The Racial Identity of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews
An interesting new report was published about non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the US, focusing on Persian Jews in the Los Angeles area, Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Bukharan Jews in Queens, and Sephardic Jews in South Florida. Naturally, I was especially interested in the section about how these Jews interact with American racial classifications:
Sephardic Jews themselves have varied perspectives on US racial and ethnic categories. When asked, some Sephardic Jews identify as white, others as Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern, but many reject US racial and ethnic categories altogether because these classifications do not reflect their experiences in their countries of origin nor represent their self-understanding.
The overwhelming majority of our interviewees—Syrian, Bukharian, Hispanic, Persian, and other Jews from the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region—told us they do not identify with the category of Jews of color.
In my own experience talking to Jews from Israel from non-Ashkenazi backgrounds who immigrate to the US, they are bewildered when they arrive by the classification boxes they are expected to check. Their personal identities are some combination of Israeli, Jewish, country of recent origin (Iraqi, Yemenite, Bulgaria, etc), and Mizrahi. An sometimes they have very strong sub-identities with those categories (e.g., eighth generation Israeli, national-religious Jewish, Kurdish Iraqi). But when they come to the US, they are expected to choose an identity ("Hispanic," "White," "Asian,") that does not even overlap with their personal identities.
It will be interesting to see how the Biden administration's promulgation of a new MENA (Middle East and North African) classification affects American Jewish identity. My short editorial comment is that a classification that includes Israeli Jews, Egyptian Copts, Lebanese Shi'ites, Turkish Sunnis, Iraqi Chaldeans, and much more isn't a very coherent category. To a significant extent it's meant to be a proxy for Arab Americans or Muslim Americans, but a very large percentage of the cohort is either not Arab, not Muslim, or neither.