This is the Forward’s coverage of Mizrahi Jews, a major Jewish ethnic group from the Middle East and North Africa.
Mizrahi Jews
The Latest
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Opinion When Israelis Kill Innocents for the Crime of Looking Arab
“If I would have known he is not the terrorist, believe me, I would have looked after him like I look after myself. In moments of fear people do things they are not aware of. I didn’t sleep all night… I feel disgusted with what happened.” These words — , one of the Israeli Jews…
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Opinion Ashkenormativity Is Twice as Common — and Harmful — in LGBTQ Jewish Spaces
After Kiddush on Shabbat, someone comes up to me to critique my recitation. Either the person asks why I pronounced the last word as “hagefen” rather than “hagafen,” or I am less-than-politely informed of the “correct” pronunciation. When I respond that my Sephardic custom is to say “hagefen,” the reply is always the same: “I…
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Opinion I’m a Mizrahi Jew. Do I Count as a Person of Color?
Am I a person of color? You’d think there would be a straightforward answer to a question like that. And for a while, I thought there was. I thought the answer was yes. When I look at my grandparents — four Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab lands — I see people who were born in…
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Israel News When Israel’s Sephardic Black Panthers Used Passover To Decry Jewish ‘Racism’
It was the spring of 1971, and the 1960’s spirit of revolution still throbbed in the streets of America and Europe. On the streets of Jerusalem, knots of young Sephardi Jews could be seen protesting, too — calling for the overthrow of Prime Minister Golda Meir and for their own liberation in Israel as an…
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Opinion The Black Panthers Haggadah
The following is a translation of the Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah With a strong hand, two. And with an outstretched arm, two more. With great terror, two more. With protests, two more. With banners raised, two more. With hunger strikes, two more. These, then, are 10 plagues that the Black Panthers from Musrara brought upon…
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Life Chocolate Wars and the ‘Angry Mizrachi Woman’
Screenshot via Youtube Getting between a woman and her chocolate is a dangerous proposition. Although not usually one that causes a brawl, as occurred on an Israir flight from Tel Aviv over the weekend. It was classic Israeli misbehavior caught on video, with irate passengers demanding life, liberty, and the best of duty-free confectionary. Yet,…
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Books Why Ayelet Tsabari’s Sami Rohr Win Is a Victory for Arab Jews
Sami Rohr Prize winner Ayelet Tsabari / Elsin Davidi Ayelet Tsabari, author of the short story collection “The Best Place On Earth” (HarperCollins 2013), has won the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature — and I couldn’t be happier about it. A couple of months ago, I issued one of those pre-New-Year’s calls for…
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Books Let’s Make 2015 the Year of the Arab Jew
Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it. As an Arab Jewish writer (my family hails from Morocco, India and Iraq), I couldn’t be…
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