Resisting Ashkenazi Imperialism

...The subsection on the new Sephardi communities of Canada is the sketchiest, providing almost no details and without any appreciation of the vitality of Montreal's large francophone Jewish community...

...Not least among these are a demographic tilt in favor of the Ashkenazi population and increased economic competition for Sephardim trying to climb the socioeconomic ladder...

...Occasionally, he adopts a certain polemical tone...

...Elazar calls for "a new relationship between Sephardim and Ashkenazim...

...By this he means the policy of Ashkenazi Zionist leaders of "civilizing" the Sephardim at the expense of their rich cultural heritage and causing incalculable damage to their self-esteem and that of their children...

...Future studies of these changes will benefit from this work of Elazar...

...226 pp., $21.95 Reviewed by Yedida Kalfon Stillman As 1992 approaches—the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain—our awareness of that great Jewish culture is magnified- These Jews were the original Sephardim, so-called because sepharad is the Hebrew word for Spain...

...This aliyah of large numbers of educated Ashkenazim has profound implications for future developments of the Sephardi-Ashkenazi encounter in Israel...

...Today, the term is broader, as Daniel Elazar emphasizes in the tide of his book, The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today...

...It is devoted overwhelmingly to New York City, with two smaller sections on Seattle and Los Angeles...

...Numerous smaller communities are relegated to brief notes in an appendix...

...He eschews dividing his "others" into pure Sephardim of Iberian origin and the so-called Oriental communities (edot hamizrach in Hebrew), characterizing such distinctions as an Ashkenazi "cultural put-down...

...Elazar provides a detailed and fascinating account of the Sephardi majority's struggle in Israel to achieve equality by means of their numerical strength in recent elections...

...Their strong identity, their traditionalism and their political activism marked "a radical departure from earlier Jewish patterns" in France...

...For Elazar Sephardim are the "others," those who are not Ashkenazim, or eastern European...

...Elazar is at his best when discussing politics (not too surprising since he is a highly respected political scientist...

...Daniel Elazar has provided a very timely, concise survey of present day Sephardi Jewry worldwide...

...He singles out Israeli establishment figures, like writer Amos Oz and political scientist Shlomo Avineri, for anti-Sephardi stereotyping in articles published in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune...

...She is Sephardi, born in Morocco and raised in Israel...

...In later chapters, he deplores "Ashkenazic imperialism" and the "Ashkenazification of Sephardim...

...He decries what he calls "Zionist triumphalism as Ashkenazification" (typical social science jargon...

...Elazar makes it clear that his purpose is to set the record straight...

...Elazar's book was completed before the present mass exodus of Jews to Israel from the Soviet Union began...

...The bleakness of Jewish life today in the old Sephardi centers of the Balkans and the Moslem countries is contrasted with the revival in France of Jewish life, due primarily to the arrival in the 1950s and 1960s of Sephardi Jews from North Africa...

...However, Elazar notes disturbing trends toward rising intermarriage rates among the younger generation of French Jews of North African extraction...

...Elazar righdy points out that today the dichotomy between western Ashkenazim and eastern or oriental Sephardim "reflect[s] certain assumptions with regard to culture and modernity" on the part of the dominant Israeli establishment and those Jews in the Diaspora who have accepted these assumptions...

...The core of the book surveys Sephardi communities in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas...

...In point of historical fact, the Sephardi world did recognize such divisions, with those of non-Spanish/Portuguese origin being referred to by such terms as toshavim (natives), berteriscos (Berbers), forastems (strangers) and musta'rabim (Arabized...

...He likewise deplores the attitude, all too prevalent among Ashkenazim in the Diaspora as well as in Israel, that traditional Jewish means Eastern European Jewish...

...The chapter on North America is somewhat disappointing...

...Such articles, Elazar argues, "if written about a minority group in the United States, would probably not have gotten past the newspapers' editors, who at the very least would have buried them for fear of being charged with group defamation...

...Yedida Kalfon Stillman is professor of Near Eastern ' studies and director of Judaic studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton...