By Tamara Yeshurun, Arts and Culture Editor
People see me and want to know what I am. Surely, I’m Bucharian. No? Moroccan? Tunisian? Iraqi? Egyptian? As they begin to sweat, I explain that, as far as my coloring goes, I am Persian and Yemenite. Of course, they beam. Do I know their Persian friend from Los Angeles or from Baltimore or Great Neck? No, I do not. Their face falls. Their disappointment deepens when they learn that my spice tolerance is average (or less), and that I have no particularly raucous or exotic traditions. It doesn’t matter that I pray in the custom of Edot HaMizrach; they’ve opened the cumin jar only to inhale a whiff of Nesquik. I have, in their words, been “ashki-washed.”
I first encountered this term in seminary. Simply, it describes someone who is Sephardi, but who has lost their super-duper flavorful and exotic heritage due to being raised in Ashkenazi environments. In a sense, they’re right. My Persian Saba left Iran as an 8-year-old, and grew up an acculturated Israeli Jew. Although his wife, my Yemenite Savta, speaks Arabic and consumes schug like its peanut butter, all of my aunts and uncles went on to marry Ashkenazim. I have attended Ashkenazi-dominant schools my whole life. I didn’t grow up in a Persian community, the food is foreign to me and I don’t speak a word of Farsi.
But this characterization is also completely wrong. In fact, I am equal parts Ashkenazi and Sephardi. The blood of Litvaks and borscht-eaters flows in my veins. My Bubbie’s roots are Russian and Ukrainian, my Zayda’s are Lithuanian and Romanian. If I am from both an Ashkenazi and Sephardi background, why should I be deemed “ashki-washed”? Perhaps it is intuitive that my Ashkenazi roots would receive less attention. After all, I follow Sephardi halakha, I know countless Middle Eastern melodies for Shabbat zemirot and I look, well, brown. And yet those qualifications are hardly enough to make me immutably Sephardi. In fact, many true, “non-ashkified” Sephardim I have met often possess none of these traits. Especially in the case of women, they are more familiar with the Ashkenazi siddur, and many even appear, at first glance, to be of European descent. Nevertheless, they seem to exude some indefinable something that I don’t. (And from my vantage point at the Sephardi Shabbaton, I think they can tell, too).
To compound my confusion, there are significant geographic, cultural, linguistic and customary differences that make the numerous Sephardic communities distinct. (Just ask the Syrian, Bucharian and Persian Jews who notoriously frown upon “marrying out” into other communities.) What do they all have in common that I so obviously lack? Is it fluency in one shared language? Hardly. Is it a particular philosophical perspective? No, Sepharad produced both Maimonides and Nachmanides, Ibn Ezra and the Arizal. And even if a superstitious sensibility can be found among Sephardic grandmothers, such inquiries are never made before a person is declared “very Sephardi” or “not Sephardi at all.” On further reflection, I believe that in the American Jewish vernacular, “Sephardiness” does not refer to any particular set of customs, traditions or beliefs, but to a metric of non-Americanness.
My family has lived in the United States for six generations, with the earnest Midwestern charm of Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota. My grandparents spent their childhoods participating in NCSY and rockin’ out to the Beatles. (Yeah, I’m talking yeehaw-level American.) Like many of my Ashkenazi friends’ grandparents, they became frum in the seventies. And thus, with every show tune, bad pun and sophisticated vocabulary word my “Sephardiness” is stripped away.
Still, I cannot be half-Ashkenazi; I can only be “ashki-washed.” Why? In short, my Ashkenazi heritage is dismissed because I do not look European, and my Sephardi heritage is clucked at because I am not fresh off the boat.
Just look at the perception of Ashkenazim who are from abroad. A European Jew who only speaks French or Spanish or Hebrew just doesn’t ooze “ashkiness” in the way that a Jew from New Jersey does. We all know it. In fact, Latin-American Jews — the vast majority of whom are of Russian, Polish and German descent — are commonly regarded as having a “Sephardi flavor.” Alas, when I recite tefillot in an Israeli accent and my peers react, “Ooh, how Sephardi!” the calculus is revealed: Ashkenazi is just another word for American; Sephardi is another word for foreign.
Interestingly, Sephardim do not seem perturbed by their being grouped into a single category, and even embrace it. The Sephardi Shabbaton is a big hit at Yeshiva University, Sephardic Jews are proud when they speak of the superiority of “Sephardi cuisine” and the first ever Sephardic Rabbinic Conference took place in 2025. Some might chalk up the adoption of this collective identity to the Ashkenormative conditions of the young State of Israel, in which the lumping together of newly-arrived Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian Jews resulted in the reactionary construction of Mizrachi identity. But I don’t think the term Sephardi is devoid of all intrinsic meaning. Sephardic Jewry boasts an incredibly rich intellectual history and a stunning aesthetic tradition, and the term retains an obvious halakhic significance as well.
Unfortunately, I do not think that that is what Sephardim in Ashkenazi American environments are referring to when speaking about their own identity. This might be a charif (hot) take, but if your version of “Sephardiness” consists of your parents not using American idioms and still speaking fondly of the old country which they had to flee, or that your religious role models are all kabbalists who worship the ground their rabbi walks on, then certain Chassidic sects are more Sephardic than you could ever dream to be. The only difference is that you’ve added some spice.
My lack of Sephardiness is at most a lack of education in philosophy, custom and halakha — not a regrettable lack of “vibes.” Those vibes are an invention. If you know the Sephardic cantorial makamim, have adopted the classical Sephardi approach to learning and deeply understand the vibrant tradition of which you are a part, then in my book you are very Sephardi indeed. And if that is what “very Sephardi” refers to, then it is something which is hardly endangered by a dad joke, or a home-on-the-range American sensibility.
No, I do not believe I have been “ashki-washed.” But America/Israel-washed? Certainly, like the majority of Jews today. If my “Sephardiness” has been watered down at all, it is no more so than my “Ashkenaziness” or that of any of my peers. How much Yiddish do you hear at Young Israel? How many people do you see dancing with bottles on their hats? The circumstances of the past two centuries have “Kibbutz galuyot (ingathering of the exiles)-ified” an entire generation, and that is a beautiful thing. So yes, I will serve malawach and herring at the same brunch. Pizmonim and kumzitz classics, ululations and oy-oy-oys will emerge from my lips in equal measure. And the next time someone shakes their head at the loss of my heritage, I will take a bite of gefilte fish with matbucha and ask them what on earth they mean.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tamara Yeshurun