The moment music would start to flow out into the living room, they would drop the needle in order to etch an angelic voice onto a black vinyl disc in order to listen again and again, long after the performance had faded into static.

Who’s voice? The mother of voice, the star of the East: Umm Kulthum.

She was, unequivocally, the undisputed master that dominated traditional Arabic music with her classical, maqam-based style and powerful live performances. Like all divas, Umm Kulthum had fierce rivals. Mohamed “the modernizer” Abdel Wahab was perhaps her greatest adversary, the innovator and composer who embraced Western instruments, orchestration, and shorter song forms, whose style was more fluid, cinematic, and infused with European influences. For years, both the public and the press understood them as diametrically opposed in artistic philosophy, heated competitors in popularity and ego.

Yet, taking place live in Cairo that night would be liqa al-sahab— the meeting of the clouds— a near-mythic convergence of the two musical giants. More specifically, Umm Kulthum would be singing a song composed by Abdel Wahab, a legendary song called Enta Omry.

The music began, and Umm Kulthum’s quivering voice filled the room.

The needle dropped, the recording began.

My grandmother Simha was, evidently, a purist. When she heard Abdel Wahab’s modern, “European” arrangements mingling with the traditional Umm Kulthum’s voice, she was outraged. “That bastard!” she yelled, “That donkey! He’s trying to destroy her, he’s trying to make her a whore!” Comments like this from my grandmother carried on throughout the song’s entire forty-minute length. But by the end, even she could not resist Enta Omry’s allure. Abdel Wahab’s lush orchestration, romantic lyrics, and modern structure combined with Umm Kulthum’s classical vocal improvisation and emotional gravitas grounded in Arab tradition was a gorgeous, nostalgic fusion of old and new, East and West, traditional and modern.

For her most devoted fans, it was a jarring departure from “authentic” Arab music, but no one could deny its entrancing quality. The song became an instant classic.

Unfortunately, for my grandmother and her friends, the recording they took of the live radio performance was sprinkled with my grandmother’s outrage and curses, an iconic version in its own right.

When I close my eyes and recall its details, I find myself in the living room with my grandparents and their friends, in a different time and place; I hear their voices in a language I do not understand. I even hear Umm Kulthum for the very first time, singing her most iconic hit.

But my grandfather, Naamat, died before I was born. My grandmother Simha passed when I was three years old. All of this happened over sixty years ago. So how do I remember this story?

Ancient Jewish wisdom offers some insight but is still cryptic. Deuteronomy 32:7 tells us, “Remember the days of old; consider the years of generations past. Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will explain to you.” The Torah commands remembrance of the generations past, but quite literally as a recollection, as if I directly experienced it. How is this possible? Because memory is part of inheritance, just as much as property or assets. The way I remember it is no doubt different from how it actually happened. Yet it becomes mine. Not because I lived it, but because it lives in me now.

There are barely any archives or records that exist in my father’s family beyond his generation. Instead, we use a kind of bodily, emotional time travel to verify events, dates, and places. No one, including my grandfather himself, knew his birthday; only that he was born the year the British came to Baghdad. I recall doing the historical mathematics in my head as a child, stitching family memory to historical and political events and eras: “My grandparents fled Iraq to Iran when the government turned on Jews; my father was born ten years later.” “My father and his family came to Israel at the start of the recession; they went back to Iran right before the 67’ war.” My father narrowly fled Iran at the height of the Islamic Revolution, after receiving a draft notice for the Iran-Iraq war. He was lucky. Hundreds of thousands of young, conscripted Iranian soldiers slaughtered in the war were not.

Flight, it seems, is in my family inheritance, at the very least in our contemporary inheritance. My great-grandparents, on the other hand, were part of a native Jewish community in Iraq for nearly a millennium, possibly longer. I can only assume that the small village my grandmother was born in, Nasiriyah, was the same one my great-grandfather was born in, and his father, and so on. Nasiriyah lies on the lower Euphrates river, southeast of Baghdad and close to the ruins of the ancient city of Ur. I imagine my grandmother often played on the riverbanks when she was a girl, washed laundry with her mother, or and had picnics there. My grandmother spoke about Nasiriyah like it was heaven on earth, a truly lovely place that buzzed with warmth and lighthearted village gossip.

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Because of these stories, my father always wanted to visit. During my grandfather Naamat’s shiva in 1997, some friends of my grandparents brought along an Iraqi Jewish man that had just finished a visit in Iraq. When my father and his siblings heard that he had visited Nasiriyah, they were beside themselves with excitement. “Tell us about your time in Nasiriyah,” they asked, “What was it like?!”

“Hayee chola,” he said, “It’s a hole!” (A hole, meaning— it’s a mess.)

Through fits of laughter, my father relayed to my grandmother what the man had said to him. “Hatha himar,” she said, “ma gayyir esh ga’id yuhki.” (“This guy is a donkey, he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about.”)

But the man was right. The idyllic Nasiriyah of my grandmother’s childhood was much different than the Nasiriyah of the late 1990’s. By then, the Iran-Iraq war had turned much of southern Iraq into a militarized zone; it housed military installations and supply routes, marking it as a frequent target of Iranian shelling and airstrikes.

Then, in 1991, Nasiriyah again became a target during the Gulf War— in retaliation for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, U.S.-led forces bombed strategic sites around the country, including Nasiriyah. Following Iraq’s defeat, Shi’a uprisings erupted across the south in hopes of toppling Saddam Hussein. Ba’athist units crushed the rebellion in a matter of days, executing between 50,000 to 100,000 people, who were then buried in mass graves.

Iraq’s economy subsequently collapsed under international sanctions and trade restrictions imposed after the Gulf War, and Nasiriyah, already battered by war, sank deeper into poverty. In other words: it had been gutted. It was hollow. My grandmother’s beloved childhood home had become a hole. Given that it was also one of the most heavily bombed cities during the Iraq War of 2003, I can safely assume that any small trace of my family’s existence there is probably gone, if it wasn’t wiped out before.

Of course, my vivid imagination of what my grandmother’s childhood in Nasiriyah was like isn’t to say that her life in Iraq was perfect, and I would be remiss to romanticize it in any way.

Yes, life was simpler in those days; children also frequently died of diarrhea or malaria before they even learned to speak. Of the five children my great-grandmother had, only four survived into adulthood. In those days, especially in the more rural areas of Iraq, women were married off as soon as they received their menses, which could be as young as twelve years old. Often, they were married to men double or triple their age, and told nothing about what would happen in the bedroom after the ceremony. Only the day or week before, they had been playing with dolls.

My grandmother married my grandfather at fourteen years old. She had gotten her period two years earlier, but her mother hid it from her father in an attempt to delay for as long as possible what would normally be an imminent marriage. As the story goes, her father, my great-grandfather, had originally arranged a marriage for her with a forty year old, bald fiddler (bald, my amma always says as she recounts the story, not even a memory of hair). No dowry would be given— her father had negotiated— to which the fiddler graciously accepted, as my grandmother’s beauty was more than enough for him.

This legendary beauty was no exaggeration: unlike most Iraqi girls, she had fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Word of her betrothal swept through the Jewish community in Southern and Central Iraq like a tidal wave. Her betrothal ceremony, they decided, would be at her aunt’s house in Basra. Many visitors would travel a long way within the week leading up to the ceremony to give their congratulations— but more importantly, to get a good look at the bride-to-be before she was married.

At the time, my would-be-grandfather, Naamat, was living in Baghdad. He was in love with a divorced woman who he could never marry due to the cultural taboos of the era. A friend at work, unable to attend my grandmother’s betrothal ceremony, begged my grandfather to go in his place and report back to him. This friend was hoping my grandmother might still be “unclaimed” by the time he arrived— and if she was, then he planned to claim her himself, traditionally done by giving her a piece of gold jewelry.

This was no simple favor. By train, Baghdad to Basra could take more than eight hours, and by car, seven. Yet as fate would have it, my grandfather begrudgingly traveled to Basra, and to his surprise, immediately fell in love with my grandmother the moment he set eyes on her.

Back then, a man couldn’t propose on his own, even at 28 years old. He raced back to Baghdad, dragged his mother out of the house in her slippers and robe, and made the long trip back to Basra so she could perform the betrothal in his place. When they arrived, his mother discreetly gave my grandmother a beautiful gold bracelet. As the story goes, when people eventually realized what had happened, chaos broke out. It was quite the scandal— betrothed before the original man had even arrived! My grandmother’s mother said he must marry her immediately.

My grandfather agreed, and the women ran to the home of the city’s rabbi and dragged him out, insisting that the matter was urgent.

After completing the ceremony, the irritated rabbi complained that because of their demands, he was going to be late to officiate an engagement ceremony for a fiddler. You can imagine the rest: everyone shrieked and laughed, “That fiddler is not getting married today!”

There are a lot of legends in my family, but this one, I’ve been told, actually happened.

Luckily for my grandmother, my grandfather was kind, gentle, and for his era, quite progressive. Though twice her age, he refused to consummate their marriage or have her move hundreds of miles away to Baghdad to live with him and his mother until she got to know him better, and felt comfortable around him. For the next several months, he visited her in her family home in Nasiriyah and spent time with her.

After she eventually moved into his family home, his mother promptly placed them in separate bedrooms, insisting that my grandmother was still much too young. Despite her efforts to keep them apart, my grandmother— quite obedient and submissive before marriage— had bloomed into her fiery, strong-willed self. Needless to say, her secret visits to my grandfather’s room at night were eventually discovered when she became pregnant. Many marriages in that time and place were quite sad, given they were typically defined by child marriage and the near-total erasure of a young woman’s agency. Which is why I am happy to report that my grandparent’s marriage was one of deep love and mutual admiration, despite its challenges.

Those challenges were often ones they had no control over. In 1941, four years before their marriage, a pro-Nazi coup led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani briefly ousted the pro-British Hashemite monarchy of King Faisal the Second and his regent uncle, Abd al-Ilah. Britain subsequently invaded once more and reasserted their control, installing a new government, but nefarious forces were simmering under the surface. Antisemitic sentiment was growing, especially after the Farhud pogrom of 1941 that shook Baghdad’s Jewish community to the core.

My grandfather never spoke about this period. One can only imagine why.

Life after the Farhud was never the same. Still, despite how Iraqi Jewry’s sense of safety was permanently shaken by what had transpired, things slowly returned to normalcy. With hindsight, it’s easy to say the red flags were there, that the pot was continuing to simmer, that the golden era for Iraq’s Jews was on the verge of collapse. But for Jews living in Iraq in 1945, that wasn’t necessarily obvious to them. No one could have predicted that within just a few years, everything they knew would fall apart. By 1945, Iraq’s Jewish community was one of the largest and most vibrant in the Middle East; Jews made up one-third of Baghdad’s population and were deeply integrated into the commercial, cultural, and professional life of the city. They were doctors, merchants, teachers, government clerks, musicians and writers. Baghdad’s Jews were often highly literate, multilingual, and overrepresented in higher education relative to their population size. Yes, there had been ruptures— the Farhud, the al-Gaylani coup— but for many, it seemed like the worst had passed, certainly compared to what European Jews were facing in 1945. Things had stabilized. The community had regained their footing. Daily life resumed, schools reopened, businesses thrived, and people carried on.

They couldn’t have imagined what was coming next.

For many years, I associated the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews with the rise of the Ba’ath party in the 1960s. But the truth is that most Jews— including my grandparents— had fled nearly a decade earlier, under the Hashemite monarchy. This was the same pro-British regime that had governed Iraq since the 1920s and had, for a time, overseen a period in which Jews were deeply integrated into Iraqi society. But after Arab armies— including Iraq’s— failed to destroy the newly declared State of Israel in 1948, everything suddenly began to change. Iraq had initially joined the war as part of the Arab League, under intense pressure to support the Palestinians and prove its appeal to the growing Arab nationalism in their population.

The Hashemite regime, already widely unpopular due to their pro-British stance, couldn’t afford to look weak or, worse— sympathetic to Jews.

It turned on its Jewish citizens relatively quickly in order to appease the public. By the end of 1948, mass dismissals from government jobs, intense surveillance of Jewish schools and synagogues, and arrests on vague accusations of Zionist activity were commonplace within Iraqi society. By 1949, they banned Jewish emigration out of Iraq altogether, trapping them in a now a nearly boiling pot. Only in 1950 did it suddenly reverse course: they offered Jews the chance to leave Iraq once again, but only if they renounced their citizenship and relinquished everything they owned. My grandparents must have hesitated, like many did. To leave Iraq would be to leave everything and everyone they had known. After what I can only imagine was intense deliberation, they decided to leave with what they could carry. As soon as they were registered to leave, the rest would be ceased by the state.

I’ve heard many stories of Iraqi Jews selling their homes or businesses to their non-Jewish neighbors for next to nothing, just to salvage a little cash before leaving. These were under-the-table sales, often for a sliver of the property’s real value. Buyers knew that Jews desperately racing to sell their property before fleeing had no real bargaining power.

They were extorted, squeezed like a sponge; some buyers never paid at all, knowing the owners would soon be gone and had no legal recourse. I recall sitting in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles as a teenager and striking up a conversation with the restaurant owner: a kindly man in his fifties, who, to both our delight, was also Iraqi. “My father helped the Jews when they left Iraq,” he proudly said, “He bought property from them when they were about to lose it all.” Being a young and naive girl, I was awe-struck upon hearing this— here was a man who had a direct connection to my family’s community back in Iraq, and at that, a positive one!

It was only later on, when I excitedly recounted the story to my father and a flash of anger and disgust crossed his face, that I understood that this wasn’t a heartwarming story at all. “Oh, really?” he sharply said, “His father helped the Jews? By buying their homes for ten dollars?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what they did to us.”

I wouldn’t know for a long time. I wouldn’t know because no one actually explained to me everything that had happened. Just like how my grandfather never spoke to anyone about the horrors of the Farhud— being 24 and living in Baghdad at the time when it happened— my father and his siblings never spoke about what happened in Iraq.

They never spoke about it, but not just because they preferred to not speak about depressing events. It also was simply not their experience. They were all born and raised in Iran. My grandparents left Iraq when they were relatively young, my grandmother being 18 and my grandfather being 32. If you were a Jew hoping to leave Iraq in 1950, the only way out was by crossing the eastern border into Iran. From there, Jews who had fled Iraq could continue onto Israel by plane, since Iran— at least under the Shah’s rule— maintained quite friendly relations with Israel at the time.

But many, like my grandparents, arrived in Iran and stayed. The cosmopolitan city of Tehran, in many ways, was much more sophisticated than the early Zionist state, which was still highly undeveloped and under major security threats. A small community of Iraqi Jews began to take shape in the city. In general, the Shah’s government embraced its Jewish population. Still, the transition could not have been easy. Despite sharing an alphabet, Arabic and Farsi are completely different languages, and my grandparents didn’t speak a word of the latter when they first arrived. They had to learn.

I don’t know if my grandparents were among the founding residents of the Iraqi Jewish enclave in Tehran, but they were certainly part of its first wave. There was, of course, already a well-established Persian Jewish community in Iran which had been there for centuries, if not millennia. But my grandparents were adamantly not a part of this community. They were Iraqis, they insisted, not Persians.

Soon, there were Iraqi Jewish clubs, synagogues, and shops that made up the Iraqi Jewish community of Iran. The language spoken was Judeo-Arabic. The customs were Baghdadi, although the food was a mix of Persian and Iraqi— because who can resist Persian food? Certainly not my family. It is this experience— the one of Iran— that my father so fondly remembers growing up with. Of course, his own frantic departure from Iran, decades later, would look very different than his parents’ from Iraq.

As my grandparents fled to Iran, the British said little as Iraqi Jews were choked out by the Hashemite regime which they had installed only a couple decades earlier. By then, they were much more focused on protecting oil relationships and stabilizing their regional influence than responding to the growing persecution of Jews that their client regime was driving. According to Sir Henry Mack, the British Ambassador in Baghdad, the Hashemite regime was “too weak to lead public opinion,” and any effort to improve the position of Jews would provoke nationalist backlash. The Foreign Office also blocked Jewish organizations in Britain from obtaining its reports on Iraq’s anti-Jewish policies from fear of British Jews protesting.

And so the Jews of Iraq, Babylonian Jews whose lineage stretched back thousands of years, were left to pack what they could carry and disappear. And I didn’t live through any of it, but now it lives in me.

I was running toward the bomb shelter in my moshav, about 10 minutes outside Beit Shemesh, when the Iranian ballistic missile struck earlier this March. The impact was so powerful that the air around me seemed to vibrate. My ears popped and the ground trembled beneath my feet.

Minutes later, Telegram channels confirmed what we had already heard: a missile had hit the city directly.

By the time I reached Beit Shemesh the next day, the scale of the destruction had begun to settle into view. The missile had directly struck an underground shelter beneath Beit Knesset Tiferet Yisrael, the neighborhood’s Sephardic synagogue, collapsing the roof of the bunker below. Nine people were killed and more than 30 others hospitalized, according to emergency services.

The street looked as if a storm had torn through it.

Burned cars stood blackened by the road. Windows were shattered across nearby buildings. Household items, holy books, and pieces of furniture were scattered across the ground, blown out of homes and the synagogue by the force of the blast. The smell of fuel and burning filled the air.

The synagogue was all but rubble.

A pair of tefillin lay on the ground among scattered family photos.

Some friends and family of the victims moved slowly through the debris, some searching for belongings, others simply staring in shock at what remained of their neighbors’ homes.

Nearby, three teenagers searched through the debris, shouting when they uncovered photographs of their friend Roni with her family. Roni and several of her relatives had been injured in the missile strike and were hospitalized, they said. Her father had been killed.

I descended into the caved-in bomb shelter. Moments later, another missile alert sounded. People around the disaster site instinctively ran toward nearby buildings and shelters— a reflex familiar across much of Israel.

Weeks after the strike, investigators are still assessing how the missile bypassed Israel’s air defense systems as residents continue clearing debris from the surrounding buildings. Weeks later, the quiet neighborhood is still marked by the blast.

This separation was ingrained in Jewish consciousness so deeply at that time that even in the early days of Jewish statehood, not conforming to ethnic endogamy carried its own stigma in the Jewish world. For our grandparents’ generation, the diaspora and its ethnic distinctions heavily shaped Jewish heritage and cultural inheritance. It was illustrated in the languages they spoke at home, their foods, liturgy, customs, and social codes, all deeply rooted in various lands, cultures, and histories outside the Land of Israel.

But Jewish ethnic distinctions are quietly disappearing. Having married a half-Cochini and half-Moroccan Jew while being a half-Ashkenazi, half-Iraqi Jew, I am acutely aware that our children will be one-fourth of each. Their children— given that it’s likely that they will marry other “mixed” Jews due to how intermingled global Jewry is today— will be one-eighth. And so it will continue: the more diverse my descendents’ Jewish ancestry becomes, the less tethered they’ll be to any single tradition or custom that developed in the diaspora.

Within a few generations, Jewish ethnic distinctions will altogether become irrelevant.

Already, the identity of diaspora is fading away, whether we like it or not. Languages of exile are vanishing, and perhaps with the exception of Yiddish, will be gone within a single generation. My father’s first language, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, was never transmitted to my generation. The same goes for my husband and his parents, who never knew or spoke Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Malayalam. We each know a few words— his brother knows a song— but the languages are gone. The same is true for food, music, and rituals. They were already cultural fragments when we inherited them, and each generation becomes more fragmented.

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I recall how, at the henna party before my wedding, an absurd realization came upon me, my mother, and the rest of my Iraqi aunties there: no one could remember the way in which Iraqi Jewish brides traditionally applied henna. Luckily, one older auntie was able to rack her brain and eventually it came to her, and the party continued. But losing the culture of my grandparents and great-grandparents is painful, even frightening. I myself, at times, have desperately tried to hold onto them, trying to learn recipes, songs, and even Judeo-Arabic. There’s a particular comfort in remembering the traditions of the past, and undeniable discomfort when one forgets. They guide us, give us purpose; without them, we are unmoored, floating in history without direction, lost, separated from our ancestors and, in some ineffable way, from our own soul.

And yet, for all their beauty, the traditions rooted in our diaspora can entrap us in an illusion. When we Jews shape our national self-perception through categories and differences, we fracture our collective soul and chain ourselves to the mental slavery of separation, superiority, judgement, racism, and ego. We’re not the first to experience it within the history of our peoplehood; even while enslaved in Egypt, not all Jews chose to leave when presented with liberation. They were too attached to the familiarity of Egyptian culture, routine, and society, even while under oppression. That said: a very real attachment to our diasporic identities still exists, perhaps because we cannot yet imagine what it means to be Jewish outside of them. That is for the next generations to imagine, because sooner or later, that will be their reality as Jewish cultural and ethnic distinctions fade into memory. A huge turning point in Jewish civilization is happening as we speak.

Throughout our history, we have moved in great, sweeping cycles of dispersion and return, fragmentation and convergence. Before the Umayyad Caliphate, Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean world. North African exiles mingled with Iberian Jews whose ancestors had suffered under brutal Roman and Visigothic rule, and merchants and scholars carried their beliefs and traditions from Babylonia and Egypt, each with their own distinct, even foreign customs and cultures. Yet under the golden age of al-Andalusia, a great unification occurred. Sephardic civilization was established, where Jews began speaking a common language, developing shared liturgy, and producing a cultural renaissance that would leave an indelible mark on Jewish life to this day.

Truthfully, these moments of cultural convergence have never so much erased Jewish identity as transformed it. If anything, they show that what may feel like loss is often the prelude to renewal.

Yet despite all the richness of the convergence that created Sephardic civilization, it was still one bounded by region. A Sephardic Jew of that era would not be able to imagine sharing a fully integrated communal life with an Ashkenazi Jew from the Rhineland, or a Yemenite Jew from the Arabian Peninsula. What is unfolding in our own time is something much more radical and complete, a global unification of communities once separated by continents, languages, and millenium.

The great Rav Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh: “Just as this occurs in an individual, so it occurs with the nation as a whole: when the spirit of Israel gathers inward beautifully within its depths, it feels a supreme wholeness within itself.” That “gathering inward” doesn’t necessarily need to look miraculous; I think more realistically it looks like two Jews from vastly different regional and ethnic backgrounds falling in love and making babies. Rav Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, understood this clearly. He argues in Mishpetei Uziel that ethnic separation within the Jewish people was unnatural, even dangerous: “Just as we are commanded to be one unified body (agudah achat), we are also sternly warned: Do not make yourselves into separate factions — Lo ta’asu atzmechem agudot agudot.”

If that is true, then perhaps marriage and families that span across Jewish ethnic lines isn’t just a sociological transformation, but part of the slow, natural healing process of our remaining fractures of exile.

In a strange way, we move backwards as we move forward in our history, returning to a moment before our identities were split into Iraqi, Ashkenazi, Cochini, Moroccan, or Yemenite. The last time Jews lived together in one place, with a shared sense of peoplehood unmediated by exile, was before those divisions ever existed. The age of exile gave us extraordinary cultural diversity. But now begins a new transformation, one that we don’t have a name for now but that our children and grandchildren certainly will: the early formation of a post-diasporic— a truly post-diasporic— Jewish identity.

The timing, certainly, is not a coincidence. 2016 was the year that fired off today’s culture wars, the proliferation of identity essentialism and politicking, the oppressor/oppressed binary mentality that had Western institutions in a chokehold, and other iterations of “Us vs. Them.” Jews were suddenly thrust into an uncomfortable spotlight. Where did we stand in the ever-changing climate that determined your privilege, credibility, and right to freedom of expression based on your ethnic origin, or the color of your skin?

In societies like the United States, where the majority of the Jewish population is Ashkenazi, many Jews can pass as “white”, despite not being perceived or dealt with as such for the majority of global history. The Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), accepted that Jews had been racialized into a type of non-European, non-white subject. He would later go on to found the Négritude movement, a precursor to the critical race theory that has become pervasive in our academic institutions. Following Israeli victories in the Six-Day War, American Jews would be increasingly demonized as enablers of colonial expansion, sponsors of capitalist imperialism, and therefore “white” in all but name.

For American Jews who became swept up in the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, the identity politics of the mid-2010’s, something strange began to happen. To be specific, many Jews in the U.S. began to see themselves through the lens of American history and colorism, desperately trying to decide where they fit, the only boxes available to them: brown, black, or white. To refuse to fit into any of these boxes—no matter our 4000 years of history and incredible ethnic diversity—was perceived by the masses as arrogant, foolish, privileged, even racist. American Jewish institutions latched on with blind militancy. To be progressive, as they defined themselves, meant to follow the current progressive movements of today.

Those movements demanded submission. Black, brown, or white—which one were you? The ADL published educational materials and glossaries defining white privilege as a systematic advantage experienced by white individuals in societies organized by racial inequality, such as the United States. It introduced anti-bias and DEI programs into its curriculum and administrative structure. Well-known Jewish magazines began to list in their submissions section that they are eager to read submissions from writers of color. Others began publishing appalling pieces on Mizrahi Jewry, on so-called “Jews of Color” (in 2020, one well-known publication published an article titled “Ashkenormativity is a Threat to All Jewish Communities”). Most of these publications were run by Ashkenazi Jews themselves, but no matter. By 2020, racial self-flagellation and masochism were considered the responsible things to partake in. The Mizrahi Jew became the mascot of Ashkenazi anti-racism, our only apparent function to be paraded before the left as evidence of millennia of DEI compliance.

Mizrahi and Sephardi organizations that had existed for decades began to be invited into mainstream Jewish institutions and gained a different kind of relevance altogether, fueling conversations about who gets counted as “Jews of Color,” and how Mizrahim fit (or don’t fit) into American racial frameworks. Popular manifestos began to be published on who is the “right” or “wrong” kind of Jew in this evil, Ashkenormative world that supposedly erases Mizrahi Jews. New and curious categories of “Mizrahi” Jews began to emerge, including figures who, on closer inspection, were not Jewish at all. The campaign against imperial whiteness, the effort to reframe Jewish–Arab relations as an ideological counterweight to pro-Palestinian social justice politics, and the defense of Zionism itself came to hinge on the recovery of Jewish “brownness”—a project in which Mizrahi Jews became largely unwitting, and frequently unwilling, symbols. To be more specific, the majority of Mizrahi Jews in Israel had no fucking clue that their identity was being repackaged by American DEI vultures. A monster began to grow: growling, drooling, and slumbering in the shadows.

October 7th and After

And then the monster awakened. No need to describe in detail the horror of October 7th. We all know what happened that day, and we know what happened after—the celebrations, the institutional statements of support, the calls for more violence. Progressive Jews were beside themselves. “Hadn’t we marched with you in your time of need?” they cried out. “Weren’t we also your faithful allies?”, they screamed into the void of the internet, as various progressive causes abandoned them to support the perpetrators of the massacre. (Spoiler alert: they were never “allies” to begin with).

Their cries fell on deaf ears. No matter the amount of Jewish families slaughtered, women raped, or hostages taken—the Palestinians were the “brown” victims, and the Jews were the “white” oppressors. The Palestinians were simply resisting white supremacy. October 7th, then, was justified, because it was an act of resistance against white oppression, colonialism. They were Jesus, the brown Palestinian—the pure one, the son of God—crucified by white Judas.

And so Jews, of all colors, began to try to find a life raft in the raging storm of mythological hatred. They took to arguing in broken Arabic with Pakistani Muslims on Omegle, or recruiting Nigerian Christians to Judaism, desperate to perform a fundamentally non-Western identity—jettisoning, in the process, centuries of Jewish contributions to European science, philosophy, and ethics. The costume followed: the sudra, or its $80 keffiyeh-styled substitute, probably stitched by Suleiman rather than Shlomo. Enthusiastically taking on the left’s moral geometry of indigenous versus colonizer—oppressor versus oppressed—brown versus non-brown—by self-orientalizing. Anything to shed themselves from this new label of “white colonizer” (but really just the label of “white”) that the political left immediately associated with Zionism in a post-October 7th world. Didn’t these arrogant leftists know that MIZRAHI AND SEPHARDI JEWS EXIST???!!

The “Non-White” Jew

Ah, yes. The Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, whose very existence disrupts the antisemitic narrative that Jews are white—and that Israel is a state of white colonizers. The Mizrahi Jews, many of whom speak Arabic (in more ways than one), who come from “Arab” lands, cook with turmeric and cumin and other “exotic” spices—the ones who can tolerate spicy food! The ones who ululate at festive celebrations and paint henna on their hands, the loud and warm and colored—sorry, colorful Jews who play the oud and beat their wives, whose grandmothers cracked raw eggs over their heads to ward off the evil eye, the ones who supposedly don’t “look Jewish” but instead “look Arab” (whatever that means). The “non-white” Jews. Let’s uplift them to confuse the antisemites, whose brains are surely not scrambled enough.

The fixation on “indigeneity”— but really just cultural assimilation— that’s dominated parts of current Mizrahi discourse uses the very binary of racial and cultural essentialism that the left uses in the Palestine movement. Insisting that Jews belong to the Middle East because Mizrahi Jews spoke Arabic, listen to Arabic music, partake in cultural traditions used throughout the Arab world—or perhaps have a specific, darker skin tone—unintentionally implies that Jews who don’t meet that criteria (aka: Ashkenazi Jews) are somehow less legitimate. “As an Iraqi-Jew, I belong here because my grandparents were part of a community in the Levant for 1000+ years.” Okay, so should Yaniv from Petach Tikva, or David from New Jersey, whose grandparents’ entire families were murdered in the Shoah, just go back to Poland? What is the point that you’re trying to make? Jewish belonging should not be adjudicated by the moral logic of those who hate us.

And what about the “non-white” Jews who just happen to be “white”? Those with blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin, whose ancestors spent centuries in Iberia and North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, or Mesopotamia—steeped in the traditions, liturgies, melodies, and practices of Sephardi and Mizrahi communities—yet never acquired any of the stereotypical “brown” (read: “Arab”) features? To reduce Mizrahi and Sephardi identity to “brownness” is not only crude and simplistic, but deeply orientalist, as if the Middle East is a racially homogeneous place without wide genetic and phenotypic diversity, including variances in skin, hair, and eye color. To equate Mizrahi or Sephardi identity with a singular racial appearance is to exoticize it. What makes this especially troubling is that a framework long used by colonial and orientalist discourses—and now the political left—has begun to circulate within Jewish discourse itself, influencing how Mizrahi Jews, in particular, articulate and perform their own identities in response to contemporary political pressures. All of this can be summed up in a seemingly banal but revealing remark often directed at Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews who do not visually confirm to the exoticized ideal of their appearance: “You don’t look Sephardi!”

But what makes this fixation especially absurd is that it collapses the moment it leaves the Jewish conversation altogether. To non-Jews in the West—many who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of Jewish history, ethnicity, and internal distinctions—none of those distinctions actually register. And yet many Mizrahim have become compliant participants in this idiotic, elaborate charade of visual proof (Look at me! I’m a brown Jew!), a performance so absurd that our Israeli counterparts would find it hysterical. Perhaps we should all carry proof of our membership in this ancient “Eastern club,” whose driving ethos is the racist assumption that everyone in the region is Arab and brown. Maybe we should cover our faces in fresh mud, dress like Aladdin, and drag our flying carpets everywhere we go, with Abu the monkey perched on our shoulders—because that is what the Middle East truly looks like, right?

The impulse behind this rhetoric is no doubt a noble one, which is that it aims to disrupt a mainstream narrative about Jews that many who seek to destroy us propagandize about, to recover the histories of the more than 800,000 Jews expelled from the Arab world in the 20th century, to reinsert those stories into dominant narratives of the Middle East that long marginalized them. That project matters. But it does not require transforming Mizrahi identity into a spectacle of orientalization. Jews today whose roots stem from the Middle East and North Africa are writers, artists, scholars, and political actors engaged in contemporary intellectual and civic life. To allow Mizrahi identity to be framed primarily as an aesthetic or folkloric counter-evidence (Amulets! Arabic! Grandma’s recipe for dolma!) is to diminish one of the most complex, enduring, generative strands of Jewish civilization.

The Futility of it All

Much of this behavior, of course, stems from internalized inadequacy—whether one is Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi. The vast corpus of scientific, archaeological, historical, and genetic scholarship demonstrating our undeniable descent from Levantine Jewish populations is apparently insufficient. We must also convince Gamal from Cairo, or Hamza from Karachi, that we are brown, “indigenous,” and human in precisely the same way they are. In all likelihood, Gamal and Hamza could not care less about our “brownness.” They despise us because we are Jews—and because, through years of clerical indoctrination, mosque sermons, school curricula, and state-sanctioned media, Jews have been presented to them as demonic, genocidal enemies of Allah. It is no coincidence that the Abraham Accords countries which recognize Jewish nationhood—Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kazakhstan—have spent the past decade fighting relentlessly against Islamist extremism.

And what, exactly, does any of this accomplish vis-à-vis the white leftist social justice crowd? No matter how “brown” or indigenous we claim to be, Palestinians will always be perceived as browner and more indigenous. At best, we are recast as brown Hebrew-speaking people colonizing and killing even browner Arabic-speaking people. Bravo. You’ve solved the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. You’ve cured leftist antisemitism. And all it took was a sudra and an “insha’Allah” every now and then. Here’s a glass award and a bottle of champagne from a Jewish American legacy organization. We’ll do it all again tomorrow.

The tragedy is that we would serve ourselves far better by teaching others about Jewish practice and its origins, rather than surrendering to the dead end of racial discourse. Jewish culture has never been separable from its monotheistic civilization: our law, liturgy, calendar, ethics, and collective memory are the very mechanisms through which Jewish difference has been lived and preserved. The contemporary obsession with “performing brownness” does not at all liberate Jews from racial thinking. It in fact replaces authentic (and yes, deeply spiritual) Judaism with phenotypical optics, echoing ideologies that first strip Jews of their Middle Eastern religious traditions and then seek to annihilate them on the basis of color—whether through twentieth-century Nazi racial science, or through today’s identitarian frameworks that cast Jews as white settler-colonialists.

To reduce the critical distinction between Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews to skin tone is not only historically illiterate; it frames Jewish validity as contingent on visible “cultural” (that is, colorist) diversity, while ignoring that everything about our practices is consistent with the trajectory of a Levantine people who adapted to a life spent in the ancient Mediterranean. One might reasonably ask why Jewish institutions appear so eager to align themselves with movements that re-racialize Judaism in precisely this way—and at what cost to Jewish identity itself.

Predictably, any anti-religious activists who rely on these institutions are incapable of articulating a serious religious case for Jewish sovereignty, having dismissed Judaism itself as backward or unserious, such that they are left with only one register through which to argue Jewish legitimacy: race politics. Given the fate of so many civilizations that developed alongside us, one would expect us to exist only in museums—and yet here we are: a living, breathing, sovereign exhibition. We are a nation that can don our tallit and tefillin each morning, recite our prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic, and bake bread in preparation for Shabbat, knowing that these practices were forged during our time as nomads in the Sinai Peninsula. Shouldn’t that be enough?

We reject the premise that Jewish belonging must be argued in racial terms at all, simply because any effort to interpret Jewish history and peoplehood through the grammar of indigeneity or phenotype relies on concepts that Jewish peoplehood itself predates. The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years precisely because we did not assimilate to the expectations of others, and instead maintained our own internal coherence—legal, ritual, linguistic, and ethical—across various geographies and appearances.

To insist otherwise is to trap Jewish identity inside contemporary politics and identitarianism, totally foreign to Judaism or Jewish self-understanding.

Treating Mizrahi Jews as “proof” in a perverse litmus test of belonging—measured by conformity to a homogenized Arab cultural framework—ultimately does the work of those who seek to degrade Jewish tradition, which has always stood on its own terms.

For so long, I’ve tried to describe to him the condition that so many new immigrants in Israel live with, which is both a deep sense of belonging intertwined with feeling like an outsider. He, of course, never truly understood what I meant— he was born in Israel, and his family has been there for three generations— that is, until we arrived in Kochi.

His emotional reaction was unexpected. Suddenly and all at once, he understood the experience of dual homelands, a rather complicated experience for Jews born and raised in the Diaspora.

To be specific, he described feeling a sense of belonging in Kerala. There, he was immersed in the language of his grandfather; the small expressions and idiosyncrasies of people in his moshav; the food he grew up eating; the snacks, the culture, even the physical attributes of people around him. He felt delighted any time someone assumed he spoke Malayalam, or thought he was an Indian national when buying tickets to local nature preserves— which are 50% less than what foreigners are charged. Essentially, his experience visiting Kerala was much like many diaspora Jews’ experiences visiting Israel. It felt like a second home, and indeed when I asked him if he felt a sense of homeland here, his answer was a definitive yes.

My own understanding of homeland, too, is layered and complicated, as it is for most Jews. My mother’s family has been in the United States for four generations, and she grew up completely integrated into American Jewish culture, which without a doubt informs my own sense of complicated belonging in the U.S.

My dad, on the other hand, was born in Iran, although his first language was Arabic, because his parents were born in Iraq. He must also have an intricate experience of belonging to all those places, not excluding the United States and Israel, given that he’s lived in the U.S. since he was eighteen and always felt deep connection with Israel, living there for a few years as a child as well. I’ve lived in Israel for the last three years, and my family has visited the country more times than I can count. It is without a doubt a kind of second home to them, too.

Dad has frequently talked about wanting to visit Iran one day. Whenever he says it, I can see in his eyes a beautiful glimmer of memories, a throaty nostalgia in his voice. He’s mentioned wanting to visit Iraq one day, too, but I believe that comes more from a curiosity of seeing the place where his parents came from— although I know speaking the dialect of his parents effortlessly with ordinary people around him would be extremely moving for him.

I ponder all of this as my husband and I travel through India, visit old Jewish sites, and meet locals, all while millions in Iran protest for their freedom. Nearly every day, we check the news to see what’s happening: how many protesters have been killed today, flights to Israel being canceled, heating rumors of imminent war with the U.S., Iran’s currency value plummeting by the day. I’ve written so much of my Iraqi heritage, but the truth is, my Iranian one has been just as influential on my life. I heard Arabic around me growing up, but heard just as much Persian, which my father spoke with his siblings; I grew up eating tabeet and bamya and kubbeh, but my favorite foods are gormeh sabzi, fezenjoon, and koresh bademjoon. After a bad breakup in 2021, I listened to Hayedeh’s “Minaye Del” (Heart of Glass) on repeat for a week; Googoosh was my top artist in my 2025 Spotify Wrapped, and I was in her top 1% of listeners. My favorite movies are Persian— Children of Heaven, Taste of Cherry, and The Separation— and one of my best friends in high school was Persian too, which is probably not a coincidence…

Perhaps if I visited Iran one day with my dad, I might feel the same thing my husband now feels in Kerala. The world today lacks so much nuance and room for complexity. These days, it seems everyone must “belong” to one place and one place only. Both the left and the right have been poisoned by a zero-sum game of identity essentialism.

Therefore: I was born in the U.S., live now in Israel, and am traveling through the land of my husband’s ancestors in South India, and all the while, can’t stop thinking about Iran. Because somehow, I too feel connected to the deep pain there, having the stories of my father’s family escaping Iran ingrained in my heart. But also from my love and admiration of Persian culture, whose language, poetry, and taarof1 has imprinted itself on my soul like a fossil (my favorite phrase in Persian, which is meant to be said to someone who just apologized for facing their back to you— considered rude in the culture— is gol posht o rou nadare, which means “a flower has no front or back”).

That is why I write about homeland now, despite being in the middle of my vacation in a remote part of Kerala with dodgy internet access and no laptop— I wrote this all first in my journal and then typed it up on my notes app— because my heart is filled with love and pain for the people of Iran, for Iran itself, which perhaps is also some kind of homeland for me in my life of many homes. Some of which I’ve been to and some of which I’ve not.

The truth is, I don’t know if I will ever visit Iran one day, despite everyone’s increasing hope that the current people’s revolution— against the literal Revolution— that we’re seeing now will succeed. That whatever leader that one day replaces the current tyranny will be better and more just, ensuring freedom to Iranian people. I remain deeply uncertain. Contrary to popular belief, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was not because of mass protests or civil disobedience. It fell because usually, anyone who tried to climb over the wall and cross over was shot on spot— and one day, people started climbing the wall as they usually did, but the Soviet guards just didn’t have it in them to shoot them anymore. Once that happened, it all fell apart. Brutal regimes like Iran’s will never fall unless there’s a crack within the authority that lessens its brutality when protest happens.

But I digress. My father’s childhood home is burning from within, and all I can do is watch and pray that some renewal emerges from the ashes. I have written essays about Iraq, waxed poetic about my grandmother’s village in Nasiriyah, the Tigris River, Baghdad, let my heart bleed when writing about Israel, let tears well in my eyes when I’ve watched Persian movies. I have dreamed about visiting Tehran and I’ve invented prose about America. I carry each of these places inside of me. Their histories, cultures, and landscapes flitter around in my stomach like butterflies, exciting and nauseating me until I vomit out stories and words about them. But here is the non-romantic truth: I feel that I belong to so many cultures, and so many places, that often I feel I belong nowhere at all.

This is a rather privileged emotion, given that my ancestors’ experiences of unbelonging stemmed from literal oppression and expulsion from their societies. But I share this feeling honestly, and I know many others share it as well. Maybe I am experiencing the future for the modern, globalized person. A future in which most people will belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time, despite toxic nationalism— which engulfs every part of our world today— that says otherwise.

For me, at least, it is the most persistent confusion of my life. My upbringing was very culturally conservative and Jewish, mixed with Middle Eastern parenting. Because of this I’ve sometimes felt a specific cultural struggle with fitting into the “American” crowd. Yet because I was raised in the U.S., its influence on me runs deep. So deep that, ever since living in Israel, I too often find it hard to fit in with Israelis around me. Wherever I go, I wonder if I belong; where my homeland is, and what a home or a land even means in 2026. I feel connected to so many places in the world; my heart swells and breaks for them each in different ways. “Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1961 essay, Nobody Knows My Name, which he published after living in France for some time. Despite living in Europe, Baldwin reflected, having physical distance from America still did not free him from the history, identity, and obligations that had already formed him.

Perhaps for me, too, no amount of movement or distance can undo the multiple histories and cultures that have already shaped me. I am incurable of the places that formed me. Even by the ones I have never been in.

Always, after a family gathering, the women of my family would sit around a large glass table, on gold, ornate couches whose dark-wood frame was engraved with designs— each of us propped up on tasseled throw pillows— to drink Turkish coffee. When each one finished their cup, they placed the saucer on top of the teacup, held the cup with both hands— thumbs on the saucer— and in one swift flip towards the heart, set the cup upside down. Over the next few minutes, the thick sludge of coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup would drip down the sides. Dark streaks and smudges would then dry into a kind of sacred map of the past, present, and future.

As a child, I would force myself to sip this bitter drink in order to be part of the ritual that came after, the one that the women around me partook in and that I observed with utter awe and admiration. When the grounds were dry, a hush would fall around the room as two women— usually one of them being my aunt— hunched over a cup. There is no manual or formula for how to interpret the images that reveal themselves to someone who reads Turkish coffee grounds. It is a form of creative transmission that is impossible to codify, probably because it carries an intimacy that printed words cannot actually truly capture. Reading a cup is, at its root, the intersection of pattern recognition and generous improvisation. I recall once, how I read the cup of my Turkish friend after we drank coffee together; “Incredible,” he said, “My girl friends in Turkey read it the exact way you do. The exact same energy, intonation, words and phrases, just in a different language.”

I have been told I have “the gift” of reading; a distant cousin in her fifties told me so when I was a teenager. I have read many people’s cups— friends, cousins, and strangers alike— and been surprised at how often the interpretations land. Men in my family, my father among them, almost always scoff at the concept altogether; but decades ago, early in my mother’s pregnancy with my brother— far before she and my father had told anyone— a cousin read her cup with amazement. “Are you pregnant?” she asked.

“No!” my mother exclaimed, “Of course I’m not.” But the cousin persisted, eyeing the cup. “I see that you’re pregnant,” she said, “And it’s a boy.” My mother did not even know the gender of the baby yet.

The way I learned to read coffee grounds was after years of others reading mine. My aunt always explained to me when she read my cup— here is an evil eye. Here is a fish. Here is a chicken. Here is a woman running. Here is a ladder. What do you see? Perhaps I had a wild imagination as a child, but within the chaotic streaks I too saw stories, pictures, warnings, and good news within my cup, whose delicate rim and outside walls were always dark with coffee stains, evidence of multiple, ongoing girlhood crushes.

As I look back on the incredibly difficult history that the women in my family were swept up in, I think of my grandmother: married at fourteen, losing her first child, fleeing Iraq with my grandfather, beginning life again in Iran, then surviving a brain tumor. A generation later came the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, in which my aunts faced unimaginable hardships and pain, constantly forced to improvise their way out of perilous situations. I realize now that it was this very creativity and instinct required for reading coffee grounds that allowed them all to survive war, expulsion, and conflict.

Despite the hardships they experienced, they never lost their spark for life or their sense of humor. My grandmother— a gifted storyteller— used to sit with her friends in Iran drinking Turkish coffee, and sometimes, upon looking at one of their cups after, would gasp and turn away. “I can’t read today,” she would tease, until they desperately begged her to continue and tell them what she saw.

The art, at least within my family, is fading; I realized, as I recently returned to the ritual, how few in my generation, or even my father’s generation, have kept it. One aunt of mine still reads; a distant older cousin, too. But as far as I’m concerned, among my cousins within my generation, I’m the only one that knows how to read coffee grounds. No one has intentionally rejected it, of course. It’s just that we live in a world so much different than the one my grandmother grew up in, a world that is modern, globalized, and dispersed.

We don’t have villages anymore; my cousins and I aren’t getting together and drinking coffee every day. We all live in different parts of the world, and if we’re lucky, see each other once every few years. Even with the older generation of my family, gatherings grow fewer and farther between as people live their lives, move away, or take their leave from this world, as we all do one day. The circumstances required for passing on the practice simply don’t exist anymore. The way it continued was through community— real community— where family, friends, and neighbors used to just pop by for a chat, or fold laundry together. It cannot be intentionally taught. It’s a natural process passed down from years of watching elder women in the family read cups, tell stories, confide and give advice to one another.

I learned from years of watching my aunt read cups, who learned it from years of watching her mother— my grandmother— read cups, who must have learned it from her mother or aunties, and so on. It was always a women’s art, social and unrecorded, passed down in kitchens and living rooms. I’m determined to make my own “village,” even if it’s something I have to cultivate; because the world doesn’t offer one ready-made like it used to.

Inshallah, one day I’ll make Turkish coffee for my daughters too. •

Maia Zelkha is the editor of Yad Mizrah.

Two years ago, I received a gift from my grandmother. It was a small tupperware of my great-grandmother Yaffa’s— born as Georgiya— hand-mixed baharat spice mix. Savta Yaffa died in 2008.

The last time I saw her was in 2005, when I last visited Israel. My only memories of my great-savta Yaffa are from when I was eight years old; I remember the trees in her yard, and how I used to take bucket baths outside while my savta Zahava showered us with a hose. The itchy, old-fashioned couches on which we slept, a tea garden, and my newborn cousin, Noee, how small her nose, hands, and feet were. I remember Savta Yaffa sitting silently in the kitchen. Beyond that, I don’t remember much. My childhood memories of her are painted in watercolor; Israel itself almost felt like Narnia, a far-away land my parents came from, where people only spoke Hebrew, drank tea from herbs in the garden, and where other Iraqi Jews existed outside of my family.

On the other side of the world was my “real” life in California. There, Jews spoke English and “ate bagels” (though I didn’t understand that bagels were, allegedly, “Jewish” until my early 20’s). Many of their family names ended in “berg’ or “man” or “stein,” unless they were Persian. None of them had a family name resembling “Yehezkel”.

Truthfully, at the time, I didn’t identify myself as anything other than Ashkenazi— that was the Jewish world around me. I was barely aware that my family was Iraqi, or that there was such a thing as Iraqi Jewish history. My grandfather never spoke about it except when telling terrible stories of barely surviving an antisemitic stoning attack at six years old. I am told by a close friend that drinking loose-leaf tea in glasses is a distinctly “Iraqi” thing, due to British influence during the Mandate. I don’t know if that is true, but I suppose I did grow up drinking a lot of loose-leaf tea from the garden.

Only in high school, the first time I studied at a non-Jewish school, did I first claim my Iraqi roots. A high school frenemy had spoken about being Middle Eastern, and I piped up. “I’m Middle Eastern too!” I said. He disagreed. “You can’t claim an identity just because your ancestors were there 2,000 years ago.” I told him that my grandfather speaks Arabic natively, that my family in Israel are only one or two generations displaced from Iraq. In hindsight, I understand that I never needed to prove myself. Even if I didn’t grow up eating my Savta Yaffa’s t’beet every Shabbat.

That t’beet is the recipe for which I have been saving Savta Yaffa’s baharat over the past two years. My grandfather’s sister, Dina, used to invite me over for Friday night dinner every time she was doing a “Shabbat t’beet” or “Shabbat sambousak.” If I couldn’t make it that weekend, she would wait to make it for a Shabbat where I could come. Now that Dina has passed, no one else has made Savta Yaffa’s t’beet recipe. For the past two years, I have been tempted to make it myself, but I worry that her special baharat mix will have become stale after all those decades in the freezer.

The baharat of my ancestors— literally, from three generations before me— has sat untouched in my grandmother’s freezer for fifteen years, and in mine for two. Possibly, the last hands that touched said baharat were those of my great-savta Yaffa. Did she mix the spices herself, or did she instruct the spice merchant on what to add? I imagine my grandparents opening her spice cabinets in the week that she died unexpectedly from an infuriating incident of medical malpractice. Those jars of fresh spices were mixed with the expectation of many more home-cooked meals for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They were not meant to be frozen for decades. Maybe, I thought, I could meet those expectations. I resolved to try, at least.

At the butcher’s, I requested two enormous turkey necks and told him I’m making t’beet.

“You’re making t’beet?”, he asked incredulously.

“Yes, and you’ll be surprised to know that I’m actually Iraqi.” I replied with a smile. A sentence I have repeated a thousand times before. This line of questioning has always baffled me: do people think that cooking choices or skills are predetermined at birth? What have I actually inherited from Iraq, other than a last name, traumatic stories, and a box of seventeen-year-old spices? Truthfully, I have always felt like an imposter, deeply insecure about if I am “enough” of an Iraqi Jew, if by being brought up in the U.S. and far from my culture invalidates it. Much of the reason I have learned to cook so many Iraqi dishes over the years, read stories of Iraqi Jews, watch documentaries, written essays, interrogated my aunt Dina, and constantly told others where my name comes from is out of that sense of insecurity. Desperation, too, that it won’t one day all disappear.

But I write now about cooking t’beet with Savta Yaffa’s baharat. One of my aunts, Orly, compiled all of her handwritten recipes and sent them to me. My grandmother Zehava guides me over the phone— she learned to cook t’beet from her mother-in-law, Savta Yaffa herself.

Since I have decided not to commit to stuffing a whole chicken, but rather cook the version with turkey necks, the recipe is surprisingly simple. Savta Yaffa’s baharat smells amazing. I cannot help but add several more teaspoons of the mix than necessary out of sheer excitement. And as I had expected, it does smell different from store-bought baharat. ‘Baharat’ simply means ‘spices’ in Arabic, so the precise mix of spices varies widely between regions. This baharat smelled of nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron, cardamom, and English pepper. Upon smelling it, I was flooded with memories of my great-aunt Dina calling me to ask if I was coming for Shabbat; because if so, she was planning on cooking a proper Iraqi Shabbat meal for me.

I put the pot of t’beet into my sister’s oven and set a timer for eight hours of slow cooking. Tomorrow, there would be an enormous pot of rice and chicken waiting to be devoured. Whether it would resemble Savta Yaffa’s t’beet, I had no idea. With that, I set an alarm for myself; the t’beet and I would wake together.

The following morning, I removed the pot from the oven and set it on the counter to cool down. My nerves got the better of me and I was not the first to taste it. Rather, it was my sister who took the first bite of meat and potatoes from the dish. Only when she proclaimed it delicious, did I find within myself the courage to taste it myself.

I couldn’t remember the precise texture of Dina’s t’beet, nor its aroma or consistency, but I was fairly sure that this was what t’beet was supposed to taste like… the slow-cooked rice was brown and mushy, almost like a porridge. The turkey neck meat slid off the bone with ease, and the eggs were a light shade of brown. The flavor of Savta Yaffa’s baharat had not faded with the years— on the contrary, it was as strong as ever. The scent though, is what stopped me in my tracks.

Seventeen years had passed, but my sister’s kitchen now smelled like Savta Yaffa’s— as if she had just stepped out of the room. •

Recipe for Safta Yaffa’s T’beet:

• Whole chicken, stuffed

• Stuffing: tomatoes, Persian rice, meat (turkey).

• T’beet baharat: (cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, saffron, English pepper) Grind together.

1. Put stuffed chicken in a pot, add oil, and some black or white pepper, and sauté some onions.

2. When the onion is browned, remove chicken from pot.

3. Add tomato puree and water (5 cups of rice, 2 cups of purée).

4. Add some chicken bouillon powder and salt according to taste; add a spoon of the baharat mix.

5. Place chicken in the sauce and let it boil for 15 min.

6. Add the rice and stir every so often so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom, and then out the chicken; add it back into the pot, along with some hardboiled eggs, once the rice has absorbed the water.

7. Cook all night (or 5 hours) al-balata (traditionally the stone floor of an oven, or if you don’t have a traditional tannur, on low heat, covered.

NOTE: Savta also made a version of this recipe with stuffed turkey necks instead of stuffed chicken. This is the version I made.

LeeEl Yehezkel is an Israeli-American living in Israel, studying an M.sc. in Environmental Quality at the Technion. She is of both Ashkenazi (Romania and Slovakia) and Mizrahi (Iraqi) descent, and this family history deeply informs how she sees the world and her writing.

The first time I heard about the Jewish Languages Project’s initiative, Heirloom, my mind raced with possibilities in my lifelong quest to unlock the language of my childhood. Heirloom is a new Jewish language reclamation initiative that aims to revitalize dying Jewish languages so they can exist for future generations; it is partnered with the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages.

I grew up in London to Bahraini Jewish immigrant parents. As is the case with many immigrants, the first language my siblings and I were spoken to was in the native tongue of our parents. Referred to in the family as “our Arabic,” Judeo-Baghdadi was the language spoken for hundreds of years by Babylonian Jews in their homeland, and then by the Jewish refugees and their descendants who were expelled from Iraq in the 20th century, or by those who earlier migrated to countries like Bahrain and India.

As is often the case with the children of immigrants, we were desperate to fit in with our Anglo school friends and convince them– and ourselves– that we were just like them: that we ate the same food, listened to the same music, and that our mothers didn’t make all of our clothes with elasticated waists from fabric our grandfather had brought from his shop in Bahrain. We were not particularly successful in convincing anyone of this. We were embarrassed when our friends heard “our Arabic” spoken to us, and so we began responding to our parents in English. Eventually, we forgot much t of the language we had once known. Now, I find myself racing to join every class, program, and initiative that I come across in order to slowly claw my way back to the sounds and meanings that were once at the center of my childhood.

In the pilot cohort of Heirloom, eight learners were paired with eight mentors. The native speaker of the pair held the “key” to this treasure trove and was eager to share it with the learner, who was ready to dive back into the family language. In many ways it was cathartic; I persuaded my mother to be my mentor. And although she has spoken to me in Judeo-Baghdadi for over 5 decades, Heirloom created a more formal framework for us through which we could learn together. We decided to focus on the extremely colourful and evocative phrases of my maternal grandmother, who had passed away the year before. Here are some phrases that we recalled:

• Walla, biblash! (wow, it’s free!) when she heard how much we had paid for our new shoes, no matter what they cost. She always wanted us to feel good.

• Bas Baka! (enough already!) when she got annoyed with us for making noise while she watched her Egyptian films in the afternoon.

• Tiff ‘ala witchak! (I spit on your face!) Such utterings were reserved for anyone who spoke or acted with malice towards Israel or the Jewish people. Though usually very elegant and graceful, my grandmother would not tolerate such behavior.

• Wehed kayinfikh il’lakhi. (One of them flatters the other). This gem would be used by her to describe two fools who flatter each other. Each fool believes the other’s words and so they convince themselves that they are both wise.

We remembered all these and more and we recorded them in our spreadsheet to add to the collection of phrases organized by the other learner-mentor pairs. Surprisingly, the “learner” of one pair was actually older than her mentor. We often assume that the loss of language is a generational thing, but that’s not always the case.

I later discovered, through the Jewish Languages Projects Heritage Words podcast, that these words and phrases are called “heritage words.” The idea of heritage words is a fascinating one. They are the food words, commands, curses, terms of endearment, greetings, and random lexical items that are used in a family’s day-to-day life. Heritage words get peppered into everyday speech where you speak one language and find yourself raising children in a country where they speak another.

My first Zoom session with Heirloom was scheduled to take place in the middle of our family holiday to Scotland.

More precisely, we were in a minivan with our Scottish tour guide who was driving us back to Edinburgh after a day trip. So there my mother and I were— with my husband, my kids and my brother— admiring five Highland cows in a field while we introduced ourselves to the group and got to know the other mentor-learner pairs. By coincidence, after overhearing the topic of our Zoom session, our guide asked us if we knew of the singer Yasmin Levy; and so a side outcome of Heirloom was an infatuated Scotsman introducing us to her incredible Ladino songs.

My participation in this project over the summer created a sort of springboard from which I launched myself into more serious study of the language of my childhood. I applied and earned a coveted place on the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages year-long course in Judeo-Baghdadi, along with 29 other Jews with Babylonian heritage (and some academics who are neither Jewish nor Babylonian). To counter the seriousness of that course, I also joined a conversational class with a group of people who had grown up hearing their parents and grandparents use the same words and phrases, eat the same foods, and celebrate the festivals of the Jewish year in the same way as I did. For an hour a week, we laughed our way through the class as we realized what our aunties were muttering under their breath, that at the time we did not understand.

It took participating in this program for me to actually schedule time to sit down with my mother and have her pass on to me the wise words of my grandmother. It is a gift and a responsibility to preserve the Jewish languages of our ancestors. •

Vicky Sweiry Tsur was born in London to Bahraini Jewish immigrants, with roots in India, Iran and Iraq. This mix of cultures gave her rich and wonderful Jewish traditions, which she endeavors to practice daily and pass on to her children. She now lives in California with her husband and three children.

Eat according to your own taste but dress with the taste of others.

- Moroccan Proverb

In 1930s Tangier, when Sultan Abdelaziz bin Hassan— deposed, exiled, yet still regal— decided to part with his vast collection of Moroccan jewelry, there was only one man he trusted to handle the sale.

That man was Simon Berdugo, my great-great-grandfather.

Simon was a jeweler from Essaouira and descendant of the Marchands du Sultan, Sephardi Jews appointed by Sultan Mohammed III in the mid-eighteenth century to represent monarchical interests in foreign trade. He had long since relocated northwards to marry Laetitia Toledano, a woman of elegant bearing from Asilah. It was there that he rose to become head of the jewelers’ guild, presiding over a consortium of craftsmen in a city that had for millennia served as a vital gateway between Europe and North Africa.

When the Sultan approached him with the task, Simon hurriedly convened the guild and negotiated the transfer of the royal collection to the Bank of British West Africa. On the surface, it was simply a transaction facilitated on behalf of a powerful nobleman. However, the story carries a deeper undercurrent of trust across religious lines, of Jewish artisans safeguarding Moroccan history, and of objects whose value often transcended monetary dimensions.

Anyone who has spent time in North Africa— and Morocco in particular— will know that in many indigenous societies, it is women, not men, who are the primary bearers of artistic expression.

Among the Amazigh, it is women who adorn their faces with tribal tattoos, who wear elaborate ornamental jewelry, and who perform ritual dances and songs that transmit both memory and meaning. These creative and spiritual practices were often shared with Jewish women, woven into the rhythms of everyday life. Yet many have all but vanished, lost to the forces of exile, assimilation, and intermarriage.

The story I am about to tell begins with Simon and his circle of men, but it is important to acknowledge that his work was entangled in a world where women wore, guarded, and passed down the very objects he crafted and sold. For centuries, Jews and Imazighen shared superstitions, symbols, and ways of protecting those viewed as most vulnerable to evil spirits. In those shared artisanal practices, there emerged a talismanic language that to this day still exists, even as its slowly fades away.

Among the most distinctive adornments shared between Amazigh and Jewish communities was the fibula— known in Tamazight as the tisaghnast or tazarzit, derived from the words for “pin” and “hair,” respectively. The metal fibula, initially crafted in bronze, and later in iron, silver, or gold, appears to have evolved from a simple pin fitted with a fastening appendage.

These triangular brooches, often ornately decorated, served both aesthetic and practical purposes: they secured unstitched garments, were woven into braided hairstyles, and also indicated regional identity across North Africa. For example, the fibulae of the Kabylia region in northern Algeria are instantly recognizable for their vivid enamelwork and the frequent incorporation of red coral. These decorative fibulae likely entered the region via Mediterranean trade routes during the Punic and Roman periods.

These eras were marked by vibrant commercial exchange, in which Jewish mercantile networks played a significant role, facilitating both the movement of goods and the transmission of artisanal forms across cultural frontiers.

One archival photograph (featured below) produced by the French ethnographer Jean Besancenot in the mid-1930s documents the festive headdress of a young Jewish woman from Goulmima in southern Morocco, with a visible tazarzit pinned upon her clothing. Her heavy amber and coral necklaces are all hallmarks of Amazigh aesthetic tradition, reinterpreted through Jewish ritual sensibilities. Those familiar with Shir HaShirim, the biblical love poem traditionally attributed to the Israelite King Solomon, may recall one of its verses when gazing upon this image: “Your cheeks are lovely with rows of jewels, your neck with strings of beads.”

The central rosette on this fibula has traces of colored enamel, a decorative technique believed to have been introduced to Morocco from Spain. This method was transmitted through the skilled hands of Jewish artisans fleeing the Iberian Peninsula due to Almohad persecution. It would become a hallmark of North African silversmithing during the early modern period.

The image also brings to mind a poetic incantation from the Sephardic Jews of Rhodes— likely rooted in medieval Iberian folklore— which testifies to the deeply held belief in the protective power of metal against malevolent forces. Judeo-Spanish tales of a figure clad in iron, condemning the evil eye (‘ayin ha-ra) to the depths of the sea, bridges together Iberian, Jewish, and broader Mediterranean traditions.

When Sephardic Jews fled to the coastal cities of North Africa, they brought with them a rich tradition of rituals and beliefs meant to protect and heal their families, children, and communities. These merged with Amazigh cosmologies, particularly the notion of jinn (demon)-induced ailments and the healing properties of amulets and charms.

The tazarzit came to reflect this convergence. Among Sephardic women in Tetouan and Tangier, the brooch often took on more elaborate and materially valuable forms, which indicated both Iberian heritage and a higher socioeconomic status than the so-called forasteros (Sp. “outsiders”) of central and southern Morocco. Figure 1.2 depicts a pair of ornate fibulae from the northern Moroccan city of Tetouan, whose Jewish community was composed almost entirely of Sephardic exiles.

The use of gold as the base metal, the inclusion of rubies and emeralds, and the refined, miniature design all signal elevated social status and clear Iberian influence.

For centuries, particularly in the Atlas mountains of North Africa, the craft of jewellery making was practised almost exclusively by Jews living in towns and villages. Across North Africa, gold and silversmithing were professions traditionally associated with Jewish communities. And according to historical accounts, rulers often entrusted Jews with the minting of coinage, a task linked to practices such as usury, which is prohibited in Islam. This monopoly may have contributed to the widespread adoption of the jeweler’s trade among North African Jews, embedding it as a defining feature of their material and economic culture.

But by the twentieth century, as French colonial rule took hold, a new mindset took over, one that saw development as something that inevitably had to replace local traditions. Colonial policies divided communities by ethnicity, breaking apart the close ties between Jews and Amazigh people. Things like traditional jewelry and clothing, once central to Amazigh identity, were now seen as backwards or out of step with the modern world.

Following independence from colonial authority, newly rising Arab nationalist movements accelerated this cultural destruction. The ideological drive for Arabization and Islamization by deeply supremacist revolutionaries such as Allal El Fassi and Ahmed Ben Bella, combined with the mass exodus of Jews fleeing persecution and instability, led to the erasure of shared artisanal traditions. On December 12th, 1960, Algerian Jews were devastated to find that the Great Synagogue of Algiers had been ransacked and firebombed by Arab nationalist thugs.

By 1962, the synagogue had been converted into a mosque, humiliatingly dubbed Jamaa-Lihud: “Mosque of the Jews.”

Jews were not the only targets of exclusion. Amazigh tribes who fiercely resisted Arabization policies, particularly those in the northern Rif and Kabylia regions, were often met with harsh repression and cultural marginalisation. What had once been a vibrant realm of creative and spiritual collaboration between Amazigh and Jewish communities became, in the post-colonial imagination, an obscured, largely forgotten relic.

Since the early 2000s, Amazigh activism has surged across North Africa, particularly in Morocco, where the 2011 Constitution officially recognized Tamazight as an official language of the state. This marked a major symbolic victory after decades of state-enforced Arabization that had marginalized indigenous identities. Amazigh activists have increasingly revived pre-Arabian contributions to the region’s cultural and spiritual landscape, reclaiming suppressed traditions, aesthetics, and vernacular expressions. Among the most striking emblems of this resurgence is the tazarzit. The Amazigh fibula, too, now adorns everything from jewellery to protest banners, reasserting a material connection to land, femininity, and ancestral sovereignty.

Yet this cultural renaissance has not been accompanied by a corresponding revival of Jewish memory, not even in relation to the Jewish contributions to one of its most iconic symbols.

The absence of Jews from the daily life of most North Africans, largely resulting from mass emigration and decades of alienation, has created a void. Few in the region today have personally known a Jew, let alone learned of the deep spiritual and material symbiosis previously shared between Amazigh and Jewish communities. This historical amnesia risks simplifying and sanitising what was truly once a richly pluralistic culture.

However, as frameworks like the Abraham Accords expand, there lies the potential for educational initiatives and cultural programs to reintroduce the Jewish threads of North African heritage. As extremist groups and foreign interference networks scramble for narrative in North Africa, reconciling Amazigh revival efforts with their Jewish history is an investment in a more plural, stable, and promising region. •

For more on the history of Judeo-Amazigh collaboration in Morocco’s jewelry trade, see Cynthia Becker’s Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity and Amira Bennison’s Jihad and Its Interpretation in Pre-Colonial Morocco.

Aurele Tobelem is a History graduate at King’s College London, specializing in colonial North African history. He serves as the Director of Research at the Forum for Foreign Relations and as Middle East Editor for the King’s Geopolitics Forum. Aurele has contributed to publications such as The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, Quillette, and Global Arab Network, focusing on regional security, interfaith relations, and political dynamics in the Middle East.

I didn’t grow up surrounded by heirlooms. My Yemenite Jewish family had the food, the music, and the holidays, but not the objects. And for most of my life, the deeper layers of that identity felt out of reach. I knew that we had a history, but I didn’t know what it looked like or how to connect to it in an authentic way. I couldn’t understand what was missing.

That all changed a few years ago, when I saw a piece of traditional Yemenite jewelry for the first time. It was delicate, detailed, and unlike anything I had ever held or touched. Something about it made me want to understand more, and a few months later, I started looking for someone who could teach me about how this kind of jewelry was made. It took some time, but I eventually found a teacher and began learning. At first it was a hobby, and then it became a kind of research. And now it’s what I do.

Today, I’m a silversmith. I use traditional Yemenite techniques that have almost disappeared: twisted wires, granulation, protective symbols, and specific elements that were passed down for generations. I didn’t grow up with these pieces, but now I make them. I didn’t inherit the jewelry itself, but I feel like I inherited the work of continuing it. Every time I sit down to create, it’s a way of reconnecting with something that was almost lost.

Sometimes I work with fragments. Coral beads that were once part of larger pieces. Silver amulets used to protect against spirits like Umm Subiyan. Small elements that used to be sewn into clothing or attached to wedding garments. A lot of these pieces come with no explanation. They’re too important to throw away, even if no one remembers exactly where they came from or what they meant. So I study them. And I try to give them a new life.

No one else in my family knew how to do this. The craft skipped a few generations, or many. But when I sit at the bench, I don’t feel like I’m doing it alone. It’s not just about personal memory. It’s about shared memory. And I think this kind of work, reviving a tradition that almost disappeared, is always shared. It belongs to more than just one person. Any pieces I create are part of that process. •

Raz Akta is a traditional Yemenite silversmith and cultural researcher dedicated to preserving the endangered art of Yemenite Jewish jewelry. One of the few artists still practicing this ancient craft using historical tools, symbols, and techniques. Through exhibitions, lectures, and a widely read educational blog, Raz shares the hidden stories behind each motif and material, inviting audiences into a world where jewelry is both adornment and living memory.

For inquiries, visit razaktajewelry.com, or Instagram, @razakta__

« La femme de Loth regarda en arrière et elle devint une statue de sel. » (Genèse, 19:26). Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Albert Memmi’s debut novel La Statue de Sel (1953), The Pillar of Salt, opened a door I hadn’t known I needed. The Tunisian Jewish writer’s work entered my life at a very moment where I, too, was trying to retrace where I belonged.

My parents and I were born in France; but the generations before us, my grandparents, were all born in the Maghreb, in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

At the time, these lands were either French territories or under French protectorate rule. Though my grandparents were born on North African soil, many of them left after the independence movements of the 1950s and 60s. They were no longer welcome in the lands where their ancestors had lived for over 3,000 years— long before the Arab conquests, alongside Berbers and other ancient communities.

Once colonial powers had departed, many Jews were cast as relics of a colonial order they never chose.

Albert Memmi was a major figure in Francophone Maghrebi Jewish literature and one of the most important postcolonial thinkers of the 20th century. Born in Tunisia under French protectorate to a Jewish family of Berber and Italian descent, Memmi’s life and work were defined by the struggle to reconcile multiple cultural identities and by his deep reflections on the tension between East and West. Although he is best known in academic circles for his seminal essay The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre, Memmi was also a celebrated novelist, philosopher, and sociologist. His writings on racism, colonial domination, and Jewish identity had a significant impact on anti-colonial debates of his time, even if his legacy remains somewhat underrecognized today.

Yet at the heart of his literary career stands La Statue de sel, his first and most iconic novel. Considered a cornerstone of Francophone Jewish-Maghrebi literature, this autobiographical work traces the identity crisis of Alexandre Mordekhaï Benillouche, Memmi’s literary alter ego. Born into a modest Jewish family on the edge of the Tunis ghetto, Alexandre grows up amid conflicting worlds: traditional Judaism, Berber rituals, Arabic culture, and French colonial influence. His French education distances him from his roots and leads him to idealize the West— an illusion that shattered during World War II, when Nazi-allied Vichy rule subjected North African Jews with discrimination, forced labor, and deportation.

Brilliant but poor, Alexandre believes talent and effort will grant him acceptance, and he dreams of integration. Yet he soon realizes that no matter how hard he tries to assimilate, he will never truly belong— not to the West he emulates, nor to the East from which he has become estranged. Caught in this painful in-between, his sense of identity collapses.

It is only through writing that he finds a means of survival, and ultimately, of self-affirmation.

In La Statue de sel, Albert Memmi delivers a deeply personal coming-of-age story while offering a pioneering literary exploration of what it meant to be a North African Jew at the twilight of French colonization. For many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews— especially those from the Maghreb— Memmi’s narrative speaks to the fractures of identity created under the weight of conflicting histories, cultural affiliations, and exile.

One of the most striking elements of the novel, whose full meaning only becomes clear at the end, is its title. La Statue de sel— The Pillar of Salt— refers to the biblical episode of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which Lot’s family is commanded to flee without looking back. Lot’s wife, overcome with longing or disbelief, turns around and is transformed into a pillar of salt. This image has inspired countless interpretations, but for Memmi it becomes a powerful metaphor for exile and memory. Through the lens of his own experience, he suggests that moving forward is impossible without confronting where we come from— a truth that resonates deeply with the Jewish condition, and the experience of being uprooted that defines so many Sephardic and Mizrahi stories.

For Memmi, “turning back” is not a transgression but a necessity. It is an act through which Jews have preserved fragments of their past in a world that has repeatedly sought to strip them away.

I know this because I’ve held those fragments myself.

I’ve spent so much time digging through my grandparents’ photographs, jewelry, clothes, tableware, handwritten letters, and recipes, their heirlooms of a world that no longer exists. These objects were anchors, tying me to a lineage that shaped what I valued, how I lived, what I cherished, the quiet sense of difference I carried when surrounded by non-Jewish friends. In La Statue de sel, Memmi demonstrates that these pieces of inheritance— objects, customs, and memories— are the very fabric of survival.

Albert Memmi understood that history often reduces lives like his to footnotes, flattening Jewish existence in the Maghreb into something forgettable or marginal. When people recall history, of course, any “in-betweens” that don’t fit neatly into the larger narrative are often erased. His story, like mine, is slipping away; no one remains in my grandparents’ native cities to remember their lives. The Jewish Maghreb they knew is gone, and what survives only does so through us, to tell their stories, and through them, better understand our own. •

Born from Jewish Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian roots, Charlotte Ada studied Francophone literature and specializes in 20th century Jewish literature from the Maghreb.

“Let’s go, Sitto, this is for you!” Steven and I help Sitto out of her chair and lead her out of the bridal room and into the hall.

“Mabrook.”
“Thank you.”
“Mabrook, Mrs. Cohen.”
“Abal!”
“Mabrook! Beautiful.”
“Sabi andak. Thank you.”
“Mabrook!”
“Abal, inshallah by you next.”

We move slowly past the throng of well-wishers and into the ballroom of The Plaza, which is dressed exquisitely in white florals and candlelight. The guests are dressed to the nines, and they make a path for us to enter the middle of the crowded dance floor. Sitto can barely walk on her own, but she will dance.

“There you are!” Lucy is radiant, and sweaty. Olga, the bridal attendant, dabs Lucy’s forehead with a white napkin and lifts a straw from a glass of ice water into her mouth. Lucy beckons us toward her. Steven passes Sitto’s arm to my mother and heads toward the other side of the dance floor, where David and the men dance separately before the music transitions to English and the two sides converge. “See you,” I mouth to him. “Save me,” his eyes seem to say. Steven isn’t exactly the mosh pit of men type but he goes anyway, to spectate as much as to show he’s there. My mother grabs my hand, I grab Fortune’s, and she grabs Lucy’s as we form a circle around Sitto. She sways her hips seductively to the beat and raises her arms in the air, twisting her hands as if she is screwing in a lightbulb. Boosy, Boosy, Boosy! The guests around us close in, clapping as we rotate around Sitto, and she moves to the music of her youth, now Farid al-Atrash, a deep and unmistakable yearning for home, set to a faster tempo courtesy of the DJ.

Leh leh leh leh! Some of the elder women in the crowd howl with joy as David’s mother and grandmother make their way inside the circle. Lucy takes the hands of her new family and together they dance.

“Aboose, Sitto,” Fortune leans in and shouts into my ear. She looks at ease, maybe for the first time in months, but still, I can see the vulnerability behind her eyes. While I don’t think there is a single part of her that regrets what she’s done, it’ll take some time before she’s completely comfortable being on her own. Sitto and David’s grandmother hold hands now, mouthing the words in their native tongue like they’re sharing secrets. I wonder if they had envisioned this when they fled Syria. I wonder if they had even allowed themselves to dream this big, this wild. I imagine that when you are forced to leave with nothing, hoping for anything other than survival feels like excess. How did we get here? Thirty years ago my grandmother and father were refugees, and today they’re complaining that the lamb chops at the glatt kosher catered wedding in the ballroom of The Plaza Hotel are well done. If we don’t ask these questions, if we don’t stop to think, we run the risk of losing everything.

Lucy pulls me into a dizzying dance. All around me, there are faces. My mother’s, Sitto’s, Lucy’s, and Fortune’s. First cousins, second cousins, Giselle, Sari, and some friends whose names I can’t remember. At least two dozen girls waiting for their turn and wondering if it’ll be with one of the boys across the dance floor. Each of them having painstakingly chosen their dress, styled their hair, and had their face made up, probably under the watchful eye of their own versions of a mother in a robe. I’m pulled into an extended circle as Lucy and my mother take center stage, hugging and dancing and looking to see who will be next to punctuate the center. From the corner of my eye, I see Olga carefully leading Sitto off the dance floor and toward a round table, where some of the great-aunts are seated. While the music ends for some, for others it’s just the beginning. Round and round we go, dancing for others in the hope that when it’s our turn, they’ll be there to dance with us.

I pull my hand from Fortune’s sweaty grasp. “I’m gonna get a refill!” I shout over the music. I weave my way off the dance floor like a quarterback holding the winning touchdown. When people acknowledge me, they don’t have that pitiful look I’d grown so accustomed to. Sitto is already knife-deep in a piece of lamb when I reach her. The floral centerpiece from the table sits on the empty chair next to her. She hadn’t even waited for the party to end. G-D, I love this woman. Whoops and hollers ricochet from the dance floor as the music transitions to a David Guetta hit, and the two sexes converge.

“When I was your age, I could’ve danced all night.” She stretches her flesh-colored stockinged leg in front of her. “When I was your age, I did dance all night. Where is that adami boyfriend of yours? He’s a lost puppy without you.”

“So you’ve noticed that, too?” I laugh.

“What did I always tell you?” Sitto forks a sweet potato. “Every pot . . .”

“Has a lid,” I finish. “Yeah, you were right.” Sitto and I both pivot slightly to watch the ensuing rave on the dance floor. My mother and father dance together surrounded by a bunch of their friends. Even Carmen is here, possibly having more fun than anybody. I nearly miss Fortune slip away from the dance floor, the kid who owns Spice following closely behind. I track them as they head toward the bar together. My mother had felt guilty and invited him and his parents at the last minute. I guess I’m glad they did. Fortune certainly seems to be.

“You know.” Sitto leans in. “Your grandfather had a saying when we moved to this country. He would say: It’s Halab against the world. Of course, you could have coffee with the Italians. You could do business with the Chinese. You could shop in the Mexicans’ store, and you can speak the same tongue as the Arab. But at the end of the day, a Syrian Jew only has a Syrian Jew. We have to stick together.” She balls her hand into a strong fist. “Tell me, where else can you find this?” She spreads her arms in front of her. The room is buzzing with chatter. Some are no doubt talking about the wedding, maybe a few have even found cause to complain. Are you invited to this one next week? Do you have the bris tomorrow morning? You heard, so-and-so’s daughter got engaged? There are five stages of plant life cycle. Sometimes I think that for Syrian Jews there are maybe three: Birth, Marriage, Death. It’s the prolonged commentary in between each one that makes us seem eternal.

“Don’t roll your eyes,” Sitto says. “What more could you ask for? Listen, now that you have found someone, maybe you’ll hear me. People outside the community, they want you to believe that this is a trap. Especially the women—they are always running these days. Running, running from the home. To the city, to the Bergdorf’s, to exercise. ‘The kitchen is suffocating.’ Who really believes this? Tell me. Tell me how you can think this is true. The kitchen is the center of the home; it is the sun around which all of the other planets orbit. Take away the kitchen and you have no home, just brick and cement. Without it, you have no tradition. You don’t have this, The Plaza,” she says disparagingly. “Yes, it is wonderful to be here. It is beautiful, mushalla, of course it is. But what comes after tonight, what comes next—that, Nina, is the real beauty.” She presses her palms into the table. “The suffeh, the presence of tradition in the home. That is where the seeds are planted, watered, and grown. Religion gives you fear, but tradition gives you a sense of home. Don’t think”—Sitto shakes her head—“a mother’s job is the hardest in the world. It’s one thing to instill a love of home in your children, it’s another to make sure they go out and build homes of their own. And close by. Of course, you must stay close. Uh-huh.” Sitto nods toward the dance floor, seeming satisfied with herself. When I look in that direction, I see Steven, his eyes scanning the room like lines on a heart rate monitor. “Lost puppy.” Sitto squeezes my knee tenderly. “Humdullah. Go get him before he wets himself yanni.”

“Sitto!”

“Go.” She shoos me off the chair. “You are young. Go enjoy yourselves. I wouldn’t be sitting with you if my knees still worked. Believe me that.” I do as I’m told, straightening my dress and lifting its straps as I get up. When Steven’s and my eyes lock, I make my way toward him. •

Sisters of Fortune can be ordered on Penguin Random House at the link here.

Esther Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community, and a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, a non-profit supporting the growing Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the New School and has had her work featured in Glamour and Man Repeller. Chehebar’s first book, I Share My Name, was an illustrated children’s book explaining the Sephardic tradition of naming children for their grandparents. She lives in New York with her husband, their kids, their Ori-Pei named Jude, and a couple of fish. This is her debut novel.

[Excerpted from Sisters of Fortune by Esther Chehebar. Copyright © 2025 by Esther Chehebar. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.]

But just as easily, it can create images of incredible tenderness— ayouni, as to mean, you are my eyes, or ab’dalek, meaning, let me go as a sacrifice for you. Judeo-Arabic is a silly, flirty, hot-headed language. For Samantha Ellis, that drama, excess, and emotional charge aren’t just linguistic quirks– they’re part of an inheritance she’s still holding onto. In her recently released memoir, Chopping Onions on my Heart, Ellis wrestles with what it means to belong to a culture whose language and idiosyncrasies are slipping away– and what it means to mourn a mother tongue in real time.

The memoir moves between intimate family memory and the violent sweep of history– between the personal and political, the tender and the devastating. She writes about the Farhud, the widespread 1941 massacre that lasted two days and left hundreds of Jews dead, countless of their women raped, homes and businesses destroyed, and a community terrified. It was a moment of rupture, but not an isolated one– the Farhud was the culmination of rising antisemitism in Iraq, fueled by Nazi influence and embraced by many in the local population. Ellis, too, traces the unimaginable aftermath: the existential questions Iraq’s Jews mulled over as they collectively wondered what would happen to them next– and whether they should leave or stay.

Ellis focuses on Jewish life in Iraq through family testimony and cultural inheritance. She writes in depth about the gradual shift in the 1940s– when Iraq still had a fragile hope of a diverse, pluralistic society– but also about how Jewish identity became something one had to be cautious about revealing. “[Jews] had only to open our mouths to reveal our identity,” Ellis wrote while quoting writer Naim Kattan’s memoir, Farewell Babylon, referring to the telltale sound of Judeo-Arabic. Many switched to Muslim Arabic – humiliating, but safer.

With the establishment of Israel and the Arab invasion that followed, Iraqi Jews were scapegoated; Zionism became a capital offense, and hundreds of Iraqi Jews were accused of being spies. Ellis dutifully notes how the public hanging of Jewish businessman Shafiq Adas in Basra– cheered on by 10,000 locals, broadcast live on Radio Baghdad– marked a terrifying descent for Iraqi Jews.

Her description of this gory display isn’t distant history for me, either: my grandmother was 18 years old and my grandfather 32 when it happened, having been married a few years earlier. By 1951, over 125,000 Jews had registered to leave Iraq, and the Iraqi government met in secret and passed a law to seize all property, assets, and bank accounts of those departing, as well as of any Jews who had already fled. When they finally made their exodus out of Iraq, their passports were stamped with a note that forbade their return.

Ellis threads these shocking facts and testimonies of violence, intolerance, politics, and social upheaval through her family stories of migration, cultural dislocation, and linguistic loss– especially in early years of the State of Israel, where Iraqi Jews found themselves in Ma’abarot transit camps. It was in these tent camps that Mizrahi Jews were often discriminated against, and for Iraqi Jews, where Judeo-Arabic began to disappear, slowly pushed out by Hebrew. Through some remarkable feat, Ellis manages to capture this layered devastation while in discussion of the cultural threads that still survive in food, humor, expression, music, and family dynamics. Her memoir’s non-linear structure is part historical, part testimony, and part cultural-linguistic archive all at once; her prose moves fluidly between the scholarly and the intimate, often laced with both humor and grief.

Just as much as she honors the past, Ellis is deeply invested in cultural continuity. She writes with warmth and wit about her young son learning about Iraqi-Jewish history and culture; it made my heart swell with pride. In one moment that made me laugh out loud, Ellis describes one rainy and cold night in which she and her son had to run through the rain from Lego club; he suddenly announces, “Let’s move to Iraq now so it will be hot.” These reflections are tender and profound, shaped by Ellis’s desire to raise a child who sees his heritage not as a cultural afterthought, but as an active story worth being part of.

Even as she describes her family, food, music, and history, she never loses sight of the political urgency of her story, either. The timing of her memoir could not be more vital: she writes about the darkness that permeated throughout the Jewish world at the end of 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the beginning of the war in Gaza. “The Iraqi Jewish story,” she wrote, “was denied and erased with more ferocity than usual because it didn’t fit into the narrative that Israelis were white European settler-colonizers… the assumption was that no Arabic word could be Jewish, no Jew could speak Arabic, and that there were no Jewish Arabic languages.” Even Hebrew– a Semitic language that predates Arabic by over a thousand years– was stripped of its Middle Eastern identity. Food, too, became politicized.

That being said, Ellis’s memoir arrives at a moment when stories like hers– and mine– are often denied space or legitimacy; it’s a reminder that our stories, languages, and histories are not just footnotes in the Jewish story. As an Iraqi Jew, reading Chopping Onions on My Heart felt like being seen: the entire book felt like a fierce, honest, and profoundly comforting hug. ◦

Samantha Ellis’s Chopping Onions on My Heart is available for order here.

Maia Zelkha is the editor of Yad Mizrah Magazine.

So much has been birthed between the Tigris and Euphrates. The Assyrians accorded them with divine forces as they emerged from the primordial waters of Apsu; they form the borders of “the land between two rivers”, Aram Naharayim, the birthplace of civilization, the birthplace of Abraham and the belief in one God.

Jewish mysticism teaches, ‘with every single drop that comes out of Eden, a spirit of wisdom goes forth with it.’

There, letters, law, sailboats, and beer making came into being — along with the wheel, mathematics, irrigation, libraries, and the world’s first epic poem. By these Babylonian waters the exiled Judeans wept for Zion, in the 6th century BCE. There, Daniel the prophet envisioned an angel who told of the end of days. Jeremiah instructed the corvée Judean slaves to “Seek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its peace you shall have peace.” There, my ancestors dug new channels and irrigation routes, planted date orchards, fields of flax and barley and founded Al Yahudu Judah Town in the Southern Nippur region. The rivers sustained the Babylonian Jews where my family comes from.

Yet ecologists warn that Iraq may lose the Tigris and Euphrates as perennial rivers within our lifetime. In the North, Turkey’s massive Southeastern Anatolia project diverts both rivers through extensive damming, choking the flow to Syria and Iraq. In the East, Iran has rerouted tributaries that once fed the Tigris, further drying the basin. Climate change only accelerates the crisis; frequent droughts, extreme heat, and shrinking rainfall have turned Iraq’s once fertile plains to dust. The river’s water levels fall every year, whilst pollution rises unchecked. Agriculture fails, families flee war, and the river, once the source of human civilization, is slowly dying, drying.

Once, the river bore so much life; by the waterfront of chattering Basra reed warblers, my grandparents shared masgouf many times, freshly caught carp as wide as stretched out hands, grilled on apricot wood by the river. Here 1800 kilometers away from its source, the Tigris meet with its twin the Euphrates, forming the Shatt Al-Arab flowing into the Persian Gulf.

Along the Tigris’s silty banks, the river once spread into the mythic Mesopotamian marshlands, al-Ahwar, a shimmering labyrinth of vaulted reed houses, wading water buffalo and herons lifting into the sky. Nearby is Al-Uzair, where my grandmother grew up by Ezra’s Tomb, on the western bank of the Tigris. As the Tigris reached Baghdad, it began to run thinner, faster; the city stretches along both banks, bridges linking the two sides. Before 1951 the river cafes overflowed with Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans — all men, all Iraqi — drinking qahwa, playing backgammon, listening to Salima Pasha’s songs ripple over the radio waves.

On the eighth day of Passover, Jewish families would walk in their festive finery to the raised river to wash their faces and bless each other: “May it be His will that you rise and be elevated like the river.” This was the living water that filled mikvaot — Jewish ritual baths in Jewish Baghdad homes. The Hebrew word, mikveh, means a gathering of water, but it also means hope.

This is the river that cuts through Mosul, the site of ancient Nineveh, where Jonah the prophet is buried. A city of many quarters, including a Jewish one where my elderly neighbor Shulamit is from; she recalls the hamam, run by a Muslim woman, once warm and friendly, who grew cold after the State of Israel was established in 1948. The warm river water cooled; Jews were no longer welcome in Iraqi society.

As the river dries my ancestors’ bones mingle at the bottom with carp, broken clay tablets, a tossed aluminum Pepsi Cola can. It carries the dead — Jews in the Farhud of 1941, Assyrian Christians at Simele in 1933, Kurds, Yazidis, Shia Muslims, Mandaeans, and others who resisted Saddam Hussein and later on, ISIS. Each time the city was ‘cleansed’, bodies were thrown in the river.

I think of this as I ask my friend in Baghdad, “How does the river look today?” He messages me a photo. It is brown, he tells me. “Like tea,” I try to comfort myself. But I know the truth. My grandfather’s cherished river is polluted with waste, dammed by Turkey, its water level falling more and more each year. 84–90% of Iraq’s marshlands have been lost since the 1970s; Basra is in a state of public health emergency, poisoned with salt and sewage. The Basra reed warbler’s chatter is silenced, classified as Endangered. Leon McCarron laments in his book, Wounded Tigris, that the river may not reach the sea by 2040. McCarron asks, “What would it mean for humanity to lose one of the great rivers of civilization?”

In the 80’s one summer, I visited my grandparents in Kiryat Ono. Once a ma’abara refugee tent camp a few decades earlier, it was now built up, “developed”, and it was oven hot. We made popsicles from mitz petel cordial to stay cool. As an Australian child, I didn’t understand why we could not flush toilet paper, or fill the bath. Then, no water came from the tap; trucks arrived and my aunt handed me a pot. Water trucks filled the pots and jugs of clustering women and children. I filled mine too, careful not to spill a single drop. I wonder if my grandfather ever thought back to his ever flowing Tigris River, where the saqaa - water carrier - filled goatskins and lugged them on a long-suffering donkey through Baghdad’s narrow alleyways of his childhood.

This was during the time of the Iran-Iraq war, before the Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam launched Scud missiles at Israel. My grandfather suffered a heart attack. He died a few years later, never truly recovering emotionally from his earlier expulsion. Truthfully even if he returned, could his heart have held the fact that the Tigris had changed color by then.

Today, I look outside my Jerusalem window to my garden, where I have planted a myrtle tree, a life-cycle symbol of blessing and renewal for Iraqi Jews. It is watered with drip irrigation. Thanks to desalination, water-sharing agreements with Jordan, and innovations such as drip irrigation, Israel has become a leader in water technology. I am not surprised to learn that Iraqi Jews like Sami Michael— famed author and trained hydrologist— have dedicated their lives to bringing water to life.

My friend in Baghdad tells me the Tigris River is very sad. He is also very sad; his wife just miscarried her pregnancy because of the lack of prenatal care in Iraq. “We don’t have a good health care system,” he writes. Another Iraqi friend tells me, “No one dares complain about the lack of fresh water in Basra. Activists are jailed.”

How do you rehabilitate the Tigris River? How do you bring blessing back?

There is an Arabic saying: el-māy yerja‘ lil-sāqiya — the water flows back to its channel. People, too, always return to their origins; my grandfather spoke of the Tigris all his life. Now I dream of returning the river, to visit the Tigris and return the people of Iraq back to themselves. The origin story of the people of Iraq is one of diversity and shared humanity. McCarron writes that even in scarcity, Iraqis still opened their homes to him, shared what little they had. This reminds me of my grandparents’ home. It gives me hope.

What if peoples and nations gathered again around the Tigris? To return the river is to imagine new leadership, a new vision for Iraq: to restore the marshes, clean its waters of sewage, and share fairly what flows across borders. To return the people is to protect minorities, rebuild shrines and schools, and restore the memories of my grandfather— of Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Yazidis, Kurds and Muslims living side by side under palms and Babylonian willows by clear, blessed water once more.

Mayim Chayim — living waters. Let us live together. We all come from the same source. •

Sarah is an Australian born, Iraqi Jewish writer, poet, and educator. She is the author of the award winning picture book, Shoham’s Bangle and This is Not a Cholent, as well as the award winning online poetry micro-chapbook, This is Why We Don’t Look Back (Harbor Review). She also co-authored The In-Between, a literary dialogue about identity and belonging (Verlagshaus Berlin). Currently Sarah is an Elson Israel Fellow at the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four boys.

Avra’Am is a hand-forged fibula made of recycled sterling silver. The dialogue between my diasporic present and the ancient form of the fibula is grounded in the traditional use of these hefty silver objects as simultaneous decorations, the transportable wealth of women, garment closures, and identity signifiers worn by Jewish and Amazigh women in the broader region of North Africa.

The fibula’s ancient path— from a masculine Roman utility to a feminine North African talisman— is retraced here through a queer Jewish body with his gaze fixed upon Jewish futurity. Avra’Am is, in this sense, a Zionist fetish— a term I have coined to contextualise my production of exquisite objects that bind body and symbol. In Jewish hands, it becomes a decolonial tool of survival and self-empowerment: beauty turned into a weapon of sovereignty, devotion, and reclamation.

A massive 44.75-carat Brazilian amethyst crowns the decorative pin portion of the fibula, supported by two smaller natural blue Cambodian zircons positioned at the terminals of the fibula’s ring. The gemstones weave Avra’Am’s historical approach into a contemporary framework. The color references royalty and high priesthood, especially in the context of ancient Mediterranean cultures, where purple-dyed cloth from the murex shell was a marker of divine or imperial status. In this piece, that symbolism elevates the full breadth of Jewish Algerian culture— its aesthetics, rituals, language, and historical depth. I am an inheritor and custodian of that wealth.

The blue zircons are strategically located at the threshold of a fibula’s opening and closing like glinting blue deflectors against the evil eye. Zircon is a gemstone that appears in our tradition— identified by some scholars as one of the 12 stones in the priestly breastplate, corresponding to ‘leshem’.

Forged in recycled sterling silver, the piece draws on silver’s traditional link to lunar light and the moon as keeper of Jewish time. A screwdriver and hammer created the stamped border that frames the piece, along with the Hebrew letters א (aleph) and ש(shin)— representing two of the names of God (Adonai and Shaddai). Together, the two letters also spell the word Esh (fire), evoking divine light as well as human passion, illumination, and survival— a nod to the Jewish silversmiths of North Africa as amulet-makers, believed to wield supernatural powers of protection.

A twisted silver wire Menorah anchors the design, a symbol that predates the Star of David and speaks to our unity, endurance, and Temple devotion that bound us to the land. The Menorah, once a symbol of shattered sovereignty under Rome, is reclaimed here as it is in the emblem of modern Israel. A decorative chain links one side of the fibula to the other, referencing the traditionally paired North African use of such objects as garment fasteners worn on the left and right shoulders. Often, these fibulae would be adorned with talismanic silver beads symbolizing fertility and abundance suspended by chains.

Avra’Am’s part-triangular, part-rectangular form evokes the gold fibulae my grandmother, Rachel Arlette Malki (née Cohen), carried when fleeing Algeria in the early 1960s. Those heirlooms, later stolen, should have passed to my mother and her sisters. Their loss is emblematic of the broader erasure of Jewish Algerian silversmithing, a tradition Avra’Am insists on restoring and continuing.

Karti is sacred armor wrought in the Jewish Algerian silverwork tradition, summoning the protective power of matrilineal guardians. Karti was forged in the days following October 7th.

Aleph reclaims the yellow badge imposed by oppressive sumptuary laws— from dhimmitude to Nazi Germany— and transforms it into a floral shield. Forged in brass, titanium, silver, and heliodor, it is a defiant emblem against the lust for Jewish death.

Adam Anderson’s art practice merges metalsmithing, performance, and photography to centre the body as a site of identity and its plural negotiations. His self-made jewellery, garments, and makeup function as Zionist fetish (a term informed by Michel Leiris and William Pietz) objects drawn from his lived experience as an Israeli of Jewish Algerian ancestry, and as a queer migrant living in regional Australia.

I don’t remember my grandmother

before she lost her teeth

before she lost the hair under her headscarf

before she lost all of her words

when I remind her my name it is

because I am afraid she has lost this too

maybe when she left

the first place she ever called home

my mother’s mother’s mother tongue

never quite made it to shore

perhaps it is still somewhere

in the Gulf of Aden

my safta

I only remember

how old age curled her spine into

the bend of a question mark

as if her whole body were asking God

Why have you kept me alive this long?

I bring her letters she cannot read

she kisses the back of both my hands

mumbles incantations under her breath

blessing me

her daughter’s daughter

in a language no one understands

Leenoy Margalit was born and raised in Southern California with Yemenite Jewish and Ashkenazi ancestry. She studied Environmental Science, has previously written for Hey Alma, and currently resides in the north of Israel.

A conversation with Carol Isaacs, musician, artist, cartoonist, and filmmaker, with Frank Stern.

During the days of Hannukah 2024, the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival screened Carol Isaacs` beautifully animated film, THE WOLF OF BAGHDAD, twice. First, to an enchanted audience as part of the regular program, and second, for a small group of film enthusiasts with the director present.

I had the chance to be present at the second screening. And a few minutes after the film began, I had the uncanny feeling of recognizing the protective wolf that Carol depicted— that he looked at me from the marvelous book pages that opened on the screen. It was Baghdad— until it wasn’t. The city faded into a shattered Jewish home, a universal site of exile and loss. In THE WOLF OF BAGHDAD, Carol Isaacs tells the story of her family’s expulsion from Iraq through a wordless animated film, accompanied by a haunting musical score.

A ghostly wolf— her imagined guide and protector— moves silently through this dreamscape, bearing witness to what was lost. As Jewish neighbors were betrayed— in Iraq, Iran, Syria, in North Africa, and even Central and Western Europe— the wolf stood watch, a silent companion offering comfort through the shadows of fear, displacement, and the constant search for refuge. Sometimes the new shelter proved just as dangerous. But the wolf always knew the way.

The emotional weight of the film left me speechless. Now, months later, Maia Zelkha, editor of Yad Mizrah Magazine, gives me the opportunity to ask Carol Isaacs all the questions that roamed my mind since that night at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.

We will return to the Wolf— but first let us listen to the creative voice of Carol Isaacs on her music, book, and film.

Given the fact that you are a really brilliant accordionist I cannot imagine watching your film or browsing through your book without the sound, without the Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic soundtrack. And how did the Wolf, did musical tradition inspire the soundtrack?

Thank you Frank for the kind words and for your interest in my work.

As I was drawing the book (it was originally published as a graphic memoir) it occurred to me that I could make an animation of it. And because there is no actual dialogue in the book, just the occasional testimony from family members, it would need some kind of musical accompaniment that would be sympathetic to and guide the storyline. As a musician and cartoonist this was a unique chance to bring my two working practices together. I had only recently discovered my own musical heritage whilst playing Arabic accordion in the Baghdad Ensemble, led by Iraqi oud player Ahmed Mukhtar. I learned from him that Iraqi Jews had written classical songs that are still popular in the Arab world today. I used some of them in the soundtrack as well as a traditional Iraqi folk song he taught me. Certain songs were paired with certain scenes in the film: for example the Iraqi classic Fog el Naqal (Above the Palm Trees) is played when the main character finds herself on the roof of the family house in the Baghdad’s old Jewish quarter; Hon Tahon (Have Mercy), a Babylonian Jewish prayer traditionally sung before major festivals, accompanies the destroyed synagogue scene. It was important to me that the soundtrack would reflect the music my family would have been familiar with in Baghdad whether in their synagogues, streets or on their radios.

The film visualizes the book, transforming every page into moving images. Which were your basic ideas about this transformation? Why page for page?

According to the comics community what I have created is something called a ‘motion comic’. This was news to me! Apparently it’s a relatively new genre, defined as a form of animation combining elements of print comic books and animation. The story comes to life on screen, panel by panel, as if you are reading a book.

This sounds like an immense work effort. Could you describe the work process creating your ‘motion comic’? Did you have collaborators?

The book and animation were created by myself alone. I drew the book on a digital tablet that was attached to my laptop. This was a first for me as I generally use pen and ink. I used a simple Powerpoint-like software to develop the drawings into the animated version you see in the film. When it came to the soundtrack, I collaborated with the founder of the newly-formed Judeo-Arabic ensemble Ayin, Daniel Jonas, a fellow Iraqi Jew, and Keith Clouston, an oud specialist. They both had extensive knowledge of Iraqi-Jewish religious songs and classical Arabic music respectively. I then successfully crowdfunded the cost of recording the soundtrack: hiring the musicians, the studio and the wonderful producer Glenn Sharp. Thanks to our generous patrons, the film was finally completed!

The film has so many visual and aesthetic dimensions— people shine through, the past seems to be present and everything emanates from your memories and those memories you were told. Concerning Bagdad´s Jewish community of about 150,000 people driven out in the 1940s and 1950s, what was focal for the characters in the story, for both the book and film?

The basic narrative in the story was the same for many Iraqi-Jewish families. For the most part they all had similar experiences. About 120,000 fled between 1950-51 and the rest left as and when they could, depending on brief windows of opportunity. The last exodus was in the early 1970s. Today, out of a population of 150,000 in the 1940s, only three Jews remain in the whole of Iraq.

You mention your family, which is always central to the Jewish experience, all over the Jewish world. Almost unusual for an animated story, the film´s first panels are dedicated to family and friends like a memoir that will live as long as people will look at the book and film, and as long as the stories will be told. Could you share more about the experiences of your family in Iraq and in the diaspora that are reflected in the film?

As far as I know, while they were living in Iraq, my family considered themselves to be both Iraqi and Jewish. They were equally proud of both identities, seeing no conflict between the two, probably because of their long history in the region. Thinking about it, perhaps Babylonian Jews would be a more appropriate term as there had been a continuous Jewish presence there for over 2600 years, predating Iraq itself by millennia.

After arriving in the UK, my parents resolutely considered themselves to be British, thankful for the safe haven they had been given and determined to give my sister and I (both of us born in England) a safer and better life. Depending on which generation you asked in my family, their memories of Iraq ranged from “We lived in peace with our neighbours and everything was good” (the older members), to “We lived every day in fear - why would I want to go back there?” (the younger ones). Post-1917, when the British were in charge, it’s true that life did become easier for the Jews and for a short period they were allowed to flourish.

But in the 1930s, things were very different. With the rise of Arab nationalism alongside imported European antisemitism, life as a Jew in Iraq became extremely difficult. My family never really talked about the bad times, I only found out when I was asking them direct questions while doing my research for the book. Like all refugees, they simply moved forward with determination and hope in their new countries.

The person we follow from panel to panel through the alleys and places, the shops and views of fabled Baghdad, and whom the Wolf observes, is a woman. Please tell us more about her – but not too much – beware of spoilers! It is you— and then it is not you— in this dreamlike depiction.

Not much of a spoiler, but it is actually based on me! The viewer/reader follows me as I navigate my family’s memories through the Baghdad of my own imagination. Despite never having been there, I tried to be as accurate as possible in drawing the old Jewish Quarter with its cramped alleyways and bustling markets. Not always easy, as there weren’t many photographs from that time, but some helpful Baghdadi students who were following me on social media sent photos of how the old Jewish houses look today. It’s sad to see their state they’re in: once so vibrant and full of life but now empty, crumbling and in great disrepair.

Some of your panels like the desecrated Synagogue, the horrific antisemitic violence remind us not just of the past, of the 1940s and 1950s, but of anti-Jewish terror in the last few years and months. What was on your mind when you worked on these panels?

Those panels were very hard to draw. To show such wanton destruction of Jewish life was really heart-breaking. Fully one-third of Baghdad was Jewish in the 1940s. They were a thriving community, mostly well-integrated and part of the fabric of life. That would soon be torn beyond repair after the terrible Farhud (pogrom) of 1941.

On the other hand, the help of neighbors still reminds us that human values can exist next to dehumanized attitudes and actions. How does your audience respond to this reality?

Some of my family remembered that during the 1941 riots their Muslim neighbours gave them shelter and protected them from the mobs. There was care and compassion literally at street level. At the end of the film the audience will notice that it is dedicated not only to my family but also to the people of Iraq.

At this point of our conversation I would like to return to the Wolf. The Wolf connects not just the visual narrative but relates as well to our emotions. So, what is the specific Mizrahi Jewish-cultural history of the Wolf? Is it still alive?

The wolf has a special place in Iraqi-Jewish mythology. We were (or maybe still are!) quite a superstitious people. In the book The History of the Jews of Baghdad by David Sassoon, which was published in 1917, the chapter on myths and superstitions mentions that a wolf was kept in the cellar of a Jewish house in order to protect the children from djinns or evil spirits. After my mother passed away, I found in her belongings an amulet made from a wolf’s tooth that traditionally would have been pinned to a baby’s crib. The wolf as protector is also a common theme amongst the Bedouin of the region. I was hiking in Jordan recently and met a local Bedouin who confirmed that they would wear a wolf’s tooth around their neck, which they believed would make them as fearless and strong as the animal itself. Quite a contrast to the Western idea of the ‘Big Bad Wolf’, a scary inhabiter of many children’s stories!

Indeed, Red Riding Hood and her hungry wolf are the definite cultural and negative opposite to the woman in her Grandmother´s garment and the Wolf caring for her in the alleys of Baghdad. So, what is reality, virtual reality? Are we superstitious? Some may call the Wolf stories, the cellar and the protective power “superstitious”. I think alongside our Halacha, beliefs, and long-lived rules, there is a Jewish imagination inspired by shared Jewish and non-Jewish popular traditions and values, very often handed down from generation to generation by Jewish women. Mostly it seems to be very different from region to region but at a closer look one feels its familiarity. The Hamsa for instance can be seen among the younger generations everywhere (and, by the way, on the beautifully crafted carpet that you show in the film). In many Ashkenazi families a dybuk - sometimes angry, sometimes friendly - dwells in the attic, keeps guard of the family, and usually complains when the family is expelled or moving all the sudden. I wonder, is there a presence of the Wolf in the diasporic parts of your and other Iraqi-Jewish families? Do the stories still have meaning for a younger generation born outside Iraq?

Sadly there is not much talk of wolves these days, although my film seems to have stirred up some curiosity. The second and third generation Jewish Iraqis that I have met certainly seem interested in preserving our stories, food, and even our language, which carries so much in terms of memory and culture. We speak Judeo-Baghdadi amongst ourselves which is a dialect of Arabic that has loan words from Aramaic, Hebrew, Turkish, Hindi, and Persian. I hope that this beautifully rich and expressive language, which is predicted to die out within a generation or two, will somehow survive.

Coincidentally, the translator who worked on the Arabic subtitles for the film happened to be a Muslim Iraqi and told me about his grandparents who lived in the marshlands of Iraq. One day, while out hunting, they found an abandoned wolf cub and raised it like a family dog! It would accompany them on their trips to the marshes and remained loyal to the end.

After October 7, 2023 and with the rise of antisemitism all over Europe and in the Americas, The Wolf of Bagdad has a meaning far beyond the Jewish-Iraqi history. I wish all those who ignore the expulsion of Mizrahi Jewry after the Shoah would see the film and maybe change their opinions about the Jewish State and the Jewish diaspora. Do the reactions of your audience relate to this?

One of the reasons I made The Wolf of Baghdad was because of the general lack of awareness of the Iraqi-Jewish experience. While this certainly is true amongst the wider population, it is also relevant to some Ashkenazi Jews. How many times has it been assumed I speak Yiddish and live on bagels and schmaltz herring! There’s even a word for this: Ashkenormativity, the assumption that Ashkenazi religious and cultural practices are the default when it comes to Jewish identity. But in a way this is not surprising. For good reason the world’s focus was on the Jews of Europe after the second world war, and the Holocaust itself was well-documented. Meanwhile, the expulsion of Jews from Iraq was called ‘the silent exodus’. Leaving everything behind, they considered themselves lucky to escape with their lives, unlike their European cousins, and quietly moved on.

It’s important to remember that Mizrahi Jews are indigenous to the region, predating Christian and Muslim communities, and have a wealth of experience as a result of living in Arab countries. More than half of Jews now living in Israel are descendants of Jews from Arab lands and Iran. Many non-Jewish people from the Middle East have seen my film or read the book and, to their surprise and delight, relate to both the images and the music. It seems that we have so much more in common than divides us. I can only hope that after seeing The Wolf of Baghdad, people will appreciate the diversity of the Jewish world and that in some small way it might provide context to their understanding of the current conflict in the Middle East.

Carol, I would like to thank you for your answers and insights. However, nothing comes close to individually enjoy the book and see the film with family and friends. I highly recommend! ◦

The Wolf of Baghdad book can be found here and the film version here.

Frank Stern, Film-Historian with focus on International Jewish and Israeli Cinema, has taught at Universities in Israel, United States, Hungary, Germany and Austria and curated film series of Israeli cinema. He is President of the Jewish Film Club Vienna and published recently a book on the films of the exiled Viennese Jewish actress Hedy Lamarr. In the last decade he has promoted Israeli Mizrahi Cinema and was twice member of the International Jury of the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for the film.

Between 1950 and 1952, over 120,000 Jews left their homes in Iraq and emigrated to Israel. It was the culmination of a decade-long rise in pro-Nazi, pan-Arab sentiment and persecution that infected Iraq. In the 1940s, around one-third of Baghdad was Jewish. In less than two years, a 2000-year-old Diasporic community, one of the oldest in the world, was almost completely uprooted. The Jewish population in Iraq dwindled to the hundreds, and several generations later, it dropped down to single digit numbers. The Dove Flyer [2013], an Israeli film directed by Nissim Dayan, treats this historical rupture not as a retrospective tragedy, but as a lived reality unfolding in real time– messy, contingent, and largely unheroic.

Based on Eli Amir’s semiautobiographical novel, the film transports viewers to Baghdad in the final days before its Jewish community’s expulsion. It’s within this backdrop that Nissim Dayan weaves a powerful coming-of-age story, dramatizing these events as seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Kabi, played by Daniel Gad, as he navigates a city brimming with political tension and cultural rupture.

At the start of the film, the Iraqi police tear up Kabi’s family home, searching for Zionist contraband. Kabi’s uncle Hazkel, his face badly beaten, is taken into custody. Hazkel’s wife Rachelle (Yasmin Ayun), a beautiful young woman just a few years older than Kabi, becomes distraught with anguish—and for good reason. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Zionism, never permissible in Iraq, had become a crime punishable by death.

Hazkel’s arrest sets the plot in motion, and before long, Kabi finds himself drawn into the Zionist underground. He gains a firsthand understanding of the predicament of Jews in Baghdad as his personal life becomes increasingly swept up in uncontrollable sociopolitical forces. The film deliberately blurs the line between Kabi’s coming-of-age and the community’s unraveling; his induction into political life is less a moment of conviction than a slow build-up of pressure and necessity.

Soon, Kabi sneaks into the prison where his uncle is being held– disguised as a tea vendor– and of course, carries copious bribes for the guards expecting him. Hazkel has no illusions about his fate; when Kabi asks Hazkel what message to give to Rachelle, his uncle instructs him to tell her that he’s fine and will be released soon. “Lie to her,” he bluntly instructs Kabi.

Kabi, meanwhile, is dealing with his own unrequited crush on Rachelle, while also courting Amira (Inbal Nir), the daughter of his upstairs neighbor Abu Adwar, played with tenderness and gravitas by Uri Gavriel. As a “dove flyer” or, alternately, “pigeon handler,” Abu Adwar raises pigeons and sells them stuffed with fragrant rice, as a delicacy, to the elite of Baghdad.

Amira has become active in the Zionist underground and her brother Adwar (David Shaul) feels drawn towards Communism. Abu Adwar opposes both the Zionists and the Communists. He maintains faith in the status quo and believes that the Jews will continue to be an integral, inextricable part of Iraqi society. “Israel doesn’t belong to us,” he tells Kabi. “Israel belongs to other Jews.” The film’s strength lies in its refusal to impose a single narrative. The characters are entangled in overlapping ideologies– Zionism, Communism, royalist nationalism– without the luxury of moral clarity.

Through Kabi’s eyes, the viewer gets a crash course in these competing ideologies and the events that marked the turning point for Jewish life in Baghdad. Throughout the film, we witness various imprisonments and public hangings, the bombing of a crowded synagogue, and Iraqi Jews smuggling themselves in trucks across the border to Iran, en route to Israel. We witness the arrival of Palestinian refugees in Baghdad along with the defeated Iraqi Army at the conclusion of Israel’s War of Independence. All of this culminates with Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the mass airlift to Israel. The 1941 Farhud is never spoken of— only alluded to— but the pogrom’s grim legacy hangs over the proceedings.

Towards the end of the film, Dayan stages a conversation between notorious Iraqi prime minister Nuri Al-Said (Makram Khoury) and a fictional Jewish businessman named Abu George (Yossi Alfi). Over dinner, Al-Said offers the Jews the chance to immigrate to Israel before conditions become too unbearable. (In reality, he was not quite so polite about it.) “We Jews are very loyal,” Abu George insists, but to no avail. The scene articulates the asymmetry at the heart of the film: Prime Minister Al-Said was never interested in coexistence, only managing a political problem. In 1950, his government passed the Denaturalization Law, finally allowing Jews to leave the country if they renounced their Iraqi citizenship, along with their property, passports, and rights. What followed was not just mass departure, but organized dispossession.

The movie distills a lot into its 135-minute runtime. To Dayan’s credit, he avoids weighing down the movie with heavy-handed dialogue or voice-over narration that would spell everything out for the audience. But there is a lot to keep track of, and it’s useful to have some background knowledge going into it. Nevertheless, what the film lacks in narrative clarity, it compensates for in atmosphere– filled with coded glances, neighborhood tension, and bureaucratic menace. Dayan opts for immersion over explanation, trusting the audience to piece together the implications.

Ultimately, The Dove Flyer is a film that celebrates and eulogizes an accomplished and prosperous Jewish community. The filmmakers faithfully adapt Eli Amir’s novel into a poignant period piece and a highly accurate insider’s perspective of a time and place. Crucially, it is the only narrative film to date written and performed in Iraqi-Judeo Arabic– the distinct dialect spoken by Jews in Iraq for millennium, now nearly extinct.

The choice of language is not ornamental; it anchors the film in reality, in the rhythms and idioms of the world of Iraqi Jewry during this time. Actress Ahuva Keren– who plays Kabi’s mother, Naima– produced the film, translated Dayan’s screenplay into Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, and coached the actors on the correct pronunciation. In addition to Keren, a number of the actors have Iraqi-Jewish heritage themselves, including Daniel Gad and Uri Gavriel. The dusty, lived-in look of the film feels authentic to the era. That authenticity extends to the beautiful, haunting score that pulsates throughout the film and features traditional Middle Eastern instruments such as the duduk and the oud.

Dayan ends the film with a shot of a long line of Iraqi Jews boarding a plane leaving Iraq, taking only what they can carry. Their departure is orderly, almost banal, which only sharpens the devastation. The film ends before that tension is resolved, but the final pages of Eli Amir’s novel provide a glimpse of the aftermath, describing Kabi and his family’s attempts to acclimate to Israel, as refugees, no less. They have lost one homeland, but they have gained a new one.

The film version doesn’t offer any redemptive arc– only devastation. Then again, perhaps what endures is not the story’s resolution, but its voice– the language, the setting, and the world it briefly brings back. ◦

Aaron Cohen is the founding editor of The Parallax Review. A Syrian-Jewish photographer and educator based in Philadelphia, he specializes in long-term projects that explore communities and subcultures. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Time Out New York, GEO, The Sun Magazine, Vice, Time Magazine, LaRepubblica, and CNN.

Tracing the old tram stops of Alexandria– whose names form one of the many backdrops to the coming of age story of André Aciman in his 1994 memoir Out of Egypt– with my fingers on an old map felt like going through an old china cupboard. The names of the tram stops are ordered like tea cups of another era. Too frail to use them. Too precious to throw away.

My finger lingered on Ramleh (oh what a sight on those old postcards in the online archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France), the often mentioned tram stop which by way of personal association attached itself to the little remaining details of my own Egyptian grandfather’s settling in Palestine’s ma’aboret of Ramleh, sometime in the early or mid-1940’s. Here in the book it was but a stop on the young boys’ way home. I thought to myself, did my grandfather take that tram line back in the days? And would he get homesick for it in his new Ramleh?

These geographies of memory, such as the tram stops of Alexandria, the summerhouse on the beach in Mandara and the movie theaters wherever they were needed, set the tone for experiencing this revelation of a book which on the corner of every page turned beams with a long lost rhythm. A rhythm of ritualistic superstition, everyday spells and the way the old traditions would fold into the narrative, unaware they were forming biblical vistas larger than life. These are the rhythms of movement — be it by carriage, car or tram. Of blessed repetition — be it by quarrel, family gatherings on mattresses on the living room floor or Ladino sayings and pidgin expressions. And of telling the seasons— be it by beach visits and quail rains. The rhythms Aciman drums up speak to an embodied memory in my Egyptian heritage, which is an emotional experience of joy of remembrance and pangs of acute loss.

With Out of Egypt, Aciman gifts us Jewish Sephardic oral tradition as ever there was one, transfixed on paper. He both peels back the layers of Jewish life in Alexandria like one peels off paint from an enamel object painted over every year to hide its wear and tear, showing all that was lived in the years, as well as craftily adding more layers and thus depth to the imagining of a world that feels long gone. There are the layers of homesickness (mostly to Constantinople), the layers of an understanding of what it means to be Jewish (losing all your belongings at least twice in your life and arguing over the recipe for haroset) and the layers of exile (in vistas of emptied out homes) as they ripple through the family.

The arc of the book is a collection of Aciman’s families’ stories spanning the decades after world war one until his family’s leaving Egypt in 1965. They are everyday moments that, put together over these many years, give the reader a comfortable feeling of familiarity, having a sense of each character’s constitution and particularities. And they are all as seen through the eyes of Aciman-the-child as well as Aciman-the-writer, who started writing his memoir at the age of 41. Throughout the book Aciman frequently and almost inaudibly shifts gears between times and locations, which causes the story to swell up with gentle melancholy of knowing its endings many years from now, halfway in any given vignette. It all adds to this distance that is created between then, in Egypt, and now, in (a new) Exile.

This exile is as much Aciman’s, who ended up in America via Rome, as it is the reader’s. As it is mine. Because in reality, the world he is describing is not that long gone. As I read the meanderings of three generations of Italian/Turkish Jews from Constantinople who are finding their ways through the changing geopolitical landscape of French and British colonizers, a mixed bag of pastries, languages and frankly, luck, it feels like we get to peek into the lives of our Jewish Egyptian grandparents. Some of whom, as is in my case, remained deafeningly silent about this old world of theirs.

As I play backgammon— the only leftover physical object of my grandfather— in the sunny garden of my exile and try to digest Out of Egypt, I cannot help but to feel grateful for the details of the old world Aciman weaves into the book, making it tactile and tangible. From the hard boiled eggs for Passover which were dyed in tea— because everything else was dyed in tea— to the faire boukhour incense ritual his grandmother initiates to ward off misfortune.

And to the complicated embrace of religious Jewishness, which was both rebelled against with grandeur and wit and at times deeply moved family members against their will. The scene perhaps most profoundly capturing the latter is when Aciman visits his old uncle Vili in the English countryside. On his way to the shower he is stopped by his cousin and his wife who tell him to go listen at uncle Vili’s door just after his listening to the French-language shortwave broadcast and before going to bed. There he hears ‘an eerie marble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame. ‘He’ll deny it if you ask him.’ said my cousin.’

In these vivid pockets of memory— like Uncle Vili praying the bedtime Shema in far away English exile— it is okay to get homesick. ◦

Lievnath Faber-Cohen is a Jewish educator and ritualist. She is a trained mikveh guide and grief ceremony facilitator, (co) founder of Oy Vey in Amsterdam and teachesTalmud at Ze Kollel. Currently a rabbinical student with ALEPH - the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, she works towards rewilding Jewish life in Europe, while connecting with her Sephardic ancestral (be)longing.

In The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, Victor Perera sets out on a sweeping journey to uncover the tangled roots of his Sephardic ancestry. Armed with little more than family stories, faded letters, archival documents, and a stubborn determination to piece together what history had nearly erased, Perera traces his lineage across continents and centuries, from the medieval kingdoms of Spain to the crowded neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

Born in Guatemala to Sephardic Jewish parents, Perera spent his early life navigating the intersections of multiple identities: Spanish-speaking, Jewish, Central American. Later, he moved to the United States, where he built a career as a journalist and writer, often returning to Israel and Latin America for his reporting. His own story—shaped by migrations both personal and inherited—set the stage for the family odyssey he would spend years reconstructing.

Drawing on old letters, family lore, archival records, and journeys to the cities of his ancestors, Perera painstakingly pieces together the odyssey of the Perera family.

Family tradition placed their beginnings in biblical times, but recorded history anchors them in Spain, where many Sephardic Jews rose to wealth and influence. That era came to a brutal end in 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs decreed the expulsion of the Jews. Those who stayed faced forced conversion, torture, or death.

It was during this upheaval that the Perera family was given its name—bestowed by royal decree—along with a coat of arms bearing the image of a pear tree, a peculiar, bitter relic of a shattered life.

After fleeing Spain, the family found refuge in Salonika under Ottoman rule. There, the Jewish community rebuilt itself and thrived for centuries, preserving its traditions, language, and customs. But history turned again when Greece took control of the city. Facing renewed persecution, many Salonikan Jews fled, while those who remained were later rounded up and deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

One of the most haunting discoveries Perera makes in the course of his research is a handwritten curse composed by his great-grandfather in 1921. It warned that any descendant who left the Land of Israel would be doomed to misfortune. Whether seen as superstition or as an expression of generational trauma, the curse hung over the family like a shadow, a reminder of just how high the stakes of exile could feel.

Victor’s investigation takes him across cities—Bukhara, Alexandria, Hebron, New York, Samarkand, Amsterdam—and into the archives of forgotten communities. He uses scraps of Ladino remembered from childhood, fragments of songs, heirloom recipes, and family photographs to reconstruct a world that was already fading from memory. The story he weaves is one of endurance, but also of constant, sometimes painful, reinvention.

Part of what makes The Cross and the Pear Tree so compelling is Perera’s style: a blend of memoir, investigative journalism, and historical detective work. He moves fluidly between personal memory and larger historical forces, never letting the emotional weight of the story get lost in the facts, and never letting sentimentality soften the realities of exile, loss, and survival. His background as a reporter sharpens the narrative, but it’s his personal investment that gives it lasting resonance.

Israel and Guatemala emerge as the twin poles of Perera’s personal journey. Israel, the ancestral homeland, appears throughout the book not only as a physical place but as a source of spiritual longing and political identity. Guatemala, where Perera lived much of his adult life, serves as a vantage point from which he could reflect on the family’s long arc of migration and resilience.

Where The Cross and the Pear Tree shines brightest is in its small, vivid moments: the family member who smuggled a gramophone into Palestine in 1935, thrilling an entire neighborhood with the arrival of recorded music; the smell of Sephardic cuisines in the kitchen; the many Ladino phrases spoken over kitchen tables. These sensory details bring the Sephardic experience to life far more powerfully than any academic framing.

But the book is not without its frustrations. At times, Perera’s devotion to genealogical thoroughness bogs the narrative down. Page after page of names and dates can overwhelm readers who are looking for a more emotionally driven story. Some of the most promising anecdotes are abandoned too quickly, sacrificed to the demands of documentation.

In his later years, Perera sought to preserve the culture he had spent so long recovering. He founded Sephardic/Mizrahi Artists and Writers International, an organization dedicated to sustaining the literary and artistic traditions of Sephardic Jewry—a fitting legacy for a man who believed that memory must be an active, living project.

The Cross and the Pear Tree also captures a broader truth about the nature of diaspora today. In Perera’s telling, the old idea of a single, unshakable homeland gives way to a more complex reality—one in which multiple places, histories, and identities all shape what it means to belong. Israel remains at the emotional core of the Perera family’s story, but it is only part of the picture. Just as important are the sounds, tastes, and memories carried from Spain, Salonika, Guatemala, and every other place the family once called home.

Through meticulous research and intimate storytelling, Victor Perera reminds us that Sephardic identity—like memory itself—is layered, fragile, and constantly being reimagined. His journey is a testament to how roots can endure even when the ground beneath them keeps shifting. ◦

Manuel Ferez holds a PhD in Sociology from the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile. Ferez studies ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East and the Caucasus, as well as contemporary Jewish diasporas. He is the academic coordinator of JAD Jewish Culture www.culturajudia.com