Creation of Tapestry
Loolwa Khazzoom, editor of The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, has launched a new project called Tapestry, which “provides the tools necessary for community leaders to shift from a limited European Jewish paradigm to one that reflects the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the global Jewish experience.”
Tapestry builds off of Khazzoom’s work in Jewish Multiculturalism, and includes resources from articles to keynotes to workshops on “Jews without Borders” and “The Color of Jews”.
Khazzoom writes for a number of publications, and recently wrote an article entitled, “Who Stole My Judaism?” for the Jewish Independent. You can find this article on JVoices–here’s a taste:
Traditionally, Middle Eastern and African Jewish communities emphasized the concept of chesed, or compassion, over that of mahmir, or strictness. Judaism was a vehicle for joy and celebration, not an instrument of fear and condemnation. One wall around the Torah was enough. We did not need a wall around a wall around a wall.
I have yet to see bigger nonsense. It is the Ashkenazi shtetl people who run liberal Judaism, and the Morrocan shtetl people who do not. This “traditionalism” still exists, except when she stops waxing nostalgic about it – she discovers it is nothing but oppression.
Puh-Lease.
That’s the thing. Askenazers had to invent liberal judaism because Ashkenizism, that is, christianity was so hardcore. Coinicdently, sephardim, much like the muslims around them, stressed active piety less and spoken G-d praise from likeable hearts more.
I’m all for jewish multiculturalism, but, while it may be dominated by people of european ancestry, mainline Jewish “culture” is so little connected to anything resembling actual ashkenasish culture or history that i think there’s a place for a grounded, informed ashkenazic cultural viewpoint within the multicultural voices, instead of seeing it as the hegemonic opressor that needs to be fought against and taken for granted.