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Ruben Shimonov’s hybrid identity as a Bukharian, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jew continuously informs his work as a community builder, educator, and artist. He is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Sephardic Mizrahi Q Network (SMQN), a New York City-based grassroots organization building a vibrant and supportive community for LGBTQ+ Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Between his work with SMQN and the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee, Ruben has designed an innovative interfaith Arabic-Hebrew calligraphy workshop that he has facilitated in numerous community gatherings around the world. 

Interweaving Arabic and Hebrew, Ruben’s multi-sensory calligraphy installations, which include audio, video, performance, and interactive components, create a space for these two Semitic languages to encounter one another in familiar and new ways. Often focusing on cognates, his work explores the ways in which these languages, their complex histories, and their rich ties to spirituality intersect and interact with each other. He also frequently incorporates another West Asian language that is dear to his identity— Farsi. 

“veyasem lekha shalom” - “May G-d grant you peace”

Passages about the city of Bukhara, taken from the classical Persian poetry of Rudaki and Rumi- ‎

“oh Bukhara! be joyous and live long! your king comes to you in ceremony.” (Rudaki)

“Bukhara was a mine of knowledge, of Bukhara is he who possesses knowledge.” (Rumi)

A verse from Shir Hashirim (the Song of Songs) - “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” in Hebrew and Arabic.

“eshq” - “Love” in Farsi

A verse from Pirkei Avot - “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”

“ani” / “ana” - The pronoun “I” in Hebrew and Arabic

The Jewish name “Miryam" and its corresponding verse from Mishlei (Proverbs) - “The light of the eyes makes the heart happy, and good news fattens the bone.”

Above: "bri’ut” - “Health” 

Below: “gam ze ya’avor” / “in niz bogzarad” - “This too shall pass” in Hebrew and Farsi

Two appropriate wishes for the world this season.

Ruben Shimonov is a Jewish educator and community builder living in New York City, by way of Seattle and Uzbekistan. Prior to establishing SMQN, he was the Director of Community Engagement & Education at Queens College Hillel. Ruben has lectured extensively on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry, including at Limmud conferences in New York, Seattle and the U.K. He serves as Vice-President of Education & Community Engagement on the American Sephardic Federation's Young Leadership Board, as well as Director of Educational Experiences & Programming for the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee (MJSC). His calligraphy (linked here) has been featured in various exhibitions across New York City.

Photo collage by Sophie Levy

Italics from The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds by Yehuda Amichai

You don’t like smoking in other cities. You take pleasure in buying Friday morning figs from the same spot your tongue first met the lips of someone you would later love, your bodies pressed against graffiti on the shuttered market door in the night. You forgot the names of boys too religious to kiss you in the alleys that smell like fish on ice. The main roads are arteries of an old Eastern heart and the Shabbat crowd sweeps you in like a transfusion. Counting almonds in a bag, you bump into the woman who taught you, seven-thousand miles ago, the word shaked. In che tarzeh harf zadaneh? How could you speak this way?

two tastes / that didn't know each other and became one in our mouth. / And over  the cafe door, next to the sky, it said: / "Not Responsible for Items Forgotten or Lost."

Olive pits in your fist, these memories, plucked from someone else’s tree. An uncle's house with samovar whistling in the kitchen. The clock hands of youth turning so you felt new on each arrival. Shuttered walls that fell open as they raised you. New families moved into your uncle’s house. Their children will kiss in alleys. Tell me again this is not my exile, tell me again I was raised only where I was born.

But where exactly? As in a children's game: / cold, colder, getting warm, warmer, hot, right there. / What shall we do with that old story now, in our own day? / One generation handed it down to the next in the synagogue reading

You can swallow words like “generational trauma” and grow olive trees in your stomach. Dream deferred, memories displaced, fig dried in the sun. Diaspora grew legs, crossed borders with forged papers. The city handed you a suitcase from Tehran with your last name on it and unpacking will take many lifetimes. Anyone can make memories seem like a wet portrait. Drag your finger through my poem, I dare you.

lovers leave fingerprints on each other / plenty of physical evidence, words without end, testimonies, a wrinkled / pair of pants, a newspaper with the exact date, and two watches

The olives are making marks in your palm, chewed dry. You tried to bury them and they called it planting. Where will you put them down? Where can you? Where?

hands severed, hair ripped out, a gash where the mouth used to be / and demanded

what was theirs, theirs, theirs

It’s been a week since we got back from PAX West 2019, and I am finally recovered enough to write about our experience for any Bloom fans who were not able to attend (and maybe some BTS fun stuff for those who were.) This was only our second PAX ever after PAX East earlier this year, but I still feel comfortable saying it was our best event ever. We took some steps to make our lives a bit easier this time around, including ordering equipment from the venue and getting some local friends to help us work the booth. The Werthers candies still made an appearance.

Let’s get to the highlights:

#InstagranYourself photobooth

A new idea we brought with us this time was having a photobooth setup with costumes for people to dress up as an old person, in exchange for a Later Daters pin. People were all about it the role playing, and not just for the free goods. Our favourite part was how many people dressed up over their cosplay outfits – cosplay on cosplay! Here are some honorable mentions for people who were really the living, breathing embodiment of the Later Daters vibe.

Seattle is Thrift Store Mecca ft. the Switch Rocker

In Boston, we had to hit a few stores to find what we liked to decorate our booth in senior citizen-style. In Seattle, however, we found the largest Goodwill I had ever seen in my life. We didn’t take any time at all snatching up furniture, costumes and a curtain backdrop for the photobooth. Our favourite find was a white wooden rocking chair that we dubbed our “Switch Rocker.” Our only regret was that we couldn’t take it home with us, but a lovely Seattle local got to take it home to enjoy.

Great Big Table Read

Another new idea we came up with was hosting the “Great Big Table Read” panel. We partnered up with fellow visual novel games Monster Prom, Boyfriend Dungeon, Arcade Spirits, and The Window Box to get a group of stellar voice actors to read out the various characters. The voice actors we had really knocked it out of the park, and brought Later Daters to life. We are hoping to post a full video of the event in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, here is a very bad and also not good video I took at the panel during the read for Later Daters.

Meeting Later Daters of All Ages!

People young and old came to play Later Daters, and we really loved seeing the game resonate with a diverse audience. We especially loved meeting the subject matter experts who were able to play the game.

General Later Daters love

The most heartwarming part of the event is that after the first few days, more and more people stopping by the booth told us they heard about us from another attendee or at another panel event. It certainly seems Seattle has a healthy appetite for quirky and queer-friendly dating sims. We even got a shout out on Twitter from the PAX keynote speaker Gary Whitta, who partook in our photobooth and that resulted in this gem.

When I try to imagine Iran, I end up recalling memories from my grandmother’s apartment more clearly than any image of the actual place. There’s homemade khoresht, compositions by Lachini and Rohani, my grandmother’s embrace when I walk through her screen door.

What I can see now, at her apartment, are two plates hanging vertically on the wall. Their edges are ridged, they soothe. When I recall her old house where I spent my childhood, I see their undulating blue shapes in the same way: amongst the voices of my family, overlapping into noise, they are anchored, distinct from all things temporary or unimportant, calling for silence and true consideration. For as long as I can remember, their color has struck me as peaceful, regal, and demanding of my attention.

Persian blue.

I always wondered why the color blue got assigned to sadness, or reflection, but I remember the ocean and the sky and I get small again—get context—and understand it more. Oh, he’s feeling blue. My grandma, sitting at the head of the table, tells me the sky and the sea are different where she grew up. 

I understand how blue changes depending on landscape and psyche. I see how different groups of people make what they want out of the life before them, make what they need out of symbols, colors, events. Persian blue is not the treacherous sea or the fear of nightfall, Persian blue is the hills in the spring, coated in an auspicious, life-cannot-be-better coat of cool morning mist, an absence of fear. Persian blue is something to keep close, something to pray for, something to pass down to loved ones. It gives royalty to common people, it balances and connects us. My grandfather is from Esfahan, and that’s where the plates were made.

There’s something musical about the design of the plates, too—the symbols encircling upon themselves, their heart-clenching and hypnotic lure. The curved pattern almost resembles an arrangement of bass clefs. Minakari is practice of enameling these designs onto plates. The curvature and cool hue of the forms on the plate makes them look like they were drawn from the flowers that glaze the green hills of Iran in the spring. The minakari hums a melody from the past, hums the blooming of aster flowers after a cold season. A reminder of something overwhelmingly good, of home.

I remember going to a concert this year where the audience got to know each other before the show. We all shared our favorite colors. My favorite was purple. We were all sharing our favorite colors and it just so happened that all the blues were sitting near each other already. Despite being strangers, they reclined in comfort as they sat criss-cross applesauce, knowing that the people in their proximity were less strange now. They could lean into their blueness together, grinning at the coincidence.

My family dinners might feel the same. All of us with the Persian blue in the cavities of our memory, stuffed into the tranquil period before rushed transitions and adjustments and foreign languages, the Persian blue wafts and sings like a dream. The plates hang to remind us of some kind of motherland, even for those like me who have no memory for reference. I can see what they see, through the spindling flowers engraved into stone. We meditate on them. We find peace through them, because of them, in spite of their taunting song of a reality we might never see again. We choose hope, for here.

view the accompanying documentary photography series following the essay

“What exactly are you trying to capture? Which community? There just isn’t such a thing as Mizrahi,” my interviewee told me shortly. He had a point; what on earth was I trying to document?

Being of mixed Moroccan and Adeni heritage and having attended Jewish schools in London all my life, I became very much aware of the erasure of Mizrahi and Sephardic Judaism in the public realm. Jewish studies at school were conducted around an Ashkenazi-centric reading of history that began in Warsaw and ended with the Khurva synagogue in Jerusalem. Israeli Independence Day was celebrated with Klezmer music in the auditorium and dry falafel for lunch.

Mizrahi histories and cultures have been sacrificed at the altar of a collective Jewish imagination. That is to say-- our understanding of Judaism and Jewish memory is always conducted through the Ashkenazi experience, by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Ashkenazi label has become the default face of Judaism and Jewishness, and consequently is often found interchangeably replaced with just “Jewish.” Non-Ashkenazi cultures, in comparison, are hyphenated, asterisked, and put in boxes-- if not shelved entirely.

Perhaps that’s why heading to Israel to document Mizrahim proved to be my own Mizrahi education. I was confronted by the fact that my understanding, despite seeing myself as well versed in Mizrahi history, was coloured by my experience as a Mizrahi in the UK. Ashkenormativity alienates Mizrahim everywhere, but in Israel there is an entire political and social commentary surrounding this subject that often feels absent in the West.

When my interviewee asserted to me that there’s no such thing as “Mizrahi,” he was technically right. Mizrahiness is what professor Ella Shohat referred to as an “imagined community” borne of interactions with Ashkenazi Israel that ethnicised Mizrahi Jews.

So vast is the cultural, linguistic and geographic space that Mizrahi groups occupy that no single aspect could be said to be the unifying factor between them. Neither as followers of the Sephardic rite - Yemenite Jewry proving an exception to that - nor as hailing from a geographic East – for example in the case of North African Jews - and neither in a common lingua franca, like Yiddish for Ashkenazi Jewry.

Rather its formation merely owes itself to the fact that as Jews hailing from Islamic majority places, they endured a shared destiny as non-Ashkenazi Jews in an Ashkenazi state. They went from simply being Jews in their countries of origin to being Mizrahim in Israel.

There are many things to consider while photographing a subject as vast as Mizrahi identity. I had to account for the variation within it in my work, so I held many interviews across the country, with Mizrahim of all stars and stripes and all walks of life, in an attempt to better understand how to capture Mizrahiness.

When I asked my interviewees to point me towards what they considered as Mizrahi, I was told repeatedly to “go to the periphery”.  The simple reason being that in the Israeli “periphery-” the localities of the north and south historical “frontiers” that lay outside the economically prosperous stretch of Israel’s central belt cities, I was to find “authentic” Mizrahiness like it “used to be.” Supposedly, unlike the residents of the Gush Dan metropolitan area, the inhabitants of this stretch of land were not altered by “modernity”.

In this assertion, the interviewees implied (perhaps unconsciously) that Mizrahi traditions and modernity could not be reconciled. The subtext was that to be “authentically” Mizrahi meant to exist outside of modern society. Aside from the fact that the quest for cultural authenticity is futile, many had used the same orientalist tropes that have historically been used to reduce Mizrahim to exotic folklore at odds with modernity.

Such a notion is as old as Zionism itself, which initially relegated historic Mizrahi and Sephardi communities in Eretz Yisrael outside of an Ashkenazi reading of history. A Jewish “return” to a “land without a people” was fundamentally an Ashkenazi return that refused to recognise that a society of Jews and non-Jews alike already existed in historic Palestine.

Likewise, the Ashkenazi establishment belief that Mizrahim were “primitive” and “backward” ultimately led to the disastrous housing policies of the 1950s and 1960s that forcibly placed Mizrahim across volatile front-line borders and empty desert expanses, on the basis that their supposed naturally “primitive state” could withstand living in such harsh conditions without modern comforts and standards.  

Those spaces that Mizrahim settled in became the Israeli periphery of today, which remains etched into the minds of many, including those I interviewed, as spaces outside of modernity.

And yet there is something to be said for the “periphery” as a space that has protected Mizrahi identities and cultures. Particularly when the outskirts of Ashkenazi population centres are also taken into consideration- for instance, Tel Aviv’s southern districts or Jerusalem’s Musrara and Katamonim neighborhoods. These Mizrahi-majority areas served as incubators of a new ethnoreligious identity in Israel.

Mizrahi settlement in the ma’abarot (transit camps) and then in the moshavim (agricultural communes) and development towns that replaced them resulted in historic cultural and societal upheavals.

A break from the Mizrahi past in the diaspora was signaled on two levels, firstly, in Mizrahi settlers’ interactions with their new co-inhabitants that hailed from across the Muslim world; and secondly, in their interactions with the structures of Israel’s Ashkenazi-dominated bureaucracy- through its education system, the military, the employment service and so forth. These interactions took place against the backdrop of Mizrahi isolation from their countries of origin, given the lack of diplomatic ties between Israel and many Islamic and Arab states. The result of this discord is that successive generations of Mizrahim have been raised in a reality where their cultures have gone from being part of a two-millennia-old conversation with the broader region they inhabited to being relegated to the private spheres of home and synagogue within a culturally ‘western’ society.

It is precisely within these interactions with the state and against this backdrop of isolation that a new Mizrahi identity had begun to form on the margins of Israeli society. The subsequent result was an intra-Mizrahi conversation that has resulted in everything from a political consciousness to the birth of Mizrahit - a musical genre rooted in the experience of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

One of the most apparent symbols of this cultural development is the modern Mizrahi attitude toward pre-wedding henna ceremonies: rituals that many interviewees had told me to avoid capturing for its lack of “authenticity” and as a worn cliché of Mizrahiness.

I shadowed henna planners and tagged along with them to wedding halls and synagogue basements across the country. Each time, I was greeted to a scene that evoked equal feelings of dismay and fascination. Hennas were conducted according to Moroccan cookie-cutter templates regardless of whether the participants were actually Moroccan or not.

I was told that the general gravitation toward the Moroccan tradition arose from the “fun costumes” and “lively atmosphere.” As the second largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel, Moroccans undoubtedly have left their mark on the nation’s collective cultural imagination. But the Moroccan way is also attractive, as one event planner pointed out to me, because many families want to host a henna ceremony but simply don’t know where to begin, as so many traditions were lost in the course of immigration and assimilation into Israeli society.

The modern resurgence of the henna ceremony owes itself to a growing movement of Mizrahi expression in Israel -- one that is increasingly vocal and unabashedly shameless. Yet it still reflects the literal Hebrew meaning of the word mizrah (east). It’s as though Mizrahiness is precisely just that - a smorgasbord of the East.  

I witnessed a Moroccan-Yemeni couple split their ceremony in half allocating equal time to conduct a Moroccan henna and the Yemeni equivalent, a za’afa. I saw an Ashkenazi mother-in-law sitting in Moroccan dress at her Persian soon-to-be daughter-in-law’s henna, while the Persian grandmother sang in Farsi to the mixed crowd. I directed and photographed a henna photo shoot for a wedding magazine with sexed-up traditional dress. I witnessed things that can only be called pan-Mizrahi.

The act of carrying out a henna is perhaps one of the greatest testimonies to the perseverance of Mizrahi cultures and the simultaneous formation of something new. Hennas today pay tribute to a diasporic past that Israel’s founding fathers wanted forgotten in their quest for a Jewish Israeli national consciousness; they boldly pine for a different, newer Israeli identity, one better rooted in its geocultural neighbourhood.

In many ways, that pan-Mizrahi conversation is the closest resemblance to the vision of the unsung essayist, Jacqueline Kahanoff. Kahanoff was a French-educated Egyptian writer of Jewish Iraqi and Tunisian descent who proudly declared herself a Levantine when Israeli statesmen warned of the social and cultural “perils” that such an assertion could bring to Israeli society.  In her essays, Kahanoff asserted that Israel should do its best to view waves of Jewish migration as an opportunity to formulate a new Levantine identity- one that emphasised integration with the region’s Arab communities. She named her philosophy Levantinism, and it is for her series of essays outlining this vision that this project is named.

While Kahanoff’s ideal has not necessarily come to fruition in Israel, a form of Levantinism has arguably manifested amongst Mizrahim.

On my journey, I also headed to a number of Israel’s heritage centres; small memorial-like independent museums that preserve the memory and traditions of Jewish communities from Aden to Kochi. A forty-minute bus ride from Tel Aviv takes you to the town of Or Yehuda, where both the Libyan Heritage Centre and the Babylonian Heritage Centre for Iraqis are found, separated only by a small stretch of road. The former, unlike the latter, is more austere and modest in appearance, but both heritage centres make an avid point of retrofitting Libyan and Iraqi Jewish histories within the Zionist narrative. Both heritage centres emphasised Jewish persecution under Arab Muslim rule and Mizrahi loyalty to the Zionist movement.

I was given a tour around the Libyan Heritage Centre by a guide who spoke of her own family’s suffering in the overlooked Libyan Holocaust. Few are aware that Libya, under Italian colonial rule, hosted the Giado concentration camp in which 562 Jews perished.

My guide relayed a real sense of frustration at Israeli society’s marginalisation of the Holocaust chapters that affected Jews in North Africa and the Balkans. “Why? Because we didn’t lose enough people?” she asked me.

Recognition of the Holocaust that blighted the Libyan community is a historical wrong that needs addressing. Its prevalence today is reflected in the fact that, in Israel, Holocaust remembrance has all the trappings of a civic religion. The memory of the Holocaust and the narrative of the Ashkenazi Zionist “pioneer” were core facets of Israeli identity building and the development of a collective national memory, and it is precisely due to the centrality of both such narratives in the Israeli national pantheon (at the expense of others) that Mizrahim have long felt shut out.

In the heritage center, as we toured countless rooms of wax figures clothed in regional Libyan dress, my guide reiterated the fundamental contribution of Libyan Jews to the Zionist movement, stopping by a series of black and white photographs to discuss Libyan involvement with Zionist youth groups. The role of Libyans in such groups was emphasized throughout the tour. Furthermore, the reiteration of Mizrahim as ardent Zionists was relayed to me in most of the heritage centres I visited and by many second-generation Mizrahim.

The centrality of the Ashkenazi “pioneer” to Israel’s founding story and the Mizrahi erasure within it have left successive generations of Mizrahim striving to be seen as equal partners in the Zionist project. It is that feeling of exclusion in particular, as many interviewees explained to me, that constitutes the origins of stereotypes like the Mizrahi vote for right-wing parties or the Mizrahi person who holds hawkish anti-Arab sentiments. The stereotypes echo the same historical processes that forced Mizrahim to prove themselves as loyal Israelis and to emphatically differentiate themselves from Arabs.

The desire to be written in as equals in the story of Israel’s founding is understandable; Mizrahim did partake in some of the most grueling aspects of state building. However, at the end of the day, the Zionist project was conceived as an Ashkenazi response to European antisemitism.

Devoid of the urgencies that Ashkenazi Jews faced in Europe, Zionism was unable to take root in the Arab world to the same effect. Members of the older generation, for the most part, were comfortable and secure in their homelands. In 1940s Iraq, for example, Zionist emissaries wrote of their despair in Iraqi Jews’ lacking resonance with Zionism. Zionism’s entrance into the Arab world was via the youth, offering Hebrew language classes and opportunities for the young to socialise, and even then only very modest numbers decided to immigrate as a result of Zionist ideals.

Rather, the reasons behind Mizrahi migration and flight are as complex as they are varied, taking place over a long period, from 1949-1979,  continuing well into the 1990s. While state-sponsored discrimination was evident in Iraq in the late 1940s, it was the bombing of the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in 1951 -  suspected by some to be the work of the Zionist underground -  that truly propelled migration. In the case of the Moroccan Aliyot of the 1960s, Jewish emigration owed itself largely to the efforts of Zionist emissaries able to monopolise on the widespread uncertainty over the future following decolonisation and the Arab-Israeli conflicts, as well as genuine religious devotion. In Yemen, immigration owed itself to Messianic fervour and dire economic straits. And in some places, the reason for departure was explained to me as simply as “everyone was leaving, so we did as well.”

And yet the battle over Mizrahi memory continues. The same year of my arrival in Israel, the government declared the first Memorial Day for “the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran” on November 30th.  Mizrahi activists in Tel Aviv explained to me that such a holiday effectively rewrote history, asserting a single, rather than accurately pluralistic, narrative of Mizrahi flight and persecution. In doing so it pushes the idea of a “Jewish Nakba” which acts as a sinister counterweight to Palestinian displacement, while simultaneously asserting to Mizrahim that the key to being equal partners in Israel’s national memory is only through a narrative of eternal victimhood.

At the end of Passover, I headed to the Moroccan-majority development town of Yeruham to witness a “proper Mimouna.” I was enticed by the Moroccan pride I saw on display, moving between houses where front doors were left open for people to come and join. I was able to witness the essence of a Mimouna I thought lost in Israel’s big cities, warmed by the genuine hospitality of open doors that could only stay unlocked in a trusting environment.

The desert air and the individuals I met left me with a feeling that I had to return and spend a lengthier period in Yeruham. And so I did. I quit my part-time job, packed my bag, and headed down south in a move that baffled many people around me as I followed those endless cries:

“Go to the periphery.”

Adi Keissar, poet and founder of Ars Poetika, a Mizrahi and female-friendly poetic space in a field traditionally dominated by Ashkenazi men. Kerem-ha-Teimanim, Tel Aviv, 2015.

Interviewees in a Moshav Yinon, a Yemenite-majority agricultural village in central Israel, 2015.

My great-uncle Moshe Meshumar. He was part of the Shubelim band, one of the earliest players in the formation of Mizrahit music, a genre that combined electric guitars with Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Yemenite elements sung in Hebrew. Shabazi, Tel Aviv, 2015.

Girls dressed up at a Moroccan henna ceremony. East Jerusalem, 2014.

A Moroccan pre-wedding henna ceremony. East Jerusalem, 2014.

A bride wears the Tishbakh lulu (originally of the Sana'a region) and is accompanied to the hall for her pre-wedding za'afa, a ceremony comparable to the Moroccan henna. Binyamina, 2015.

A bride's grandmother sings to her at a Persian henna celebration. Rishon Le Zion, 2015.

A photoshoot for a henna fashion magazine. Ramla, 2015.

Libyan Heritage Centre, Or Yehuda, 2015.

Or Yehuda, 2015.

Ohel Moshe Yemenite syangogue, Moshav Yinon, 2015.

Women pray at the Baba Saleh Tomb. Netivot, 2016.

Beit Shemesh, 2014.