Mijal Bitton responds to letters about “The Future Is Sephardic”

My recent essay “The Future Is Sephardic” seems to have struck a nerve—and the conversation it has generated, including these three thoughtful responses, is exactly what I hoped for.

With one exception, none of my respondents dispute the core goods I’m arguing for—reinvesting in the Jewish family as the primary site of Jewish identity, building communal boundaries around peoplehood, cultivating a less self-conscious spiritual life, and nourishing a Jewish self-confidence independent of external approbation.

Zemmol’s critique cuts deepest, so let me be direct: He’s right that I shouldn’t essentialize, which is why I referred to the Ashkenazi-Sephardic binary I drew as “admittedly provocative and exaggerated.” But his objection goes further—it implicitly questions whether group-level cultural patterns are meaningful at all, and whether the behaviors I describe are distinctively Sephardic rather than broadly Jewish. Here I’ll push back. Sociology and cultural anthropology rest on exactly this premise: that we can identify meaningful trends within groups without claiming every individual conforms to them, or that other groups cannot share the same traits.

There is substantial data showing that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from Muslim-majority countries—whether they settled in America, Israel, or elsewhere—trend toward higher forms of communal collectivity compared with Ashkenazi Jews, including the kinds of behavioral patterns and attitudes I would characterize as following the logic of family. That’s not essentialism; it’s sociology. These patterns weren’t innate; they developed because of the particular circumstances of Jews living under the crescent rather than the cross. And yes, they’re available to any Jew willing to embrace them. That is precisely my hope.

Rabbi Kraus offers a corrective that is really an extension. Synthesis over replacement—absolutely. Synagogues like his that host both Ashkenazi and Sephardic minyanim under one roof may be exactly the kind of infrastructure in which the selective cultural appropriation I’m advocating could be genuinely tested.

Levin’s challenge takes on one of the four reforms that I’ve called for. He’s right that “thicker skin” risks letting bigots off the hook. I don’t and won’t pretend otherwise. But I’d push back on his remedy. He wants us to rebuild moral taboos and refuse to normalize the unacceptable. I share that aspiration. But our skin has been getting thinner for decades, and it hasn’t deterred a single antisemite. Campus administrators, UN resolutions, cultural gatekeepers—none have been moved by our outrage. What I’m calling for isn’t stoic silence or tolerance of bigotry. It’s the refusal to let their contempt determine our self-worth. A community rooted in family, memory, and peoplehood can fight back harder—precisely because it isn’t fighting to be liked. Thicker skin and moral clarity aren’t opposites. We need both.

What gives me hope is that all three respondents agree on the diagnosis: American Jewish life needs to reorient around family, peoplehood, and the kind of internal confidence that doesn’t collapse when the surrounding culture turns hostile. Call it Sephardic, call it something else—if we agree on the direction, dayenu. It is that shared inheritance—not the label—that I’m fighting for.