Mizrahi Jewish College Students Don’t Fit An Easy Israel-Palestine Narrative
NEW YORK — When Jessica Yeroshalmi started her political science degree at Baruch College in 2019, she was surprised to learn that some students in her classes had no idea there were Jews with roots in the Middle East.
Yeroshalmi’s parents fled from Iran to New York after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She grew up speaking Farsi and attending a Sephardic synagogue in Roslyn, Long Island, where other Persian Jews like her were commonplace.
It was only once Yeroshalmi moved to the city for college that she realized that her peers had an Ashkenazi-centric image of what it means to be Jewish.
“They just saw Jews as kind of these people who were persecuted in Europe and then went to Israel, who were all white,” said Yesrohalmi, 23. “Which couldn't be further from the truth.”
That gap in knowledge was part of what inspired her to learn more about the history of Iranian Jews. It also helped her land on a thesis topic: the case for Jews from Iraq and Morocco to receive legal reparations after being driven from their home countries after 1948.
“It became a huge passion project of mine to bring that to light, and also bring to light Jewish culture in the Middle East,” said Yeroshalmi, who started at Columbia Law School last fall. The Oct. 7 attacks and subsequent Israel-Hamas war then opened her eyes to how even post-graduates knew little about the history of Middle Eastern Jews.
“I had people who were coming to me with very strong opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then telling me that they didn't know that Jews existed outside of Europe,” Yeroshalmi said over coffee during a break between her classes. “Which was very scary.”
Yeroshalmi is not alone in her frustration. According to Manashe Khaimov, founder of the Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative, some 30% of American Jewish college students are Sephardic or Mizrahi. That means their family spent the diaspora in North Africa or the Middle East, before moving to Israel, Europe or America beginning in the twentieth century.
Unlike in Israel, where Mizrahim form nearly half of all Jews, Mizrahi students are a minority within a minority on American college campuses. Khaimov explained that students often find themselves fighting for recognition of their identities and histories in campus discourse.
“ I think now our Jewish community is realizing that they need to bring in Mizrahi and Sephardic narratives into their conversation about Israel,” Kahimov said.
But the students aren’t waiting for a green-light to be included. Since Oct. 7, Mizrahi Jewish students in America have found themselves playing an outsized role in campus Israel advocacy. As Jews whose families originate in the Middle East, their stories complicate prevailing campus narratives of Israel as a European-led, settler-colonial project.
Student activists overlooking Mizrahi student’s identities – and their family’s histories of persecution in Arab countries – have propelled many Mizrahi students to become more politically outspoken since the latest Israel-Hamas war began.
A forgotten history
Mizrahi means “Eastern” in Hebrew, and the term usually encompasses both Jews who have lived in the Middle East and North Africa since the exile of Jews from the Second Temple, as well as the descendants of Sephardic Jews who moved to the Mediterranean basin after the Spanish Inquisition.
“Two sets of refugees emerged from the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” explained Lyn Julius, journalist for Fathom and author of the book, “Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.” She spoke over Zoom during a talk at the Columbia Law School during Mizrahi Heritage Month last November.
In addition to the Palestinian Nakba, in which 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee from their homes after the 1947-1948 war, around 850,000 Mizrahi Jews were driven from their countries to Israel in the wake of Israel’s founding, according to the nonprofit group Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.
In Julius’ view — and the view of the Israeli government, which acknowledges the expulsion of Mizrahi Jews every year on Nov. 30 – the movement of Mizrahi Jews to Israel was not a voluntary migration, but rather an instance of refugees fleeing dispossession, violence and discrimination. Still, Julius decried that people often deny or minimize this aspect of Mizrahi Jewish history.
Events like the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, in which local rioters massacred up to 180 Jews, and 1947 riots in Aleppo, Syria, which killed 75 Jews, made conditions for Jews in countries with Arab majorities unbearable. Many Mizrahim had property seized and found refuge in Israel after fleeing immediate violence, or the threat of violence looming.
Entire communities that had existed since antiquity vanished overnight. Algeria had 140,000 Jews in 1948 and a consistent Jewish community since the first century, according to information from the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Virtual Library. Today, zero Jews remain, according to data from the Middle East North Africa Research Center.
When it comes to Mizrahi Jews in the U.S, “they are much more recent arrivals” and far less numerous than the Ashkenazi contingent, Julius said.
A 2020 Pew Research Survey of American Jews showed that only 7% of American Jews identified as Sephardic or Mizrahi. Many Mizrahim immigrated to Israel in the mid-twentieth century, before later moving to Europe or America.
Accidental activists
Years later, the descendents of Mizrahi Jewish immigrants to America have become a political football on both sides of debates about Israel on college campuses. Some Mizrahi Jewish students have become outspoken about their family’s histories of persecution in Arab countries to make the case for the necessity of a Jewish state.
Chloe Levian is a grad student at the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management in Los Angeles, and she is a recent graduate of UCLA. But people online know Levian by her social media moniker @thatpersianjew, where she raises awareness of antisemitism and the Israeli hostages in Gaza on Instagram and TikTok to the tune of over 8,000 followers.
Similar to Yeroshalmi, Levain also moved from a tight-knit Persian Jewish community in L.A. to now educating people on campus about the experiences of Jews from Iran: something that she never thought would end up inspiring her career path.
Levain works as a regional campus manager with the organization Stand With Us, which is a pro-Israel educational group that teaches about the country’s history to fight antisemitism on campus.
“My Persian Jewish identity — and my own family’s story of leaving Iran and seeking refuge in Israel — are at the heart of why I care so deeply about Israel,” she said.
Joe Gindi, an economics student at Rutgers University, also found himself thrust into the activist spotlight after the Oct. 7 attacks. His family arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century after leaving Aleppo, Syria for economic opportunity years before the 1947 riots. At Rutgers, Gindi picked up minors in Jewish studies, history and Arabic to connect more with his Mizrahi heritage.
“Since Oct. 7th, friends refuse to speak with me anymore because I'm a Jew who's willing to stand up,” said Gindi, referring to his outspokenness on social media. “I spoke in Congress last February as part of an antisemitism roundtable,” he said, referring to his participation in a roundtable by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism with ohter Jewish students. “I made sure to mention proudly that I am a Syrian Jew,” he said.
Gindi said that Mizrahi history challenges students’ preconceived ideas about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I’ve been called a European colonizer, which is pretty ironic,” he said.
At the same time, Gindi considered how the under-acknowledged history of Jewish persecution in Middle Eastern countries might explain why so many of the Mizrahi students he knew were passionate about Israel advocacy.
“Demographics-wise, at that roundtable, we were overrepresented,” Gindi said. “I remember seeing the other students at that table, and over half of them were non-Ashkenazi,” he said.
Embracing dual narratives
Not every Mizrahi student who I spoke to had the same viewpoints about Israel. Some, albeit a smaller minority, viewed their family’s history as a driving force to advocate for Palestinians or a two-state solution.
“After my gap year, I had a much more nuanced, even lefty perspective,” said Yarin Hagay Nevel, 22, who is currently finishing up her honors psychology degree at UCLA. After high school, she lived in south Tel Aviv for a year on a volunteering program.
Nevel said that her Mizrahi heritage helped her connect with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and Eritrean asylum seekers with whom she volunteered. She also learnt about the persecution of Mizrahi Jews in Israel, such as Israel’s Black Panthers, which made her think about the inequality Arabs and Palestinians face in Israeli society today.
“I think it’s easier for us to relate to the shared struggles of just being minorities,” said Hagay Nevel. “It’s like an immediate relationship-building connection.”
At Brown University, computer science student Ronnie Shashoua, 22, said her paternal Iraqi heritage propelled her passion for pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus. Her grandparents moved to Israel several years after the Farhud upended Jewish life in Iraq, which made her sensitive to how persecution affects people’s worldview.
“I very firmly believe that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever inflict that kind of terror on another human being,” said Shashoua, who is involved in Brown University’s ‘Jews For Ceasefire’ group.
“Part of that is also not just making sure it doesn't happen again to our community, but making sure it doesn't happen to anyone else,” she added.
Remembering Mizrahi heritage year-round
Back in uptown Manhattan, Yeroshalmi described over coffee how she hopes to continue advocating for greater Mizrahi representation year-round – both in Jewish campus life, and in broader conversations about Israel within the larger law school community.
“Even though we are a minority, there needs to be more education of history, amplification of our voices,” Yeroshalmi said of Mizrahi Jews in the U.S.
She said she believed many Mizrahi young people do not know their own family histories, as their parents or grandparents may be reluctant to talk about past persecution.
“We still have a responsibility to record that history and the perspectives of Jews from the Middle East, because I think it very much defines the story of the people of Israel, and the story of Jewish people as a whole,” Yeroshalmi said. “There are enough Mizrahi-Sephardic Jews to be able to tell their story,” she said.
Samuel Eli Shepherd is a culture journalist and a digital reporting and editing intern at the Forward. He can be reached at shepherd@forward.com.