(Jewish Group) How to be the wrong kind of Jew
That was Jewish music. Authentic Jewish music. That was Niggun Yerushalmi, an Israeli folk group, performing the medieval piyyut, a liturgical poem, Ma L’Ahuvi.
If you have never heard Jewish music like that before – if your idea of Jewish music is Freudenthal’s “Ein Keloheinu,” with its musical roots, supposedly, in a German drinking song, or something from “Fiddler on the Roof,” then perhaps it is time for all of us to confess the sin of Ashkenormativity – the widespread Jewish sin of imagining that our central and eastern European Jewish experience is the heart of Judaism. That would be the idea that the Yiddish language, chicken soup, gefilte fish, and stories of the shtetl are essential to Jewish life.
Yes, we are from Berlin and Ukraine…and also from Yemen and Iraq and Iran and Morocco. Those are the Sephardim, but more accurately, they are the Mizrahim, the so-called eastern Jews who come from Arab lands – who today constitute more than fifty percent of Israeli Jews. They have their own stories of grandeur and persecution and pogroms and exile – stories that we almost never hear, and that we almost never honor.
Even though it is where we began. We began in Ur, in ancient Babylonia. The stories of Genesis make that clear: we are constantly returning there. It is where ancient Judaism was shaped during the exile. It is where the definitive Talmud – not the Talmud of the land of Israel – was created. Maimonides himself was a Mizrahi Jew.
more...