More in ‘Mizrahi’

• Motivated by digs against Judge Sotomayor, the Anti-Defamation League is joining forces with a Latino group in Boston to fight “anti-immigrant rhetoric.” [Boston Herald]
• The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look at the remaining Jewish population in Syria. [SFC]
• Jo Amar, a renowned cantor credited with pioneering Mizrahi music, a style blending Sephardic and ...

That the State of Israel has an ethnicity problem is the opposite of news: hardly a day goes by without some report on the hostilities between Jews and Arabs. But We Look Like the Enemy, the impassioned, often self-righteous new book by Rachel Shabi, draws the reader’s attention to an easily overlooked dimension of that ...

Moshe Katsav defends himself at a press conference in January.
In Israel, a country where victimhood is a badge of honor, just about every ethnic or religious group—Arab, Ethiopian, Russian, Mizrahi, ultra-Orthodox—is convinced that it’s been screwed over and that society “owes” it. These feelings aren’t necessarily false, of course, but sometimes it’s hard not to ...

Yona Dardashti was an acclaimed singer of Persian classical music. In Iran, he hosted a weekly radio show, and regularly performed for the Shah. But in Israel, where he immigrated in the mid-1960s, audiences tended to look westward for cultural cues, and his music was ignored.
According to his granddaughter, Galeet Dardashti, he would have fared ...