How I became a TSF

How I Became a Traditional Sephardi Feminist

Part I

I was born to an American Haredi family; the eldest daughter; followed by a smattering of brothers. The sisters came later; already after the outsider sense was cemented in me; a girl among boys in a highly gender segregated society. Thus the frame was laid early for both for the sense of outsiderness; the sense of otherness.

The outsider complex didn’t start with me. My father was the only sephardi in town. He married married my mother, learned yiddish, learned to speak hebrew with a yiddish accent and received a prestigious Ashkenazi Rabbinical ordination. No matter how Ashkenazi he became; my father always felt different. He announced his difference too, although in small ways; when called to the Torah he always pronounced the blessings in his childhood sephardic accent. I felt it too; my grandparents didn’t speak yiddish, were more moderately religious, had different accents, different clothes, different food. I adopted my fathers hebrew as my own instead of my school hebrew.  

Then the Israelis came. Despite having family in Israel, we pretty soon realized that we didn’t fit in with them either, although as sephardim we were all supposed to be the same. We learned that for them, their mizrahi identity was bound up in a narrative of socioeconoomic discrimination and marginalization, not only cultural marginalization as ours had been. we had never been subject to an ashkenazi ruling class as they had- only to a non jewish one, alongside the Ashkenazim.We were middle class- in culture if not in means- and they were working class. We were intellectual; they were materialistic. And we were fair, while they were swarthy. I found myself longing for that tan tinted skin. It seemed to provide a sense of certainty; of belonging. Interestingly, they never looked at us as other; they hung about our place as if we were long lost brothers and I think it never occured to them that our sephardi-american narrative was different than their mizrahi-israeli one. To be continued