April 2026 Book Review

Aviva Ben-Ur. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

By Rich Robinson

Although Aviva Ben-Ur’s enlightening book is already fifteen years old, it is still entirely relevant, perhaps now more than ever. This is not exactly a history of Sephardim in the diaspora. More exactly, it is a history of how Sephardim in America have been marginalized, neglected, looked down upon and simultaneously exalted, and excluded from the larger Ashkenazic Jewish community over the past century or so.

Aviva Ben-Ur teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora. She raises the question whether, at only 4% of the American Jewish population, this subcommunity merits attention. Indeed it does, says Ben-Ur, for by shining a spotlight on the Sephardim, we can learn a lot about other Jews as well.

“Other Jews.” And thereby lies the rub. Sephardic Jews in America have hailed from various backgrounds: there are “Western” Sephardim, those whose ancestors escaped the persecutions of medieval Spain and Portugal; “Eastern” Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire (in which Ashkenazic Jewish lived as well) and points further east. Customs, languages (Ladino and Arabic, primarily), food, behavior, all varied.

Yet they all were often excluded socially and organizationally from what was considered to be “Jewish” life. Most Jews today can probably roll out the terms Ashkenazic and Sephardic when asked to describe the two main divisions of world Jewry. Alas, American Sephardim routinely have been—and still are, judging from contemporary accounts of the Jewish people—“the Jews who weren’t there” (from the Introduction and throughout).

Not only weren’t they “there”—not with their non-Yiddish languages, their “looks,” their cuisine—but they came under suspicion by Ashkenazim as not even being Jewish at all, certainly not “real” Jews. This phenomenon the author calls “coethnic recognition failure.” The irony, Ben-Ur points out, is that many of the negative characteristic ascribed by Ashkenazim to Sephardim were characteristic of Ashkenazim themselves. But such is the way of prejudice.

Chapter 1 of Sephardic Jews in America highlights what it means to be an ethnic group vis-à-vis a race vis-à-vis a social grouping. In chapter 2 the author explores the rise of the Sephardic accent in reading and speaking Hebrew. Chapter 3 delves into the relations between Eastern and Western Sephardim; chapter 4, the relations, or lack thereof, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim; and chapter 5, the “embrace” of Sephardim by the non-Jewish Hispanic community, including a look at the phenomenon of (alleged) crypto-Jews that has surfaced in the American Southwest. A concluding chapter and an appendix on non-Ashkenazic demographics in the U.S. finishes the book.

Though focused on America, the conclusion notes the importance of placing things in a global framework. It is suggested that non-Ashkenazic Australians in Sydney could be a fruitful point of comparison, along with the mostly Mizrahi demographic of France.

There are undoubtedly larger implications that could be drawn out for the nature of inter-communal interaction across many ethnic and social groupings, not only Jewish ones. Further, there is cause to reflect on how the ideal unity of all Jews of all places and times runs squarely up against the reality of daily, embodied Jewish life. While Ben-Ur also shows that all has not been doom and gloom—there have been collaborative efforts between Sephardim and Ashkenazim—life on the ground has often skewed more negatively than not. Sephardic Jews in America is well worth your time, and will surely offer lessons for those in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.