Sephardic Jews
The Latest
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Food Danielle Renov’s new cookbook celebrates Sephardic and Askenazic food—just not raisins
There are 86 things Jerusalem-based, Long Island-born food blogger Danielle Renov wants you to know about her new kosher cookbook, “Peas Love & Carrots” — and about cooking in general. She lists them across two pages right up front, and like the book itself the list is highly practical and deeply personal — a combination…
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Books Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish history on Portuguese tour
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
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Fast Forward Portugal Approves 10,000 Citizenship Requests From Descendants Of Expelled Jews
(JTA) — Portugal has approved about a third of approximately 33,000 applications for citizenship under its 2015 law for descendants of Sephardic Jews, according to official data. Applications based on the 2015 law, primarily from Israel, Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela, are behind a 10-percent increase in applications in 2018, which saw 41,324 such requests in…
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Fast Forward Only 5 Jews Are Left In Cairo Following The Death Of Jewish Matriarch
(JTA) — Marcelle Haroun, mother of the current president of Cairo’s Jewish community, has died at the age of 93. Her death, announced on Saturday, leaves five Jews known to be living in Cairo, Watani International reported. The five remaining are her daughter, Magda, and four granddaughters. The AFP news service reported in March 2017…
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Opinion Why Do So Many Sephardic Jews Have Christian Lastnames?
There’s a curious phenomenon which may be unfamiliar to American Jews: Many Germans who have no Jewish ancestors commonly use surnames like Rosenberg, Rosenthal, Meier, Weill, Schuster and Landau. The same is true of Sephardic Jews: Names like Henriques, Lopez, Mendes, Rodriguez and Pereira are commonly used by both Sephardic Jews and by Iberian Christians…
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Opinion Ashkenormativity? What about Israel-Centrism?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I first heard complaints about Ashkenormativity in March 2009, five or six years before the term was apparently coined. I was attending a conference in Chicago for young Yiddish speakers and college students interested in studying the language. While explaining how learning Yiddish as a teenager and…
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Fast Forward Sephardic Genes Widespread In Latin Americans Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(JTA) — In a genetic study of 6,589 people from five Latin American countries, about a quarter displayed traces of what may be Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Geneticist Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque and his colleagues published their findings last week in Nature Communications magazine, in an article titled “Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local…
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News Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Sephardic Claim Unleashes Fierce Debate About Jewish Identity
Crypto-Jews. Secret Jews. Conversos. Marranos. B’nai Anusim. These are the terms used for Jews, mainly of Spanish descent, who were forced to convert to Catholicism or die during the period of Spain’s Inquisition. While many Sephardic Jews did convert, some continued to practice their Judaism in secret. Now, this 500-year history of hidden Jewish lineage…
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News What We Know About Jeffrey Epstein’s Childhood
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Fast Forward Jewish congresswoman storms out of Epstein hearing after Pam Bondi raises her record on antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
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Culture Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
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Fast Forward Olympics committee defends sale of T-shirt commemorating 1936 Nazi-era Games
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News Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage
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Looking Forward The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
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