(JEWISH GROUP) The Jewish world's dangerous amnesia about Mizrahi history
I am no longer the stateless 20-year-old Egyptian-Iraqi Mizrahi Jewish immigrant who arrived in America confused at being unseen, expected to assimilate into the exclusively mainstream Ashkenazi Jewish story.
It is different today. Much has changed in America regarding awareness of the Middle East. American Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi, are far more aware now than in previous decades that half the Jewish population of Israel is Mizrahi, Jews from Arab lands, and that we exist. It’s been a while since I’ve been asked if I “missed my grandparents’ Yiddish,” although I miss my family’s Judeo-Arabic every day.
What has not changed and what is critical today is the continued lack of integration in the Jewish world of the Mizrahi story and what it has to teach about Jewish survival in the face of Islamic ideology today.
There is also the additional resistance in progressive circles, where our history disrupts the prevailing narrative that Jews in Arab lands had a blessed life under Islam, and worse, that we are somehow “Islamophobic” when we speak about our lived history.
Another issue is the comparison of how Jews fared so much better under Islam versus the European experience of the Holocaust – way too low a bar. Jews in Arab lands had good times and very bad times, never equal times. It was no paradise, despite the nostalgia with which some people speak of it.
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