The biblical King David was a poet, musician, and conqueror, but we remember him primarily as a warrior. Indeed, all of David’s most notable exploits were martial: his duel with Goliath, his conquest of Jerusalem, his enlargement of the Kingdom of Israel — he even enabled his affair with Bathsheba by sending her husband, Uriah,…
I’m old enough to remember a time way back before the 2016 presidential election, when political leaders of both parties saw refugees as victims. While the United States didn’t always fulfill its rightful role as a safe haven, there was nonetheless a basic bipartisan commitment to help those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Now…
One of the year’s most crucial resolutions is about to go to a vote in the United States Congress, and the American Jewish community is missing it. For all of the conversations and debates in our community about Middle East issues, we rarely hear a word about Yemen. The most impoverished Arab-majority country, Yemen is…
NEW YORK (JTA) — It’s not uncommon to see Hasidic Jews in Day N Night, a Yemenite-owned corner store in Boro Park, Brooklyn. In fact, the shop caters to the many Orthodox Jewish customers who live in the neighborhood by selling Hebrew and Yiddish-language newspapers and allowing observant Jews to buy things on tab on Shabbat and Jewish holidays,…
Ayala Tiefenbrunn’s recent Hevria personal essay, “The White Girl In The Dunkin Donuts,” is worth reading, especially if you’ve been trying to make sense of all the Jews-and-whiteness conversations that have popped up ever since white nationalists emerged from the American woodwork to offer their opinion on the matter. Tiefenbrunn, a Yemenite Jew who wears…
This piece is part of a series about the issues in the 2016 presidential election. The next President has an enormous mess to clean up. Eight years of President Obama’s utopian rationalism has resulted in a sense of global unraveling — both of geostrategic stability and of American interests — and nowhere has it been…
Between 1948 and 1954, hundreds of children of immigrant families, about two thirds of them Yemenis and the rest of other Mizrahi background, disappeared from hospitals and transit camps in Israel. Parents were told that their children had died, though no bodies or death certificates were presented. Seventeen years later, many of the children received…
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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