In Memory of René Cassin, A”H, the French Sephardi jurist, professor, President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, as well as recipient of the Croix de Guerre and the Noble Peace Prize, whose co-creation, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, turned 73 on 10 December.
The Sephardi World Weekly is made possible by Professor Rifka Cook, Maria Gabriela Borrego Medina, Rachel Amar, Deborah Arellano, and Distinguished ASF Vice President Gwen Zuares!
Click here to dedicate a future issue in honor or memory of a loved one
😏 “Jesus was Ashkenazi”
By Isaac de Castro, Jewcy
(Photo courtesy of Jewcy)
Isaac de Castro has fun with various absurdities arising from “absolutely everyone” trying “to claim the lord and savior as theirs. I mean, we’re all obsessed with ‘representation’… Jesus has been Black. He has been Asian. He has been Irish… OH, and lest I forget, Jesus has… been Palestinian.” The last one is prize-worthy in its silliness: “Jesus could not have been Palestinian because Palestine did not exist in his lifetime… [T]he term ‘Palestine’ wasn’t used until more than a century after his death.” What about “Mizrahi”? Well, “to say Jesus was Mizrahi... is unfortunately as ridiculous as saying he was a Palestinian Jew.” De Castro’s two cents? “What will Jesus be next? Maybe… Ashkenazi.” He then imagines the Judean victim of Roman oppression as a fan of “bagels and klezmer and chopped liver.”
Feature: Reclaiming Identity: MENA Jews Share Stories of Identity, Struggle, and Redemption 💬
Liad Arussy and Dr. Drora Arussy (Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience)
(Screenshot courtesy of ASFIJE/Youtube)
Since 2014, the State of Israel has been marking 30 November as, “The Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran.” This year, the ASF’s Institute of Jewish Experience observed Jewish Refugees Day by arranging a first-of-its-kind global event featuring a series of fascinating conversations with Greater Sephardic Jews from the US, Canada, Gibraltar, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and Iran. In this week’s video, we get a taste of the interviewees’ stories and views, including the various forms of prejudice they encountered along the way, and sometimes still encounter today, as well as the great pride they take in their Jewish identity. The full broadcast can be seen here.
✡️ “The Spinoza controversy resurfaces in Amsterdam”
By Shira Hananu and Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA/The Australian Jewish News
Interior of the Esnoga (Portuguese Synagogue), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 22 April 2015 (Photo courtesy of Chajm Guski/Wikimedia).
Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, the singular Jewish genius-traitor, remains a controversial figure three-hundred and fifty years after he helped birth Biblical criticism, viciously attacked the Jewish people in his Theological-Political Tractatus, imagined an enlightened, liberal order, and was excommunicated by the Sephardi community at Amsterdam. The latest incident? Rabbi Josef Serfaty, a rabbinical leader from today’s Sephardi community at Amsterdam, “banned a scholar of Spinoza’s work”—Prof. Yitzhak Melamed from Johns Hopkins University—“from visiting Amsterdam’s historic Portuguese Synagogue and library.” The community's response? “‘We regret that a perfectly normal request to visit the premises of the Portuguese Synagogue… has led to an international uproar.’”
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The American Sephardi Federation invites all individuals, communities, and organizations who share our vision & principles to join us in signing the American Sephardi Leadership Statement!
Please also support the ASF with a generous, tax-deductible contribution so we can continue to cultivate and advocate, preserve and promote, as well as educate and empower!
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Concealed: Memoir of a Jewish Iranian Daughter Caught Between the Chador and America
By Esther Amini
Esther Amini grew up in Queens, New York, during the freewheeling 1960s. She also grew up in a Persian-Jewish household, the American-born daughter of parents who had fled Mashhad, Iran. In Concealed, she tells the story of being caught between these two worlds: the dutiful daughter of tradition-bound parents who hungers for more self-determination than tradition allows.
Exploring the roots of her father’s deep silences and explosive temper, her mother’s flamboyance and flights from home, and her own sense of indebtedness to her Iranian-born brothers, Amini uncovers the story of her parents’ early years in Mashhad, Iran’s holiest Muslim city; the little-known history of Mashhad’s underground Jews; the incident that steeled her mother’s resolve to leave; and her parents’ arduous journey to the U.S., where they faced a new threat to their traditions: the threat of freedom. Determined to protect his daughter from corruption, Amini’s father prohibits talk, books, education, and pushes an early Persian marriage instead. Can she resist? Should she? Focused intently on what she stands to gain, Amini comes to see what she also stands to lose: a family and community bound by food, celebrations, sibling escapades, and unexpected acts of devotion by parents to whom she feels invisible.
In this poignant, funny, entertaining, and uplifting memoir, Amini documents with keen eye, quick wit, and warm heart how family members build, buoy, wound, and save one another across generations; how lives are shaped by the demands and burdens of loyalty and legacy; and how she rose to the challenge of deciding what to keep and what to discard.
Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism
By Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel
A challenging look at two great Jewish philosophers, and what their thinking means to our understanding of God, truth, revelation and reason. RAMBAM/Maimonides is Jewish history’s greatest exponent of a rational, philosophically sound Judaism. He strove to reconcile the teachings of the Bible and rabbinic tradition with the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, arguing that religion and philosophy ultimately must arrive at the same truth. Baruch Spinoza is Jewish history’s most illustrious “heretic.” He believed that truth could be attained through reason alone, and that philosophy and religion were separate domains that could not be reconciled. His critique of the Bible and its teachings caused an intellectual and spiritual upheaval whose effects are still felt today.
R’Angel discusses major themes in the writings of Maimonides and Spinoza to show us how modern people can deal with religion in an intellectually honest and meaningful way. From Maimonides, we gain insight on how to harmonize traditional religious belief with the dictates of reason. From Spinoza, we gain insight into the intellectual challenges which must be met by modern believers.
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Upcoming Events or Opportunities
The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
Kickstart your Memoir: Heirlooms
Join award-winning author Gila Green in a hands-on workshop where we will talk about how we can use objects from the past in memoir writing.
Sunday, 19 December at 11:00AM EST
Sign-up Now!
About the speaker:
Canadian author Gila Green is an Israel-based writer, editor, and EFL teacher.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
Museum Mondays:
The Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem
Tour the Museums from the comfort of your own home with Nachliel Selavan, the Museum Guy.
Monday, 10 January at 12PM EST
Tour the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda
Sign-up Now!
About Your Tour Guide:
Nachliel Selavan created and delivered an integrated learning and museum tour program for both school and adult educational settings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has hosted similar pilot visits to a dozen museums in North America, and a few museums in Europe and in Jerusalem. He also teaches and engages audiences through virtual tours and social media. He has recently completed a year long Tanach Study podcast called Parasha Study Plus, delivering a weekly episode of Archaeology on the Parasha, and is now on his second podcast and a new video series reviewing every book in Tanach, called Archaeology Snapshot.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
New Works Wednesday with Shira Klein
Join us for a New Works Wednesday with Dr. Shira Klein who will be discussing her new book Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press).
Wednesday, 12 January at 12:00PM EST
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About the book:
How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews’ experience in the decades before World War II – during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture – led them later to bolster the myth of Italy’s wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy’s Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.
About the author:
Dr. Shira Klein is Associate Professor of History at Chapman University. She has won awards from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation, and the USC Shoah Foundation.
Click here for more about the book.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
The Qur’an and its Relationship to Torah and Judaism
Why does the Qur’an refer so extensively to the contents of the Torah? Are there differences between the way the Qur’an and the Torah tell the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and other Biblical characters?
What does the Qur’an say about the Jews whom Muhammad encountered in his lifetime, especially in Medina between 622 CE and his death in 632 CE? Is the Qur’an anti-Jewish? Did the Islamic view of the Torah and Jews change over time?
How should verse 9:29 of the Qur’an and mentions of the dhimmi status of Jews be read? In the 1,300 years after the foundation of Islam, for Jews living in Muslim lands, did these verses act as a “humiliation” or as a “protection”?
Sunday, 16 January at 12:00PM EST
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About the speaker:
Rick Sopher has a financial background and is the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Capital Holdings, which he joined in 1993. He is the Chairman of the world’s longest established investment fund of its type. Prior to that he worked at BDO Stoy Hayward, where he was appointed the youngest ever partner. He has received various industry awards, including the Outstanding Contribution Award from Hedge Fund Review and the Decade of Excellence Award by Financial News.
Rick graduated from Cambridge University and has more recently worked in the area of interfaith relations with the Woolf Institute, Cambridge as a member of their Council.
During the lockdown period, Rick convened an online dialogue between Professors of Religion at the world’s leading universities to discuss the relationship between the Qur’an and the Bible, and has himself dialogued with Muslim leaders on the subject.
Rick was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 2007 from President Chirac for his contribution to religious education in France and is Chairman or Director of several educational charities in the UK.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
The Jews of Italy and the African Empire
This project examines the causes, nature, and consequences of Italian Jews’ support for imperialism. I argue that between the 1890s and 1930s, Italian Jews took an active part in racializing and controlling indigenous Libyan and Ethiopian Jews. Moreover, by promoting the empire and upholding a racial hierarchy between Europeans and Africans, Italian Jews unwittingly contributed to their own downfall, since Italy’s antisemitic campaign (1938-1945) borrowed heavily from earlier anti-black legislation and propaganda.
This book breaks new ground; using non-traditional sources, it is the first study to inquire what ordinary European Jewish women and men thought about empire and how they engaged with it in their daily life. The Italian case is uniquely fertile for examining the relationship between Jews and race; Italy’s forays into Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia, home to the Beta Israel, triggered the earliest significant encounter between white Jews and sub-Saharan black Jews. As such, Jews and Race also speaks to emerging interest in the history of Jews of color and broadens the study of intra-Jewish racism.
Monday, 24 January at 12:00PM EST
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About the Speaker:
Dr. Shira Klein is Associate Professor of History at Chapman University. She has won awards from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation, and the USC Shoah Foundation.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The American Sephardi Federation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, the Sephardic Foundation on Aging, and the Shearith Israel League Foundation proudly present:
Salud i Vida: The 5th Annual New York Ladino Day!
Featuring scholar Eliezer Papo
Sephardic Nonagenarians: A Panel by Bryan Kirschen
Estreyikas d’Estambol Children’s Choir “Kantiga,” a Ladino Short Story by Jane Mushabac
Trio Sefardi: the Musical Finale!
Sunday, 30 January at 2:00PM EST
Sign-up Now!
Ladino is a bridge to many cultures. It is a variety of Spanish that has absorbed words from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, French, Greek, and Portuguese. The mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, Ladino became the home language of Sephardim worldwide. While the number of Ladino speakers has sharply declined, distinguished Ladino Day programs like ours celebrate and preserve a vibrant language and heritage. These programs are, as Aviya Kushner wrote in the Forward, “Why Ladino Will Rise Again.”
Since 2013, International Ladino Day programs have been held around the world to honor the Ladino language, also known as Judeo-Spanish. January 30th marks New York’s 5th Annual Ladino Day curated by Drs. Jane Mushabac and Bryan Kirschen for the American Sephardi Federation.
Print © loannia, mid-19th c. Sephardi & Romaniot Jewish Costumes in Greece & Turkey. 16 watercolours by Nicholas Stavroulakis, published by the Association of the Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens, 1986. (Scan courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Greece)
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
New Works Wednesday with Dina Danon
Join us for a New Works Wednesday with Dr. Dina Danon who will be discussing her book The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture.
Wednesday, 2 February at 12:00PM EST
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About the book:
This lecture will tell the story of a long-overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? What happens when there is no “Jewish Question?” Through the voices of beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this lecture will underscore how it was new attitudes to poverty and social class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community’s encounter with the modern age.
About the author:
Dina Danon is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University. She holds a doctorate in History from Stanford University. She is the author of She was recently a fellow at the Katz Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began work on a new project on the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage, and divorce in the eastern Sephardi diaspora. She is currently at work, with Nancy Berg, on a co-edited volume entitled Longing and Belonging: Jews and Muslims in the Modern Age.
For here more about the book.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org
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The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:
The Jew who Ruled Persia: The Story of Sa’ad ad-Dawla
Sa’ad ad-Dawla was a Persian Jew from the city of Abhar. Being a master in recovering delayed taxes, he was able to rise in the ranks of the Mongol Ilkhanate that ruled all of Persia and Iraq. He had personal interactions with Ilkhan Arğun, where he demonstrated a strong compunction against corruption, a facility with languages, knowledge about minute matters throughout the lands, and the ability to cure the Ilkhan of disease. The led to Arğun appointing him as the Grand Vizier of the Ilkhanate in 1289, the most powerful position in the country below the Ilkhan himself. Despite the offense that many Muslims took to having a Jew in such a position of power, the Buddhist Arğun defended him and gave him a long leash to improve the Ilkhanate.
Sunday, 6 February at 12:00PM EST
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Complimentary RSVP
(Please consider a suggested donation of $10: https://tinyurl.com/DonateASFIJE)
About the Speaker:
Richard Sassoon is an Iraqi-American of Jewish heritage who graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Fordham University Law School with a J.D. and with an LL.M. in European Business Law from Madrid’s Universidad Pontificia Comillas. He currently works at UnitedLex as a Contract Manager, but has previously held roles at Samsung Engineering, J.P. Morgan, and several law firms. Richard sits on the ASF Young Leaders Board and is a recipient of the ASF Broome & Allen Fellowship. Richard has a long-standing interest in diverse cultures and regions, having visited over fifty different countries, meeting various high-level diplomats with Jewish organizations, working on three continents, and handling legal documents in five languages.
Sponsorship opportunities available:
info@americansephardi.org