Mizrahi Collective
Our Foundation and the Need for this Work
Broader Motivation and Context
Recent Work and Outcomes (2019-20)
Our Vision
The Mizrahi Collective is an emerging project grounded in the incredible work of Mizrahi Jews who have invested their labor and wisdom in creating spaces within progressive Jewish institutions to serve the goals of Mizrahi communal healing, learning, and organizing. Our vision is to build a national network focused on building a powerful community amongst Mizrahi Jews in the US. The Collective will serve as a locus of connection, integration, and cross-pollination for Mizrahim across the country who are currently engaged in the work of communal healing, cultural production, and organizing; this will allow members to learn from one another, to support each other on their projects, and to grow the power and impact of their work. The healing work that will be supported through the Mizrahi collective is itself anti-racist work, moving us collectively closer to liberation. To transform and dismantle white supremacy, it is essential that we have our own space to heal, learn, root and claim our identities as Mizrahi Jews.
Our Foundation and the Need for this Work
In recent years, there have been notable instances of Mizrahi organizing within various organizational contexts that align with our vision - these experiences and communities have clarified the need for this project and shaped our vision for the Mizrahi Collective. The Mizrahi-Sephardi Caucus of NYC-based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice was founded in 2014, and has grown exponentially over time. Within this caucus space, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews have gathered to engage in identity excavation, collective learning, and activism to support the work of JFREJ, as well as to shape their own cultural and political work. From large scale public events like Mimouna with the Arab American Association in NYC, to smaller cultural production events and educational workshops, the Mizrahi-Sephardi Caucus of JFREJ has laid much of the groundwork for the political education and identity gathering that we intend to expand on and nourish in this Collective. Kavod in Boston is another example of an organization that has organized Mizrahi Jews around justice work over the last number of years, emerging in 2015 and growing to hire an organizer for the JOCISM Caucus in 2019. Both of these organizations, among many others, such as Tzedek Lab’s S/M Caucus, the Sephardi-Mizrahi Queer Network, have laid the foundations and built many of the relationships from which this Collective grew out. Without the foundation laid by the extraordinary organizing efforts at JFREJ, Kavod, Tzedek Lab, and elsewhere, we would not be where we are today.
Engaging in the organizing efforts described above has clarified our vision around the need to build something new that is not tied to an existing political organization and has flexibility and autonomy to focus on deeper community-building, ritual, healing and cultural work specifically for Mizrahim. While other organizations have created meaningful spaces for Mizrahi organizing, we desire a deeper space to engage with our identities on our own terms.
One of the biggest gaps that we intend to fill is the dearth of Sephardi and Mizrahi egalitarian ritual and prayer spaces. There are almost no Sephardi or Mizrahi Jewish egalitarian spaces held or led by women in this country. Moreover, many of us find ourselves in predominantly white Ashkenazi spaces, where progressive Jews are exuberantly excited to diversify their Jewish practice, and bring in Mizrahi or Sephardi piyut, nusach, or tradition. Yet when asked to contribute something from our own heritage, many of us, particularly women and queer folks, have nothing to offer. Because of systems of erasure and dominance - Ashkenazi dominance within American Jewish educational institutions and the patriarchal systems that shape more traditional Mizrahi ritual space - we have been denied access to prayer, piyut, or knowledge of religious services in the tradition of our ancestors. We are looking for a place to learn ritual, prayer and piyut, as well as actually hold services in community, where we feel welcome, held and whole.
One of the other major limitations of Mizrahi organizing work in the American Jewish community is the concentration of these efforts on the East Coast, and general limitation of these caucus spaces being housed in organizations that tend to be rooted to a particular locale. Several of those who visioned this Mizrahi Collective are located on the West Coast, and are responding to needs from Mizrahi community members there, who experience a sense of isolation and lack of access to this work. Through this Collective, we hope to create a national network beyond the scope of specific cities. We envision much of our programming being online, with selective in-person events (global pandemic notwithstanding). We believe that building a national Mizrahi network that is dedicated to the goal of building relationships, sharing wisdom, ritual, and supporting one another will counteract the geographic fragmentation that currently exists.
Broader Motivation and Context for the Mizrahi Collective
For centuries, Mizrahim have experienced material, spiritual, and intellectual theft both within and outside of the Jewish community. Our stories have been erased, forgotten, and misrepresented. This has caused deep generational harm in our communities. We believe that as Mizrahi members of the Jewish community, our journey towards wholeness begins with access to material resources that will allow us to have our own space to gather, create, and learn together. As a people in exile from our ancestral homes, Mizrahim have faced continuous marginalization and erasure in the face of anti-Arab racism and Orientalism both within and outside of the Jewish community. This reality of historical and continued oppression has left many of us desperately grasping for ever disappearing threads of our histories. Our vision for our Collective is to create an emergent community of practice that carves out space for us to reclaim our stories, and support each other in complex identities to connect to a long lineage of resilience grounded in our songs, prayers, food, and writings.
Mizrahim are often lumped into a broader category of JOCISM (Jews of Color, Sephardi, Indigenous, and Mizrahi) but do not get the opportunity to root and draw resources from our specific heritage and tradition as Mizrahim. For us, this work of weaving together the threads of our past into a vibrant present, is an essential piece of building towards Jewish communities that hold a deep commitment to anti-racist values and practices. In a moment of unprecedented Black uprising in response to systemic racism in the US, we are learning that the work of creating pro-black community comes from a deep introspection into our own racial lineages, traumas, and resilience.
We believe that when we have the space through the Mizrahi Collective to lean into our own truths, we can show up with greater sustainability and integrity over the coming years to support our black siblings fighting for justice and liberation. Our goal for this work is to nourish our collective and individual resilience so that we can continue to work towards eradicating racism within our broader Jewish communities, and beyond.
Recent Work and Outcomes (2019-20)
Mizrahi activists, artists, educators, scholars and community members have been dreaming and executing visionary curriculum, courses, events, ritual gatherings, campaigns and more. Over the past year alone, members of this Collective have begun to design a Mizrahi Feminist Curriculum, Mizrahi Virtual Retreat, Weekly Shir Hashirim, Rosh HaShanah Selichot Services, Storytelling Workshops and more. For example, in January 2020, we created and implemented a Feminism All Night that was centered on Mizrahi identity and opened the space for intergenerational and global Mizrahi learning spaces. We continued our learning through Feminism All Night this past May by leading and participating in sessions around Mizrahi identity, history and feminism. Some of the sessions included hosting scholars like Claris Harbon to teach about Mizrahi activism through housing rights, organizing Mizrahi Feminist text study to learn about the relationship of gender and race, and other sessions on piyuttim and ritual from a Mizrahi perspective.
While we have been able to begin the process of building this Collective even without significant resources, we believe that with support we will be able to further nurture these goals, specifically by enabling the development of these types of independent projects and initiatives created by and for Mizrahim. The
Collective will serve as a locus of connection, integration, and cross-pollination for Mizrahim across the country who are currently engaged in the work of communal healing, cultural production, and organizing; this will allow members to learn from one another, to support each other in their projects, and to grow the power and impact of their work.
Goals for 2020-21
In the coming year, we intend to continue to support programming that is created and implemented by and for members of our Mizrahi community. Our primary goal for this year is to build a foundation via community building, learning, and training opportunities. We want to strengthen our Collective by investing in relationships with one another and deepening our own leadership. We are proposing three foundational pillars that will guide programming and activity for the Mizrahi Collective in the year ahead:
● Ritual: prayer, art, food, piyutim, ancestral healing practices
● Learning: history, feminism, culture, language learning (eg: Arabic, Persian)
● Activism: anti-racist work, create Ashkenormativity Guide for Jewish organizations
We imagine that our programming and activity might take a variety of forms including national retreats (whether virtual or in person) for members of the Collective to build community, to teach one another, and to learn from Mizrahi scholars and elders; monthly workshops and trainings for members in Arabic language skills, prayer, and more. We also imagine producing educational and artistic content that emerges from these retreats, trainings and gatherings that can be shared with the broader Jewish world.
Currently, there are about 75 people in our collective. We hope to continue to expand and reach Mizrahi activists, educators and artists and we hope to invest in our existing members. Our collective is for Mizrahi folks only; it is in this sacred space that we are able to finally be seen for our racial identity, process our grief and traumas in community, and foster resilience to transform Jewish communities into a multi-racial reality.
Growth Areas and Supports
The primary question we are currently wrestling with is how to find a balance between focusing on internal healing and learning and engaging in external educational and programming opportunities for the broader, non-Mizrahi Jewish community. At the founding of our Collective, many of our members expressed a desire to build a community specifically by and for Mizrahim. This longing emerged from shared experiences of feeling exhausted by a constant expectation to educate non-Mizrahim in Jewish spaces about our culture, ethnicity, and history of oppression as well as feelings of loss and disconnection from the practices of their family and ancestry due to cultural erasure and assimilation, and a yearning for a space of collective reconnection. For these reasons, we have decided as a Collective to focus our capacity and resources primarily on organizing and programming inside of the Mizrahi community. That being said, we also recognize that in order for our entire Jewish community to move closer to liberation, there must also be opportunities for non-Mizrahim to understand the historical and current realities of Mizrahim. We anticipate that as our Collective grows in size and reputation, our members will likely receive requests to offer resources and trainings for Ashkenazi-dominant institutions. We would benefit from support in finding a sustainable balance between internal and external work, and in figuring out how other Jewish organizations may serve as a conduit to translate our internal work into resources that can be used by the broader Jewish community.
Additionally, it is extremely important for us that as a democratically-run Collective, we cultivate deep transparency with all members, specifically around our budget. We want our members to have access to our financial resources to support the projects they feel passionately about, and that they feel a sense of agency over the way our money is spent and distributed. We hope to grow in developing practices and principles to ensure this kind of transparency moving forward.