“It was something in me,” he said over lunch at a Brooklyn café near the apartment he shares with his wife, Liat, and their 2-year-old son, Zohar (glancingly named after Zohar Argov, Israel’s first breakout Mizrahi pop star). “On this instrument, the oud, I could express that. Later, I listened to recordings from that time.” He turned his head to the side, laughing, and lifted his hand dismissively. “It wasn’t good.”

Avital’s humility belies the substance and import of his music: Over the last few years he has become a leading force in a hybrid that synthesizes American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past. And unlike the self-conscious projects in which many musicians cloak themselves—garments as easily thrown off as put on—Avital’s work has emerged in the course of his search to better understand his identity as a jazz musician, as an Israeli, and as an heir to a Mizrahi cultural tradition historically viewed as inferior by Israel’s Ashkenazi elite.

In 2008, the New Jerusalem Orchestra premiered Avital’s “Debka Fantasia,” an extended composition that unearths the Bedouin roots beneath Israeli folk tunes such as “At Adama (You, Soil).” And in 2009, he presented his “Song of the Earth,” a Middle-Eastern Afro-Jewish musical suite for 13 pieces at Merkin Concert Hall. On March 9, he appeared at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, with the Israeli-Yemenite singer Ravid Kahalani, presenting their joint project, “Yemen Blues.” And on April 2, Avital will perform again with his quartet at the Jazz Gallery, also in New York.

“Omer’s work is very important politically because it represents part of a trend in Israel over the last 10 or 15 years of Mizrahi Sephardim finding public space to reclaim identity,” said Carmel Raz, an Israeli-American violinist and doctoral candidate in music theory at Yale who has performed with Avital. “In the development of Israeli identity, you can be Arab and Jewish and live in Israel. They’re not mutually exclusive. The stage is now open for a broad way of being Jewish.”

Listen to “Eli,” by the group Yemen Blues:

Avital, 39, who has been known to wear a Jewfro, long sideburns, and beads that evoke an Israeli Superfly, grew up in Givatayim, then a middle-class Labor Party redoubt east of Tel Aviv. His late father, Eliyahu, was from a family of mughrabim, North African Jews from Morocco, who emigrated in the late 19th century. His mother, Dalia, comes from a Yemenite family originally from Ta’izz, near Sana’a, home of the great 17th-century poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, celebrated by Jews and Arabs alike as the “Shakespeare of Yemen.” While his grandparents prayed as Jews, and lived among Arabs, his parents sought to become secular moderns. Eliyahu, a photographer and free spirit, introduced Omer to big band jazz, Frank Sinatra, European classical, and Arab traditional music. Dalia, dogged and practical, worked for the phone company and pushed her husband to Hebraicize his last name, Abutbul, which means “Father of the Drum.” Abutbul became Avital (“Father of the Dew”), as Israeli as Smith or Jones is American.

“When I grew up, Mizrahi culture was considered garbage compared to the European; nothing to take seriously,” said Avital. “For my parents, there was a survival thing that was key. They wanted for me to be part of something, not grow up in the ghetto. My mother, who is dark-skinned, really suffered. They tried to integrate. They joined the Labor party and believed in the Zionist ideal, but they were laughed at.”

While proclaiming Israel open to all Jews, David Ben-Gurion sometimes referred to Mizrahim as “savages.” “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs,” he wrote in the mid-’60s. “We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.” As the historian Avishai Margalit summarizes: “For the Labor leaders only Ashkenazi Jews had ‘culture’; Oriental Jews had at best a ‘heritage.’ ” In 1977 Menachem Begin exploited their seething resentment, when his right-wing Herut party swept into office with widespread Mizrahi support.

As a boy, Avital won a children’s songwriting contest and began to play an old guitar. He got good enough to audition for the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts, Israel’s predominant incubator of young talent. After a botched first attempt, his mother’s friend, a Yemeni cleaning lady who worked for the school’s music director, got him a second chance. He was accepted, and though generally ostracized for being an Oriental Jew, he was inspired by the sounds of jazz and blues around him and gave up classical guitar for jazz and the acoustic bass. He came under the sway of Emil Ram, a bassist who had studied in New York with Barry Harris at the legendary pianist’s Jazz Cultural Center. Ram, along with the late pianist Amit Golan, who also studied with Harris, carried back to Israel a muscular sense of swing and a historically rooted jazz lexicon.

“He had everything,” remembered Avital. “Meeting Emil meant finding someone who could give you a taste of what was really happening. From then on, I always had Mingus and Ellington in the back of my head.” Avital’s parents felt comfortable watching Omer play jazz, which resonated with Arab music’s tradition of incantation, improvisation, and trance-inducing rhythms.

Before he could pursue a jazz career, Avital, like most high-school graduates in Israel, was compelled to perform mandatory military service, which after a month of basic training he spent in the Air Force Orchestra. At first motivated by a sense of belonging, Avital soon found the experience a nightmare. He was disgusted by what he saw as the army’s anti-Arab and anti-Mizrahi sentiments. He became depressed, buoying himself with incessant chatter about his latest jazz obsession, Clifford Brown, the American bebop trumpeter of the ’50s who co-led a landmark group with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“They treat you like human garbage. I met the worst people I ever met. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be living in this country. If this is what’s it’s about, it’s not for me,’ ” he said. “My commander hated me. He’d yell, ‘If I hear the words Clifford Brown one more time, I’m going to send you to grease the bombs in the South!’ I was a bad influence in the orchestra.”

In 1992, following his discharge from the army, Avital boarded a plane with his friend, trombonist Avi Lebovich (the renowned bassist Avishai Cohen was on another flight the same day), and flew to New York to pursue his calling.

“I knew I could play and that what I do doesn’t interest anyone in Israel,” he said. “New York was the place. It allowed me to be something I couldn’t have been without it. I had two dreams: One was to play with the musicians I admired, and the second was to just become a good musician. I just wanted to get better.”

Listen to “Brighter Future,” from Live at Smalls:

Unbeknownst to him, Avital arrived just as a great wave of young jazz talent—global in orientation and possessed of shocking technical proficiency—was cresting in New York. Much of that talent revolved around the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program, where Avital spent a semester getting oriented before continuing his studies at Mannes College. In the early ’90s, New York was full of small bars and restaurants—St. Marks Bar, Nuyorican Poets Café, Zinc Bar, Jules, the Village Gate, the First Street Café—where musicians could play and hang out. (What few are left pay the same or less today as they did then, a sign of a struggling bohemia after dark.) Avital used these opportunities to learn standard tunes and build his confidence.

Now known for the missile-like speed, trajectory, and impact of his improvisation, Avital once remarked that he developed his sound not by acceding to some higher plane of musical understanding, but by deciding at some point only to play—to make heard—those ideas to which he could commit totally: strength through self-editing. To supplement his income he worked for a moving company run by his now brother-in-law.

In 1993 while on a gig at the Village Gate, Avital was heard by the bassist Dwayne Burno, who recommended him to saxophonist Antonio Hart. Hart took him on tour and featured him on his next record, along with Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on Miles Davis’ landmark 1959 recording, Kind of Blue.

Avital also formed his own band, a sextet that featured four tenors, which appeared regularly at Smalls, one of the Greenwich Village clubs where the new wave of young musicians pooled.

“He brought so much, man,” remembered tenor saxophonist Charles Owens, a member of Avital’s group, who plays with a meaty sound that recalls Sonny Rollins. “He was such a badass that when people from Israel were noticed subsequently, they were always compared to him, which was a gift and a curse for them, I suppose, as leaders. I don’t know if he had a specific agenda for an Israeli sound. He was just writing what was in his heart. He brought together jazz, French impressionist harmonies, Middle Eastern rhythms and tonalities, as well as a love for four-part harmony. His pieces were very challenging, not necessarily because there were a lot of notes, but say for example holding the lowest note on your horn for measure after measure, and at a piano or even double piano level. What a great feeling when it came together. Magic.”

New York at that time was, Avital said, an ideal place for exploring his multiple identities. He and guitarist Amos Hoffman would hang out with their friend, a Palestinian oud player and Williamsburg falafel shop owner named Najib Shaheen (brother of the oud player and activist Simon Shaheen), who before buzzing them in would answer his intercom in a mock sinister baritone, “Go away you filthy Jews. You are not welcome here.” In Israel, Avital would take trips to the Sinai desert and spend time with Bedouins. He started speaking with his father in greater depth about North African music and reading about Israel before 1948, when strains of Zionism looked to the Arab, rooted in the land, as an example to emulate rather than a threat to defend against. All the while, his music, characterized by its tuneful gritty romanticism, became more distinctive, personal, and searching.

“I made my own music and people wrote about it. They treated me like I was saying something,” he said. “That wouldn’t have happened in Israel. In New York you can be a human being and think for yourself. In Israel you have to make it your career to think for yourself.”

Listen to “Faith,” from Arrival:

In 1997 Impulse! records signed Avital and prepared to release his first record, Devil Head, but before it could do so, the label dropped the project.

“I was a little disappointed,” said Avital. “I had that band which was going super well. I found myself doing the same things. What do you do next? I had the feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I met Liat and started this long-distance relationship.”

Avital had been traveling more regularly to Israel, which in the wake of the Oslo accords was slowly becoming a more hopeful place. “Once you had that possibility for peace, it was amazing, that whole Middle Eastern sensibility came to life,” he said. “Israel became a much hipper place for about three years. Everyone was going to India and they brought back a looser vibe. The old Israel was ending. A sense of possibility opens people up.”

Avital started to study Moroccan music and played with Israeli-Arab musicians in Nazareth and the Galilee. He played in joint Jewish and Arab bands with Arnie Lawrence, the American saxophonist who created the jazz program at the New School, made aliyah, and founded the International Center for Creative Music. He moved to Ein Kerem shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and began a course of study combining the European and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

In 2005, longing for the “openness of jazz and society” in New York, Avital returned and began to further develop the concepts he had been working on in Israel. He resurrected his own groups and released a string of albums on Smalls Records, the club’s label. And with the percussionist Yair Harel, the director of the Israel Festival, he co-founded the New Jerusalem Orchestra, which draws on traditional piyutim, or liturgical poems, and the work of modern Israeli poets.

“I’m really trying to rebuild a bridge to the past. I have to learn this tradition. I have to know it,” said Avital. “It’s part of my body. I have to not lose it for the future.”

Avital’s vision of a shared Middle Eastern sound—exuberant, inclusive, and hopeful—could easily provide the soundtrack to the region’s fast-changing present. “In Israel, and in the United States, the Arab world can be seen as unknown, as one block of darkness,” he told me. “And now all of a sudden it’s like the world is seeing the people of these countries for the first time.”

Near Grand Army Plaza he recounted a recent session he had in his apartment with an Iraqi-American trumpeter, a Syrian singer, a Moroccan Berber percussionist, and a Palestinian oud player.

“It was a great vibe,” he said, smiling.

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Last week’s wildfire in northern Israel caused the deaths of more than 40 people and destroyed thousands of acres of forest. It also let the shed ha’adati—the ethnic genie—out of the bottle.

You might think the ethnic genie (which is probably best thought of, in English, as playing the race card) is a reference to the Arab-Jewish divide. But actually it concerns the rift—stoked by political rhetoric—between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, perhaps best encapsulated by the way European Jews are venerated as the pioneers who tamed the swamps and desert, while Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin were dumped in ma’abarot, a kind of refugee camp for new immigrants.

The fire did bring some other ethnic issues to the surface as well. On the coexistence-in-tragedy side, the blaze affected Jewish as well as Arab and Druze towns, and Arabs and Jews alike were killed (almost all of them Israel Prison Service officials on their way to evacuate a jail in the area). On a potentially more divisive note, police suspect the fire was started by a Druze teen who carelessly discarded a lit coal used for smoking a nargila water pipe.

But it was differences among Jews that Interior Minister Eli Yishai invoked when he came, er, under fire in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Yishai said he was the victim of a media “lynching” that had nothing to do with his ministry’s being responsible for the ill-equipped Israel Fire and Rescue Service and everything to do with his being “Sephardi-Mizrahi, right-wing, and Haredi.” But that’s not just a description of his own ethnicity; Yishai also heads the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas party—a movement that might be said to base its very existence on ethnic resentment, and that has been repeatedly accused of a blinkered focus on getting more government handouts for yeshivas, large (read: Haredi) families, and non-working yeshiva students.

Regardless of the very real basis for any lingering anger or insecurity on the part of regular Mizrahim, no amount of fire retardant is going to put out the still-simmering indignation—whether real or manufactured—that continues to feed Shas leaders like Yishai, who unabashedly elevate their constituents’ narrow interests over those of the country at large.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

How could I pick something else? As a Syrian Jew, I am named after my mother’s mother. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, Syrians name their children after their parents, living or dead. Bolisa is an Arabic name that goes back generations in our family, as is Shefia, my mother’s name.

Had the preschool incident been an isolated one, I probably would have forgotten it by now, but as I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve found it indicative of the general state of Judaism in America, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Ashkenazi tradition. My Ashkenazi in-laws have a collection of Jewish books on their coffee table, books on Jewish humor, cooking, and tradition. I peruse them and find no trace of my culture. Recently, my mother-in-law added a book titled The Sephardim to the pile. While I appreciate her intention, it saddens me that Sephardic Jews (and here I use the term loosely, describing all Jews who lived under Muslim rule) need their own book—that we have to exist outside of the norm rather than as part of the whole.

It’s not enough to define myself as not being Ashkenazi; defining oneself against something means, really, being defined by it. The definition must lie in the presence: I am Mizrahi, literally a Jew from the East, a product of Arabic culture, and I must find a way to know and own my story and preserve it for my children.

Even today, in New York City, some people are shocked when I say I am both Syrian and Jewish. They imagine intermarriage, an illicit love affair, elopement perhaps. I find myself explaining my past and having social conversations that turn into history lessons, especially when I relay all the details: My mother’s grandparents emigrated from Syria in the 1910s. My paternal grandfather escaped to pre-1948 Palestine from Aden, Yemen. There, he met my grandmother, the Iraqi-born daughter of a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. She and her family had been stuck in Iraq for several years until they could save more money, because the cost of being smuggled into Jerusalem had risen considerably.

Despite this mixture, I identify most with my Syrian side, a result of my parents’ decisions. When I was 9, my mother enrolled me and my three siblings in a Syrian-Jewish day school, where there were two Ashkenazis in my grade. When I was 12, we moved from the mixed Israeli-Sephardic and American-Ashkenazi neighborhood where we lived into the heart of Syrian Brooklyn.

To live in the Syrian community is to be immersed in its traditions, to eat its tangy-sweet meats slow-cooked in tamarind sauce, to speak its Arabic-inflected Hebrew, to sing its Middle Eastern melodies, to dance to the music of the oud, to revere family, and to always have a home open to guests. But it is also to marry young and often forgo higher education to start a family. It can be stifling, and as a young, independent, headstrong girl, I left for college thinking I’d never look back. But as a grown woman, living on the Lower East Side with my Ashkenazi husband and our 2-year-old daughter, I wonder if I’ve lost something. How I can infuse my home with what I love about Syrian culture even as we physically reside outside of it?

If maintaining the heritage is hard, transmitting the history is even harder. At the Syrian-Jewish high school I attended, the Jewish history curriculum—aside from a passage on Maimonides and another on the Damascus Blood Libel—concerned itself with the lives of Jews in Europe, reducing the millennia-old history of my people to a mere footnote. What I know of Sephardic and Mizrahi history is self-taught, the product of months of research while writing a novel. At the same time that I am grateful for all I was able to learn, I’m angry about how far outside the Jewish canon I had to go to find it.

How have Mizrahi Jews fallen so far into oblivion? Where is the record of millennia of history, of Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa since biblical times? The community in Aleppo traces its roots to the time of King David. Documents in the Cairo Geniza prove an unbroken Jewish presence in Egypt for 2,000 years. Until 1948, when Israel was founded, 800,000 Jews lived in Arab countries, and another 200,000 lived in Turkey and Iran. About half later moved to Israel, and the other half were scattered around the world. When the veteran reporter Helen Thomas ended her career by telling Jews to go back to Germany and Poland, I wanted to remind her of the thriving Jewish community that once existed in her beloved Lebanon.

Mizrahi Jews, like my grandparents, started leaving the Levant well before Israel’s creation, and those who arrived in the United States were often shocked by what they found. Ostracism of non-Yiddish-speaking Jews was so pervasive in the early 20th century that it’s noted in an exhibit at the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. In a tour called “Living History,” visitors are invited into the home of the Confinos, a Greek-Sephardic family who lived in the tenements in 1916. There, a costumed interpreter portraying 14-year-old Victoria Confino answers questions about her old life in Greece and her new life in New York. When I ask her how she feels about Jewish life on the Lower East Side, she sighs and shakes her head. “They treat us like we’re not real Jews because we don’t speak Yiddish,” she says. “And their food,” she shudders. “They don’t use any olive oil; they fry everything in chicken fat.”

In his excellent book The Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush, Joseph A.D. Sutton recounts the tale of the first Syrian Jews to arrive on the Lower East Side in 1910:

During a mid-week prayer service in an Eastern European synagogue, my father, ritually clothed in taleet, a prayer shawl, and tefileen, phylacteries, was approached by an Ashkenazic congregant. Since he did not understand what was being said to him in “plain Yiddish” the man who had spoken to him asked in evident amazement, “Bist du a Yid?” (“Are you a Jew?”). Similar experiences were common.

Sutton details that Syrians weren’t welcomed to worship with their Ashkenazi co-religionists and soon set up their own congregations on the Lower East Side, first in the basement of the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, then at 48 Orchard Street. As they prospered, and as families grew, they left Manhattan for Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

It’s little wonder, then, that Syrian Jews stick to themselves. The community, now in Midwood, Brooklyn, is often described as an insular enclave. In widely used slang, Syrians play off that early experience by calling Ashkenazi Jews J-Dubs. It’s short for J-W, or simply, Jew, as if to say, “Yeah. We got it. You guys are the real Jews.” They call themselves SY and draw sharp distinction between ours and theirs: language and food, behavior and culture.

Ironically, after eight years of marriage to my husband, and my mother-in-law’s patient insinuations, I probably know more Yiddish than I do Arabic. And though I want to preserve my daughter’s Sephardic heritage, she is also half-Ashkenazi, and that side of her should be celebrated as well.

For now, I think of ways I can keep Middle Eastern tradition alive for her. I’ll show her how to dance to Arabic music at parties, flicking her wrists and shimmying her hips. I’ll feed her grape leaves stewed in apricots, a dish of rice and lentils with caramelized onions. I’ll teach her to stuff filah dough with sautéed spinach and walnuts, folding it into triangles topped with sesame seeds. When Passover comes, she’ll join me in helping my mother and grandmother prepare. We’ll spread grains of rice on the table, inspecting them for hametz, passing them from one woman to the next until they’ve been checked three times and are ready to be served at the seder.

I’ll explain the amulet I pin on her clothes, the hamsika hand-pendant that wards off the evil eye. I’ll recount the story of the Arabic-inscribed Ottoman coin I wear around my neck, the one my great-grandmother took with her before she was smuggled out of Iraq, on foot, at night, through the mountains. I’ll tell her about another great-grandmother, who was employed as a seamstress before marrying in Aleppo. After a long day’s work, she would sit beside her family’s large pool, smoking her narghile. I may worry that mainstream Judaism’s institutions will not teach her her history, but I will tell her the stories of these women, teach her to dance the way they did, to cook their food, and express intense emotion in the handful of Arabic phrases I know. I’ll keep her traditions alive for her. And hope that will be enough.

Paula Sadok, a writer living in New York, has recently completed a novel.

Shabi makes one thing clear: if you are one of those Jews, you adamantly refuse to call yourself an Arab, or even an Arab Jew. In her last chapter, titled “We Are Not Arabs!”, Shabi recalls riding an early-morning bus to Kiryat Shmona, a majority-Mizrahi town near the Lebanon border. She gets into a conversation with three women who, like her, come from Iraqi Jewish families. They are pleasantly surprised to find that she can speak Arabic, and they share their enthusiasm for Arab culture: one woman “lives in central Tel Aviv and speaks Arabic constantly, listens to the music, adores the great singers like Fairuz and Farid al-Atrash. She has all the Arabic channels on TV an declares herself to be in love with the language. . . . She relates that she is happy in Israel, of course, but that she was happy in Iraq too.”

But then she goes on to say things the left-leaning Shabi—who was born in Israel but spent most of her life in England, where she works as a journalist—does not like so much. All of her glorious hybridity does not stop the woman from thinking that “the Arabs themselves, they are killers. They like to die, she says; you see their mothers on TV, wishing for their son’s death if it means they also kill Jews.” Struck by the irony that she is saying all this in Arabic, Shabi demands, “Aren’t you also an Arab?” This sends the friendly conversation “screeching into a dark alley. ‘Of course I’m not Arab!’ she fires back. ‘I’m Jewish! Of course we are different!’”

Shabi reports this encounter honestly, even though it presents a rather large obstacle to her book’s thesis. For Shabi believes that reclaiming the Arab-Jewish identity of so many of Israel’s citizens—40 percent of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, down from an actual majority in the 1970s—is the only way to save the country’s soul. Writing with a combination of grievance and idealism familiar on the Western left, but not as often heard from Israelis themselves, Shabi decries the marginalization of Mizrahi culture and the economic injustice that keeps Mizrahis poorer and more likely to end up in jail. She attacks the founders of Israel, the European Zionists, who failed to integrate Arab Jewish immigrants into the new society. She quotes the most disaffected Mizrahis she can find, like Shlomi from Ofakim, who greets an Independence Day display of flags by saying, “My children will never raise the Israeli flag, never!” Shlomi goes on to add that the Ashkenazis brought the Holocaust on themselves: “anti-Semitism doesn’t come from nowhere, something causes it.”

This is obviously a fringe viewpoint, not to say a lunatic one, and Shabi is a little too eager to make voices like Shlomi’s sound legitimate. She looks fondly, for instance, on Israel’s Black Panthers, an extremist Mizrahi-rights organization that incited a major riot in 1971. (Golda Meir famously dismissed its members as “not very nice boys.”) This tendentiousness is a pity, because the actual facts Shabi gathers are sobering enough. It becomes easier to understand why some Mizrahis would look to Eldridge Cleaver for inspiration when you learn that, “in 1970, 78 percent of all adult Jewish and 93 percent of all juvenile Jewish offenders were Mizrahi.” Even today, Shabi writes, “the majority of university professors and students, TV presenters, Supreme Court justices (all but one, in fact) have Ashkenazi surnames; the glaring majority of university cleaners, market stall traders, TV buffoon characters, and blue-collar criminals are Mizrahi in origin.”

So are most residents of Israel’s “development towns,” impoverished places on the periphery of the country. These towns were created to house Arab-Jewish immigrants in the 1950s by an Ashkenazi Labor establishment that did not consult them about where they wanted to go. As is the nature of things, these towns have only become more disadvantaged as time goes on. Shabi writes penetratingly about the way kibbutzes—the pioneer settlements of European Jews, which enjoy great prestige in Israel—control the best agricultural land, to the detriment of development towns that have no place left to develop. In the 1990s, when kibbutzes were allowed to rezone their land for commercial purposes, they reaped a huge private windfall, even though almost all the land in Israel is technically owned by the state.

This ethnic cleavage can have major repercussions in other ways, as well. Especially since the invasion of Gaza, there has been much coverage of the town of Sderot in the American press; close to the Gaza border, it is a constant target of Hamas rockets. But I do not remember having read that Sderot is a development town with a population that is 70 percent Moroccan. Shabi quotes a Sderot storekeeper named Haim who believes that this is why the government sees the town as expendable: “Polish people, they wouldn’t let it pass in silence. They are Ashkenazi, so they are strong and they are connected to the country, to our government.”

All of this material will be eye-opening for many American Jews, though it is common knowledge in Israel itself. Indeed, “the ethnic demon,” as it is called in shorthand, is a frequently debated subject in the press and in politics. Yet Shabi tends to play down the evidence that Israel’s ethnic divisions are gradually improving. The state has now had a Mizrahi president, Moshe Katzav, and even a Mizrahi head of the arch-Ashkenazi Labor Party, Amir Peretz. Culturally, the current generation of Israelis is much more open to Middle Eastern influences than the pioneers, who tended to look down their noses at Jews who looked and talked too much like Arabs. (Shabi collects many damning quotes to this effect from the heroes of early Israel, including David Ben-Gurion, who said that the Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in Israel “without a trace of Jewish or human education.”)

Where We Look Like the Enemy falters is in its rose-colored vision of the distant past and the potential future. Like many a child of immigrants who grew up on tales of the old country, Shabi tends to see her ancestors’ lives as a lost paradise, ignoring the reasons why they might have wanted to leave it behind. But it is one thing to wax rhapsodic about Basra date syrup—“brown, thickly sweet,” eaten drizzled on fried eggs—and another to suggest that Jews, like dates, can only flourish in Iraqi soil: “Now they, just like the smuggled palms, were sowed into the alien, new soils of Israel. And this land, they say, seemed unaccountably hostile to Middle Eastern and North African Jews—so they didn’t grow right, either.”

The suggestion that the Jews were better off in Babylon ignores the fact that, whatever might have been the case in the time of Cyrus the Great, in 1948 they voted with their feet—nearly the entire Iraqi Jewish community left the country after Israel was founded. Nor is it a good argument against the Jewish state that, as one Iraqi Jew quoted by Shabi has it, “If Israel had not been established, nothing would have happened to the Iraqi Jews.” Just ask the Kurds and the Shiites whether they think Iraq has been an oasis of diversity in the last 50 years.

Nor does Shabi seem justified in hoping that Mizrahi Jews, once reawakened to their Arab cultural identity, will finally be able to make peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. Shabi quotes a Moroccan-born Likud party official to this effect: “We the Sephardis, if they had placed it in our hands to make peace with the Arabs, we would have done it, we would have succeeded better than the Ashkenazis because they don’t have the mentality to speak with the Arabs.” Not only does this talk of an Arab mentality sound like just the kind of thing Shabi would despise, coming from an Ashkenazi politician, and not only does it represent an obvious case of wishful thinking. Most important, it ignores the fact that it is precisely the Mizrahis who have flocked to the most hard-line political parties in Israel, Likud and Shas. Sadly, coexistence does not always lead to amity—a fact that We Look Like the Enemy demonstrates, but would prefer to forget.

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 get the sense that life here is one big competition, in which all Israelis are proudly vying for the title of “Victim No. 1.”

The latest contender is a bona fide heavyweight: the state’s president, Moshe Katsav. Katsav, 61, has been under intense scrutiny since July, when suspicions surfaced that he had sexually harassed a onetime employee at his official residence in Jerusalem. Once this woman came forward with a rape complaint, another 10 women were reported to have lined up at the police station to claim that they, too, had been victims of Katsav’s advances. Some of the accusations predate his six years as president. Yet, in spite of the grave accusations now directed at him, it is Katsav who insists that he is the wronged party, and in his defense he insinuates he’s being persecuted because of his Mizrahi origins.

On January 24, the day after Attorney General Menachem Mazuz announced his intention to indict the president, Katsav delivered an address nearly an hour long, covered live by all local media. He categorically denied everything, and vowed that until “my dying breath” he would fight a “world war, if necessary” to establish his innocence. Most of his 50-minute performance consisted of a frontal attack on the media: an “elitist clique of bloated egos, born with silver spoons in their mouths,” who, he claimed, had conspired with the police to frame him ever since his election to the presidency in 2000.

To observers overseas, Katsav’s words may sound bizarre. He was speaking in code, but delivering a message every Israeli understands. A desperate man, he was playing a kind of “race card,” or, as the Hebrew phrase has it, in translation, he was “letting the ethnic genie out of the bottle.”

The Iranian-born Katsav’s argument is that a homogenous (read: Ashkenazi) media had set him as its target because he had gotten uppity. He had defied all expectations seven years ago, when he was chosen by the Knesset over Shimon Peres for president, and is still smarting from an otherwise forgettable Jerusalem Post column which declared that his election foretold “the end of Zionism.”

In truth, Katsav could be seen as the embodiment of the Zionist dream, an Israeli version of a Horatio Alger character. His family arrived in the young state in 1951, when he was five, spending their first years in one of the makeshift transit camps used to house the many immigrants from Muslim lands whose arrival helped double the country’s population during the 1950s. Kastina, their tent camp southeast of Tel Aviv, was flooded during their first winter, and Moshe’s two-month-old brother died.

Defying the odds, the ambitious Katsav earned a bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University, and at age 24, returned to become mayor of Kiryat Malakhi, the town that had been built on the site of the Kastina camp. Eight years later, having worked his way up in the Likud, he was elected to the Knesset, and at 38, he became the youngest man ever appointed a government minister, in this case at the ministry of Labor and Welfare. Over the next two decades, Katsav went on to serve as minister of transportation under Yitzhak Shamir, and then under Benjamin Netanyahu, as both tourism minister and as deputy prime minister.

Katsav’s appeal has been his blandness. Most voters would be hard-pressed to recount his political initiatives. Rather, he has projected a modest dignity, a welcome contrast to so many aggressively obnoxious political figures. Katsav’s arrival after the noisy presidential tenure of the late Ezer Weizman—which ended with Weizman’s own early resignation—provided a timely respite.

Since the sex charges, however, another version of Katsav has emerged. Journalists and fellow politicians now acknowledge that they had known for years that Katsav was a serial womanizer, that behind the calm façade was a disappointingly typical pol, who got far not through hard work but through deal-making.

Katsav is hardly the first politician to attempt to exploit feelings of discrimination among the country’s Mizrahi majority, comprised of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and their descendants. Menachem Begin, Israel’s Polish-born sixth prime minister, brought three decades of Labor rule to an end in 1977 by appealing to the anger and frustration of working class voters, largely of Mizrahi origin, who felt that the country’s Ashkenazi founders had used and abused them. Four years later, in his reelection campaign, Begin masterfully seized on the use of an epithet for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, tchakh-tchakim, (roughly translated as “riff-raff” or “thugs”) by a Labor campaigner, manipulating the slur to further ingratiate himself with the underclass.

More recently, when Benjamin Netanyahu, no more Mizrahi in background than Begin, stood for reelection in 1999, he played similar rhetorical games, claiming that rival Labor party members remained the “same condescending elitists,” whereas he was “proud to be part of the rabble.” But Netanyahu’s was a hail-Mary ploy, and the electorate rejected him in favor of Ehud Barak. For his part, Barak had famously appealed to Mizrahi voters by holding the 1997 party convention in Netivot, a Southern development town whose residents mostly came from Morocco and Tunisia. There he announced his desire, “in my name and the name of the Labor Party,” to “ask forgiveness from those who were caused . . . suffering.”

Israel’s current crop of politicians are hardly morally superior to their predecessors, but ethnic demagoguery no longer has the same effect. That’s why Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born current chair of Labor, was able to defeat none other than Shimon Peres for the party leadership last year, even while very consciously refusing to make his background part of the campaign. When he became Labor’s candidate for prime minister, in 2006, he declared, “Today we are euthanizing the ethnic genie.”

A year later, the public has repudiated Peretz as defense minister and Labor is preparing to replace him as its head. Yet no one in his camp has the nerve to suggest that he is the victim of ethnic prejudice. He is the victim of his own incompetence and his refusal to acknowledge it.

Israel still has a permanent underclass, and it is largely Mizrahi in background. The gap between the affluent and the impoverished is growing, even as the country increasingly prospers. But these days, the source of the problem is social and economic, not ethnic, at least for the Jewish (as opposed to Arab) population. If Katsav, who throughout his political career maintained an outwardly dignified appearance, is now publicly claiming that he’s the victim of prejudice, it’s a sign of desperation. Regardless, it will not be the public that determines his fate, but the attorney general.

After last month’s successful prosecution of the former justice minister on sexual harassment charges, Menachem Mazuz is being touted as Israel’s most powerful man. Not only has he put Katsav on the defensive, but it is he who’ll decide in the coming months whether to file a criminal indictment against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, under investigation on several matters.

A cursory look at Mazuz’s background provides a rejoinder to Katsav. Mazuz was born in Djerba, Tunisia, the son of a rabbi. In 1956, when he was one, his family arrived in Israel and was plunked down in Azata, another transit camp, which eventually became the development town of Netivot, the same town where Barak offered a mea culpa on behalf of Ashkenazim to his Mizrahi countrymen a decade ago. It is more remote than Kiryat Malakhi, and remains an impoverished, disadvantaged community. Now, Netivot’s most famous son will determine the fate of the one-time pride of Kiryat Malakhi. It is hard to imagine Moshe Katsav is now much more than a source of embarrassment in his hometown, compounding his own misdeeds with a misguided attempt to transfer blame from himself to a faded bogeyman.

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 much better today. Galeet is an anthropologist, a part-time cantor, a student of Arab and Persian devotional poems called piyyutim, and the lead singer of Divahn, an all-female ensemble specializing in Mizrahi music.

She tells us about the Arab-Jewish music craze in Israel, and shares samples of her own songs, as well as her grandfather’s.