of community.
Featured photo by Nick Fewings via Unsplash.
