Jonathan Zemmol responds to Mijal Bitton on “The Future Is Sephardic”
To the Editor:
I typically agree with Dr. Bitton 120 percent. Her scholarship is invaluable, and her voice is essential in American Jewish discourse. It pains me to write this letter, but I feel compelled when I believe she gets something fundamentally wrong.
By framing her argument around Ashkenazi versus Sephardic paradigms, Bitton has undermined what could have been a powerful thesis about Jewish communal resilience. Instead of focusing on actual communal attributes—family-centeredness, institutional boundaries around peoplehood, embodied spirituality, and internal confidence—she’s wedded these insights to ethnic categories that play into the very stereotypes that have plagued our people for generations.
The well-worn canard that Ashkenazim prioritize assimilation while Sephardim value preservation isn’t just reductive—it’s historically false. Syrian Jewish insularity in Brooklyn developed in America, not medieval Damascus. Persian Jews in Los Angeles have pursued the very elite institutional validation Bitton critiques. Hasidic communities (which Bitton mentions almost in passing) exhibit precisely the “Sephardic” characteristics she champions, yet they’re thoroughly Ashkenazi. The communal orientations she describes don’t map cleanly onto geography or ethnicity—they map onto choices about Jewish continuity.
More troublingly, this binary reinforces destructive intra-Jewish divisions at precisely the moment we need unity. When Bitton writes that “the next century must be Sephardic,” she inadvertently suggests that one Jewish community must triumph over another rather than that all Jews might benefit from certain communal practices. This gets us nowhere.
The real question isn’t whether we become “more Sephardic” but whether American Jews—regardless of origin—will prioritize family transmission over institutional outsourcing, peoplehood boundaries over radical inclusivity, embodied practice over intellectualized distance, and internal confidence over external validation. These are choices available to any Jewish community willing to make them.
Bitton’s four reforms are genuinely valuable. But they didn’t need ethnic branding. By tying them to Sephardic identity rather than to communal choices that transcend ethnic origin, she’s made it harder for the very Ashkenazi Jews she hopes to reach to embrace these practices without feeling they’re abandoning their own heritage.
Our shared Jewish values—ahavat Yisrael, commitment to am Yisrael, reverence for tradition, and confidence in our covenant—belong to all of us. Let’s focus on strengthening those bonds rather than perpetuating divisions that serve no one.