Women Forging Futures: Sephardi Beyond Ethnic and Geographic Belonging

• In Event: Jews of North America: a Social Sciences Perspective

Abstract

“Sephardic” most often refers to an ethnic designation of Jews descending from the Iberian Peninsula and encapsulates a wide range of cultural and religious traditions noted by geographic heritage, e.g. Turkey, Greece, or Morocco. This understanding of Sephardic relies on a constant eye on history to maintain distinct liturgies, customs, and cultures in North America. Using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article explores how communal belonging functions when Sephardi affinity is based on imagined futures rather than geographic or ethnic pasts. What does Sephardi belonging mean when unbound from a history relayed by men? This article follows a group of 15 self-identifying Sephardic women who gather to video chat for an hour once a month to find a community focused on confronting the current reality of not feeling comfortable in traditional Sephardi synagogues or liberal Ashkenazi synagogues and imagining futures built on their understandings of how Sephardi identity can operate as a category beyond the bounds of history.


The discussion will focus on three women of the group in particular to provide thorough portraits of their positionality, entrance to the Sephardi community, and hopes for the future. In this way, the three accounts show unique women bound together in community through their commitment to imagine. In their conversations, there is not a romanticized past of customs to maintain. There is no tracing genealogies or trying to rescue histories. There is no longing for what could have been if not for forced migration. Instead, the only discussion about the past is to imagine what could be different in the future. The possibilities for the future go beyond revitalization and into worlds unrecognizable to previous generations. They imagine Sephardi futures without the current limitations they feel from the confining focus on history and geography. In their conversations, that could only happen outside in the private online space, they find confidence to claim their authenticity and authority over imagined Sephardi futures.

Author

• Elizabeth Narvaez, University of Virginia