Culture

The Tora enjoins the Israelites upon their entrance into the Land of Israel to love the stranger—36 times. Moses gives the people a historical context to this commandment, he reminds them to love or in some instances to not oppress the stranger “for you were a stranger in the land of Egypt.” This thread of…

…fleeing the Inquisition a Sephardic merchant, bag locked in one elbow, crouched by a Lisbon dock, and in that position was reborn in the New World: Lima; Curaçao. The topic of Black-Jewish relations and their literary representation has rarely been addressed outside of a twentieth-century U.S. framework. Despite both the geographical breadth and historical depth…

“Having had the affairs of this community, may God protect it, neglected and [since we are] desiring to adopt and imitate the good conditions of the communities of our brethren of Europe, the notables and majority of this community have been invited to attend a general Junta [assembly] ….” This is extracted from the opening…

In 1778, Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado of Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America, took justice into his own hands. Three years earlier, Prado had been convicted of verbally insulting the sexual virtue of various Jewish women. One of these was Ribca de la Parra, widow of Selomoh de la Parra, described variably as a “white…

Many would argue that Middle Eastern and North African Jewish culture is having a moment. Dishes like sabiḥ and shakshuka are gracing menus around the globe and musicians like Dudu Tassa and Riff Cohen are gaining praise for their fresh takes on traditional Middle Eastern and North African sounds. Many Ashkenazi Jews don’t bat an…

Jews have lived in Iran since the Babylonian exile, approximately 2,700 years ago. A result of the harsh rhetoric between Israel, the Jewish homeland, and Iran—especially since 1979—has been the masking of the fact that the largest Jewish community in the Middle East, outside of Israel, is the Iranian Jewish community. These Jews, unlike Soviet…