Telling the Jewish story without including Mizrahi, Sephardic, and other global Jewish histories is like reading a book with half of its chapters missing.
There are so many reasons to celebrate all the individual threads of our culture. Unfortunately, our Ashkenazi centric education in the west has given fodder to antizionists who believe all Jews are of European origin. If they know anything about Mizrahi Jews, it is to claim that they lived happily and equally with Muslims. They know nothing of the forced conversions, the Farhud or dhimmi status.
Matthew: a great article that all too many of us less knowledgeable jews of European descent should read. I say this with all respect( and humor) : your lineage should be referred to as Jews Without Bagels
This essay resonates deeply. I was born in England, grew up in Toronto and Israel, and now live in Germany — but wherever I was, my father’s Baghdadi Indian heritage was invisible or at best - secondary, in Jewish schools, Ashkenazi Yeshiva and community life. I still remember a neighbourhood (Ashkenazi Jewish) optician in Toronto telling my Indian-looking father that he “didn’t look Jewish.” Those moments left a mark. My dad was hurt so deeply, I will never forget that.
My substack project, @BeyondBabylon, is my way of reasserting that heritage and showing its richness through food. I’m encouraged to see an awakening — more people curious, more voices being heard. I invite readers to join me in making sure these stories are no longer pushed to the margins but celebrated as part of the whole Jewish experience.
What strikes me, thinking back, is how quickly people — non-Jews but also Jews — reduce Jewishness to appearance. Yet Jewish lineage has never been about skin color or facial features; it’s about continuity, halacha, and memory. My father didn’t “look Jewish” to that Ashkenazi optician, but his prayers, his melodies, even the food he cooked carried an unbroken line stretching from Baghdad to Jerusalem and back.
History shows how dangerous it is to confuse identity with appearance. The Nazis did it in the Nuremberg Laws, defining Jewishness by “blood” and race in order to persecute. Even Israel’s Law of Return, meant to protect, expanded Jewish belonging to anyone with a Jewish grandparent, regardless of halacha. Both took the question outside its traditional framework.
That’s why Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s 1973 ruling was so profound. As Sephardi Chief Rabbi, he reaffirmed that the Beta Israel are fully Jewish—based on halacha, not stereotypes. Belonging, he insisted, comes from tradition and continuity, never from what the mirror shows.
That’s the piece that often gets lost: heritage doesn’t announce itself in physical appearance. It lives in practice, story, and how traditions travel across borders and renew themselves.
I remember well when this article first came out on your Substack, Matthew. It is an excellent and insightful article that makes a very important point! Jewish schools need to be teaching about the history of Middle Eastern, North African, African, Asian, and Latino Jews. Jewish history and cultural education needs to be expanded and to stop being so Ashkenazi centric. All Jews are part of Am Yisrael and are family. So why does only one branch of the family tree get talked about or studied? That has to change! This would not only help bring Am Yisrael closer together but would once and for all dispel the myth of Israel as a white settler colonial project. By the way, Ashkenazi Jews are not white. They are in their own category. Some are light-skinned enough they can identify as such but they technically are not. Dark-skinned Ashkenazi Jews can’t identify as white at all. They are not European and were never accepted as such by Europeans.
But returning to the topic of this amazing piece, Jewish schools need to create curriculums and courses about non-western Jews and invite speakers from these cultures and historians and scholars to teach Jewish children about Mizrahi, Sephardic, Ethiopian, etc. Jews. You’re average Jews knows all about the Dreyfus Affair, the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and the Holocaust in Europe for instance, as they should. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying these things don’t matter. But they are not aware of the Holocaust in North Africa, the Farhud in 1941, the discrimination faced by Mizrahi Jews in the early years of the state of Israel, Operation Magic Carpet in 1949-50, the Israeli Black Panthers, or Operations Moses, Joshua and Solomon in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
That needs to change! Where are the stories of Indian, Chinese, Iraqi, Tunisian, Syrian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Iranian, Mexican, Panamanian, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Cuban, etc. Jews? Did anyone here know Haiti has a small Jewish community? Was anyone here aware that there are Pied-Noir and Afrikaner Jews? Did you know that African-American Jews exist? I would bet most people here have never heard about any of this. The Jewish story is more than just what took place in Europe, it stretches around the globe. This must be reflected in the lesson plans, lectures and textbooks of all Jewish schools. Jews are white-passing, black, brown, red, and yellow. They aren’t one size fits all just like any other group of human beings. Sephardic, Mizrahi, Bene Israel, Beta Israel, Chinese, Hispanic, and Native American Jews should NOT feel like they don’t matter and they have been erased from Jewish history! That’s not fair and not okay!
For further reading on the stories of non-western Jews here are some titles I would recommend to everyone to learn more:
• The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto by Hen Mazzig
• Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight by Lyn Julius
• Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism by Alanna E. Cooper
• The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 by Bryan K. Roby
• The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng: A Millennium of Adaption and Endurance by Anson H. Laytner
• The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000-Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community by Edna Fernandes
• The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World by Houman M. Sarshar
• Journeys of Faith: Five Centuries of Jewish Life in Panama by Elyjah Byrzdett
• From the Alleys of Baghdad: Growing Up Jewish in Iraq During the Farhud by Edmond Cohen
• Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews by Asher Naim
• Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews by Stephen Spector
• The Holocaust and North Africa by Aomar Boum
• History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: Memories of a Past Golden Age by Elli Kohen
Matthew, this is such an important piece. You’re right — Jewish education too often leaves out the histories of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, India, Ethiopia, and Asia. My father’s Baghdadi Indian heritage was invisible in every Jewish school I attended, from England to Canada to Israel. Ashkenazi stories dominated, while ours were treated as marginal, if they appeared at all.
That erasure is what I’m working to address through my Substack project, Beyond Babylon, where I study overlooked Jewish communities through food. It’s another way of recovering those missing chapters and showing how migration, adaptation, and memory shaped the Jewish table.
My family is Ashkenazi, but my father looked like he could have walked out of the Levant. Over years of reading about the scope and range of Jewish civilization, I've often found myself annoyed that we ourselves know practically nothing about our own collective history outside of northern and eastern Europe. So it's hardly surprising that antisemites who object to the existence of Israel like to claim Jews are indigenous to that continent.
All Jews, if you were to follow their DNA thru history, are indigenous to the Middle East. We were there before we were in Europe.
The following is thanks to Gemini the AI genius, which for someone like me is a godsend …. he educates me daily lol
Genetic studies have consistently shown that the vast majority of Jewish people around the world share a common genetic thread. While there is diversity among different Jewish communities due to their migration histories and interactions with local populations, a significant degree of shared ancestry can be traced back to the ancient Middle East.
Here's a summary of the key findings from a number of different studies:
* Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry: Multiple studies using autosomal DNA (which looks at a person's entire genetic makeup) have found that the major Jewish diaspora groups—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews—are more genetically related to each other than they are to the non-Jewish populations among whom they have lived for centuries. This shared genetic signature points to a common ancestral population in the Levant (the historical region of Israel/Palestine) thousands of years ago.
In summary, while not all Jews are genetically identical—and there are exceptions due to conversions and interfaith marriages throughout history—the genetic evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea of a shared, deep-rooted ancestry among the global Jewish population, with its origins in the Middle East.
Boy Matthew you sure do have a way of educating us in the nicest possible way. 💙 That is def not sarcasm. Been following you on IG since Oct 7th and as soon as you mentioned you had created a Substack I came a runnin’. Looking forward to reading more. Btw, you are adorable 🤭
I find on a personal level that no matter "what kind of cultural " Jew you might be or for that matter even of a different race we do in fact share the ideas of one people. We just express those ideas in different ways. What truly bothers me about contemporary American Jews is their replacement of Jewish values with popular culture and using the excuse that they are very Jewish because they support Israel. Well many people who are not Jewish are strongly supportive of Israel. But it still does not make them Jewish so that argument that support of Israel makes you a "good Jew" is a bit fallacious in my opinion.
Such an important initiative. We all need more education on this subject. I am forwarding it to a few locally prominent Jewish educators, including my daughter. With so many other issues fracturing the Jewish community these days, here is one we ought to be able to heal. Vancouver Talmud Torah, our large day school, has already been working on this initiative. I am proud to report that Vancouver is way ahead of most cities in its level of cooperation between and within Jewish entities. We are blessed with great leadership on all fronts. We have come together, as a community, in support of Israel, although not without exception. Sadly, we have Jews who swallow whole, and even disseminate, the misinformation coming out of Gaza. We have Jews who demand an immediate ceasefire and Jews who want Israel to complete the job of wiping out Hamas. It is a tough time, within congregations, within families, and within communities. Your essay helps us continue to grow our Judaism in the best possible way. Thank you!
Back in ancient times (the 1970's!) our temple (Reform) covered "ancient Israel / torah" an' the embare-ass-mint of KaTonTon (the bane of my eggsistance! like jooish Tele-tubbies) an' we missed out on the ENTIRE hist'ry of Judaism (E. European--we're Ashkenazis--AND Misrahi, Sephardic--all've it/olive-it!) My own fam filled me in on E.YourUp (pogroms, etc) but mostly 'twas in history classes I filled in the gaps plus readin' on mah own. I will say that the Inquisition featured prominently in the his'try of horrors committed against us. Zo my belief that as we are "of a people" an' "one" (in spite 've different traditions etc--we all have the Torah, etc), that part'a the problem is that sunday skool sucked--just absurd. (I did like the music, the little plays we did but the rest? AWFUL) so sumbuddy needs a "FULL" jooish curriclum fer all branches--with lotsa options fer creativity--but we (many of us) failed ta learn of our own history--in the middle east, in Spain, Italy--an' of course in E. Europe--many of us are still piecin' it all together in fits, starts, & fragments... a long vey ta go before we sleep as they say! Oh an' addin' the chooish kids need ta start readin' the literature--from all the mahvelous writers 'round the velt--EARLY! not just in college or as older teens... (a'nnuther pet peeve'a mine)
LOVE this. I attended a well-known, Ashkenazi Hebrew parochial school in NY for 12 years. My experience was virtually the same. I learned that Sephardic Jews were expelled during the Inquisition and ate spicier food, but I had no idea that after 1492 and prior to WW2 Thessalonika had the largest Jewish population in Europe. I too had no idea of the many pogroms by Muslims against Jews in Iraq, Iran, Spain, Morocco, Yemen and North Africa more generally.
As 0.2% of the world's population, of which about 85% resides in Israel of the US, we indeed must do a better job of uniting around our common heritage, and educating all Jews about their multifaceted heritage.
I last attended Hebrew school in the mid sixties till my bar mitzvah....there was nothing Ashkenazi centric let alone Sephardi or Mizrahi.....there wasn't anything Judeocentric....it was learning to read the siddur at break neck speeds for the synagogue service. I'm not discounting your history, but the classmate with Tunisian background was just another Jew....there were plenty of reasons to otherrize and attempt to harass and bully me but my Jewishness wasn't one of them. Maybe I am one of the few, but I sought out knowledge about Mid East and Central asian Jews on my own. I had to investigate the beginnings of the klezmer revival on my own. Most Jews entirely indifferent to any of this. Ashkenazicentric? nope. Not interested unless to disparage. If only we were Italians sitting around huge Sunday dinners after mass. I'd like to see those of the E. European diaspora like myself regarded as indigenous to Israel and not hang Israel's authenticity on it's large Sephardi(European /N. African) and Mizrahi citizens.
There are so many reasons to celebrate all the individual threads of our culture. Unfortunately, our Ashkenazi centric education in the west has given fodder to antizionists who believe all Jews are of European origin. If they know anything about Mizrahi Jews, it is to claim that they lived happily and equally with Muslims. They know nothing of the forced conversions, the Farhud or dhimmi status.
Great article.
Matthew: a great article that all too many of us less knowledgeable jews of European descent should read. I say this with all respect( and humor) : your lineage should be referred to as Jews Without Bagels
🫶🏼 that! Jews without bagels 😂
This essay resonates deeply. I was born in England, grew up in Toronto and Israel, and now live in Germany — but wherever I was, my father’s Baghdadi Indian heritage was invisible or at best - secondary, in Jewish schools, Ashkenazi Yeshiva and community life. I still remember a neighbourhood (Ashkenazi Jewish) optician in Toronto telling my Indian-looking father that he “didn’t look Jewish.” Those moments left a mark. My dad was hurt so deeply, I will never forget that.
My substack project, @BeyondBabylon, is my way of reasserting that heritage and showing its richness through food. I’m encouraged to see an awakening — more people curious, more voices being heard. I invite readers to join me in making sure these stories are no longer pushed to the margins but celebrated as part of the whole Jewish experience.
What strikes me, thinking back, is how quickly people — non-Jews but also Jews — reduce Jewishness to appearance. Yet Jewish lineage has never been about skin color or facial features; it’s about continuity, halacha, and memory. My father didn’t “look Jewish” to that Ashkenazi optician, but his prayers, his melodies, even the food he cooked carried an unbroken line stretching from Baghdad to Jerusalem and back.
History shows how dangerous it is to confuse identity with appearance. The Nazis did it in the Nuremberg Laws, defining Jewishness by “blood” and race in order to persecute. Even Israel’s Law of Return, meant to protect, expanded Jewish belonging to anyone with a Jewish grandparent, regardless of halacha. Both took the question outside its traditional framework.
That’s why Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s 1973 ruling was so profound. As Sephardi Chief Rabbi, he reaffirmed that the Beta Israel are fully Jewish—based on halacha, not stereotypes. Belonging, he insisted, comes from tradition and continuity, never from what the mirror shows.
That’s the piece that often gets lost: heritage doesn’t announce itself in physical appearance. It lives in practice, story, and how traditions travel across borders and renew themselves.
This is such important educational work! Jews must not be divided by our own lack of knowledge of our diversity. Am Yisrael Chai!
I remember well when this article first came out on your Substack, Matthew. It is an excellent and insightful article that makes a very important point! Jewish schools need to be teaching about the history of Middle Eastern, North African, African, Asian, and Latino Jews. Jewish history and cultural education needs to be expanded and to stop being so Ashkenazi centric. All Jews are part of Am Yisrael and are family. So why does only one branch of the family tree get talked about or studied? That has to change! This would not only help bring Am Yisrael closer together but would once and for all dispel the myth of Israel as a white settler colonial project. By the way, Ashkenazi Jews are not white. They are in their own category. Some are light-skinned enough they can identify as such but they technically are not. Dark-skinned Ashkenazi Jews can’t identify as white at all. They are not European and were never accepted as such by Europeans.
But returning to the topic of this amazing piece, Jewish schools need to create curriculums and courses about non-western Jews and invite speakers from these cultures and historians and scholars to teach Jewish children about Mizrahi, Sephardic, Ethiopian, etc. Jews. You’re average Jews knows all about the Dreyfus Affair, the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and the Holocaust in Europe for instance, as they should. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying these things don’t matter. But they are not aware of the Holocaust in North Africa, the Farhud in 1941, the discrimination faced by Mizrahi Jews in the early years of the state of Israel, Operation Magic Carpet in 1949-50, the Israeli Black Panthers, or Operations Moses, Joshua and Solomon in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
That needs to change! Where are the stories of Indian, Chinese, Iraqi, Tunisian, Syrian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Iranian, Mexican, Panamanian, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Cuban, etc. Jews? Did anyone here know Haiti has a small Jewish community? Was anyone here aware that there are Pied-Noir and Afrikaner Jews? Did you know that African-American Jews exist? I would bet most people here have never heard about any of this. The Jewish story is more than just what took place in Europe, it stretches around the globe. This must be reflected in the lesson plans, lectures and textbooks of all Jewish schools. Jews are white-passing, black, brown, red, and yellow. They aren’t one size fits all just like any other group of human beings. Sephardic, Mizrahi, Bene Israel, Beta Israel, Chinese, Hispanic, and Native American Jews should NOT feel like they don’t matter and they have been erased from Jewish history! That’s not fair and not okay!
For further reading on the stories of non-western Jews here are some titles I would recommend to everyone to learn more:
• The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto by Hen Mazzig
• Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight by Lyn Julius
• Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism by Alanna E. Cooper
• The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 by Bryan K. Roby
• The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng: A Millennium of Adaption and Endurance by Anson H. Laytner
• The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000-Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community by Edna Fernandes
• The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World by Houman M. Sarshar
• Journeys of Faith: Five Centuries of Jewish Life in Panama by Elyjah Byrzdett
• From the Alleys of Baghdad: Growing Up Jewish in Iraq During the Farhud by Edmond Cohen
• Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews by Asher Naim
• Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews by Stephen Spector
• The Holocaust and North Africa by Aomar Boum
• History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: Memories of a Past Golden Age by Elli Kohen
Matthew, this is such an important piece. You’re right — Jewish education too often leaves out the histories of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, India, Ethiopia, and Asia. My father’s Baghdadi Indian heritage was invisible in every Jewish school I attended, from England to Canada to Israel. Ashkenazi stories dominated, while ours were treated as marginal, if they appeared at all.
That erasure is what I’m working to address through my Substack project, Beyond Babylon, where I study overlooked Jewish communities through food. It’s another way of recovering those missing chapters and showing how migration, adaptation, and memory shaped the Jewish table.
Food writing can be another doorway into the same essential work: making sure the full Jewish story is told. Here is a recent piece about Jews in Barbados. https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/candle-in-the-dark?r=32dxtv
Thank you for your important work.
My family is Ashkenazi, but my father looked like he could have walked out of the Levant. Over years of reading about the scope and range of Jewish civilization, I've often found myself annoyed that we ourselves know practically nothing about our own collective history outside of northern and eastern Europe. So it's hardly surprising that antisemites who object to the existence of Israel like to claim Jews are indigenous to that continent.
All Jews, if you were to follow their DNA thru history, are indigenous to the Middle East. We were there before we were in Europe.
The following is thanks to Gemini the AI genius, which for someone like me is a godsend …. he educates me daily lol
Genetic studies have consistently shown that the vast majority of Jewish people around the world share a common genetic thread. While there is diversity among different Jewish communities due to their migration histories and interactions with local populations, a significant degree of shared ancestry can be traced back to the ancient Middle East.
Here's a summary of the key findings from a number of different studies:
* Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry: Multiple studies using autosomal DNA (which looks at a person's entire genetic makeup) have found that the major Jewish diaspora groups—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews—are more genetically related to each other than they are to the non-Jewish populations among whom they have lived for centuries. This shared genetic signature points to a common ancestral population in the Levant (the historical region of Israel/Palestine) thousands of years ago.
In summary, while not all Jews are genetically identical—and there are exceptions due to conversions and interfaith marriages throughout history—the genetic evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea of a shared, deep-rooted ancestry among the global Jewish population, with its origins in the Middle East.
Too many facts for most faculty at Harvard and Columbia as well as The Squad and their senior citizens Bernie and Liz
Thank you. Very interesting
Boy Matthew you sure do have a way of educating us in the nicest possible way. 💙 That is def not sarcasm. Been following you on IG since Oct 7th and as soon as you mentioned you had created a Substack I came a runnin’. Looking forward to reading more. Btw, you are adorable 🤭
Thank you so much! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼❤️❤️❤️
I find on a personal level that no matter "what kind of cultural " Jew you might be or for that matter even of a different race we do in fact share the ideas of one people. We just express those ideas in different ways. What truly bothers me about contemporary American Jews is their replacement of Jewish values with popular culture and using the excuse that they are very Jewish because they support Israel. Well many people who are not Jewish are strongly supportive of Israel. But it still does not make them Jewish so that argument that support of Israel makes you a "good Jew" is a bit fallacious in my opinion.
Such an important initiative. We all need more education on this subject. I am forwarding it to a few locally prominent Jewish educators, including my daughter. With so many other issues fracturing the Jewish community these days, here is one we ought to be able to heal. Vancouver Talmud Torah, our large day school, has already been working on this initiative. I am proud to report that Vancouver is way ahead of most cities in its level of cooperation between and within Jewish entities. We are blessed with great leadership on all fronts. We have come together, as a community, in support of Israel, although not without exception. Sadly, we have Jews who swallow whole, and even disseminate, the misinformation coming out of Gaza. We have Jews who demand an immediate ceasefire and Jews who want Israel to complete the job of wiping out Hamas. It is a tough time, within congregations, within families, and within communities. Your essay helps us continue to grow our Judaism in the best possible way. Thank you!
Can any recommend some books to read to learn more about Mizrachi Jews or Ethiopian Jews so I can educate myself in more detail
Great article Matthew. Thank you for it.
Back in ancient times (the 1970's!) our temple (Reform) covered "ancient Israel / torah" an' the embare-ass-mint of KaTonTon (the bane of my eggsistance! like jooish Tele-tubbies) an' we missed out on the ENTIRE hist'ry of Judaism (E. European--we're Ashkenazis--AND Misrahi, Sephardic--all've it/olive-it!) My own fam filled me in on E.YourUp (pogroms, etc) but mostly 'twas in history classes I filled in the gaps plus readin' on mah own. I will say that the Inquisition featured prominently in the his'try of horrors committed against us. Zo my belief that as we are "of a people" an' "one" (in spite 've different traditions etc--we all have the Torah, etc), that part'a the problem is that sunday skool sucked--just absurd. (I did like the music, the little plays we did but the rest? AWFUL) so sumbuddy needs a "FULL" jooish curriclum fer all branches--with lotsa options fer creativity--but we (many of us) failed ta learn of our own history--in the middle east, in Spain, Italy--an' of course in E. Europe--many of us are still piecin' it all together in fits, starts, & fragments... a long vey ta go before we sleep as they say! Oh an' addin' the chooish kids need ta start readin' the literature--from all the mahvelous writers 'round the velt--EARLY! not just in college or as older teens... (a'nnuther pet peeve'a mine)
LOVE this. I attended a well-known, Ashkenazi Hebrew parochial school in NY for 12 years. My experience was virtually the same. I learned that Sephardic Jews were expelled during the Inquisition and ate spicier food, but I had no idea that after 1492 and prior to WW2 Thessalonika had the largest Jewish population in Europe. I too had no idea of the many pogroms by Muslims against Jews in Iraq, Iran, Spain, Morocco, Yemen and North Africa more generally.
As 0.2% of the world's population, of which about 85% resides in Israel of the US, we indeed must do a better job of uniting around our common heritage, and educating all Jews about their multifaceted heritage.
Excellent.
A good analogy: Just become my house is different from my next door neighbour's does not mean we are not members of the same street.
I last attended Hebrew school in the mid sixties till my bar mitzvah....there was nothing Ashkenazi centric let alone Sephardi or Mizrahi.....there wasn't anything Judeocentric....it was learning to read the siddur at break neck speeds for the synagogue service. I'm not discounting your history, but the classmate with Tunisian background was just another Jew....there were plenty of reasons to otherrize and attempt to harass and bully me but my Jewishness wasn't one of them. Maybe I am one of the few, but I sought out knowledge about Mid East and Central asian Jews on my own. I had to investigate the beginnings of the klezmer revival on my own. Most Jews entirely indifferent to any of this. Ashkenazicentric? nope. Not interested unless to disparage. If only we were Italians sitting around huge Sunday dinners after mass. I'd like to see those of the E. European diaspora like myself regarded as indigenous to Israel and not hang Israel's authenticity on it's large Sephardi(European /N. African) and Mizrahi citizens.