Differences between Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews have come sharply into focus since Zohran Mamdani became mayor. In the greater New York City area, 10% of Jews identify as Mizrahi or Sephardic, two groups that report stronger connections to Israel and more conservative political views than Ashkenazi Jews, according to a new national study.

Aaron Cohen, a Moroccan Jew raised in Venezuela, and a New York City–based financial adviser, said, “I think it will be hard to find Sephardic Jews who voted for Mamdani because of how important Israel is to us.” For us, he said, “there is no divide between being against Israel and antisemitism.” He added that many in these communities who escaped socialist countries are also wary of Mamdani’s democratic socialist policies.

Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews arrived in the United States between the 1950s and 1990s, often fleeing openly anti-Jewish regimes and socialist regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. While some were able to immigrate to the U.S., many found that their only viable refuge was Israel, under the Law of Return, which grants every Jew the right to Israeli citizenship.

“Sephardic Jews are very Zionistic, because the state of Israel changed our lives,” Cohen said. “A lot of Jews from Morocco were saved by the fact that they were able to go to Israel. The same was true for Iranian Jews, Egyptian Jews, and so on.”

According to the study, conducted for JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, 31% of Mizrahi Jews and 28% of Sephardic Jews in the U.S. hold Israeli citizenship, compared with just 5% of Ashkenazi Jews. And 80% of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews say they feel somewhat or very emotionally connected to Israel, compared with 69% of Ashkenazi Jews.

Mamdani has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel and identifies as anti-Zionist. He has repeatedly stated Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, but rather “as a state with equal rights.” An Anti-Defamation League report from December found that 20% of Mamdani’s administrative appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups.

Those positions land poorly in these communities where, for many, Israel functioned as a lifeline. Ralph Betesh, a 22-year-old Syrian Jew from Midwood, described the Syrian Jewish community in New York, the city’s largest Sephardic community, as “super, super pro-Israel.” Before the election, he said, “In every Syrian group chat, they were sending things like, ‘Please everyone, go register to vote. This is crucial. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime election,’” Batesh said. “Even in shul, they would urge people to go vote.”

The primarily Syrian congregation Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, one of the largest Sephardic synagogues in North America, sent a letter to congregants before the High Holidays stating that to attend services, one must show proof of voter registration. While the synagogue did not endorse a specific candidate, the letter warned of “a very serious danger that can affect all of us.”

Memories  of persecution and socialism 

For Yisrael Cohen-Vásquez, a 21-year-old Lebanese, Iranian, Spanish, and Moroccan Jew who grew up in Buenos Aires and moved to New York at 13, the intensity of the reaction is rooted in the proximity of persecution. “The pogroms that happened to us are as recent as the 1990s,” he said. “This is not generational trauma. This is my parents’ trauma that I grew up listening to.”

Michael Anwarzadeh, an Iraqi Jew from Manhattan, expressed a similar view. “We understand, Iraqis, what having someone who is anti-Jewish in power means,” he said. “I can say that because my parents lived through it. I grew up listening to them, and I learned those lessons.”

Cohen-Vásquez is particularly alarmed by Mamdani’s recent decision to revoke the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lift restrictions on boycotts of Israel. “All these policies that are being changed are exactly what was introduced to Mizrahi communities in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “These were the indicators, the litmus tests, for the beginning of the pogroms.”

Beyond concerns over antisemitism and Jewish safety, Cohen-Vásquez said his family’s experiences “whether Lebanese, Argentinian, or Iranian” have also made him deeply skeptical of Mamdani’s “socialist policies.”

That perspective, he added, has often left him feeling misunderstood when sharing his views with Ashkenazi peers. “I feel like I had to defend myself and explain my family story,” Cohen-Vásquez said. At the same time, he said he was heartened by conversations with non-Jews in New York who had immigrated from socialist countries and, as he put it, “got it.”

“I felt more seen and understood by the Dominicanos and the Puerto Ricans in Washington Heights, and by African American communities in Harlem and Queens, than by Ashkenazi Jews.”

While Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews emphasize their deep attachment to New York, many describe a relationship shaped by repeated displacement and hard-earned lessons about how quickly safety can erode. “When you talk to anybody in our community now, you say, ‘Okay, where would you go?” Aaron Cohen said. “What’s your plan B? What’s your plan C?’”

The post Why New York’s Sephardic Jews are more Zionist — and more wary of Mamdani — than their Ashkenazi neighbors appeared first on The Forward.

Marisa Fox always knew her mother Tamar Fromer-Fox had secrets. Tamar never shared the circumstances under which her family had left Poland for Mandatory Palestine, only saying that they avoided the worst of the Holocaust. But years after her mom’s death in 1993, while searching for family records in Dąbrowa-Górnicza, Poland, Fox learned her mom had spent four and a half years in Gabersdorf, a labor camp that became a concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia.

In the documentary My Underground Mother, Fox, who is also an occasional Forward contributor, tries to piece together her family history (such as that her mother’s birth name was Alta, not Tamar) and understand why her mother never admitted she was a Holocaust survivor.

Making the film took more than a decade. Fox’s search took her across the globe: Tel Aviv; Berlin; Melbourne; Malmö, Sweden; Silver Spring, Maryland. She tracked down and interviewed dozens of women who had grown up with her mother or survived Gabersdorf with her. Most of them, including Fox’s mother, were teenagers when they were taken.

Although the film starts with Fox’s mother, it quickly expands into a larger story about the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust. The narrative is primarily driven by the survivors’ interviews, which are particularly powerful given how few Holocaust survivors are left to tell their stories. At the film’s New York Jewish Film Festival premiere, Fox said that only a handful of the people she interviewed are still alive.

Among their memories of the labor camp are those of brutal sexual violence. The women recall being lined up naked and paraded for visiting SS officers, who would then choose which of the girls — many of whom were 16 or younger — they wanted to sleep with.

These organized assaults are an aspect of the Holocaust that have not received much attention, partially because they were not highlighted on the international stage at the Nuremberg trials. Benjamin Ferencz, a chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the trials, told Fox that the American lawyers thought it would be difficult to convice Russians to prosecute sexual violence as a crime against humanity, given that Soviet troops themselves committed mass rape in liberated areas (American soldiers were also known to perpetrate this offense).

But amid the horror, the women in the camp bound together. One woman, Helene, remembers teaching the other girls Hebrew songs. When Fox’s mother fell ill during a shift, one of her friends did her work for her when the guards weren’t looking. The women also documented their experiences in a shared diary and wrote about their hopes that they would soon be free. Miraculously, the diary survived the war and its owner, Regina, passed it onto her daughter. Fox was able to use excerpts from the diary in the film, including a passage her mother had written.

After the war, Alta was smuggled to Mandatory Palestine by the Haganah and joined the Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary organization, and adopted the name Tamar. She later immigrated to the United States where she started college at 30. She married a native Brooklynite and created a new life for herself.

While some of the survivors condemn Tamar’s decision to hide her past, others understand that it could be easier to invent a whole new identity than try to reckon with such a traumatic experience. One woman, Sara, tells Fox that she named her son Christian so that he wouldn’t be seen as Jewish. Fox herself was originally named Mary Teresa (she changed it as soon as she could).

Growing up, Fox always heard her mother say “I was a hero, never a victim,” and her secrecy may have been essential to keeping that narrative alive. But by shining a new light on the strength of female survivors, My Underground Mother shows that telling the hard truths can also be heroic.

My Underground Mother will be screening at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival starting and the Boca International Film Festival in February.

The post She thought she knew her mother. Then she learned about the concentration camp appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — It was a “Supreme” Oscar-nominations morning for Timothée Chalamet and the heavily Jewish period sports comedy he stars in.

“Marty Supreme” picked up nine Academy Award nominations Thursday, including best picture and best actor for the red-hot Chalamet, the 30-year-old thespian who is seen as likely to nab his first Oscar for the role.

The film also earned nods for best director for Josh Safdie; original screenplay for Safdie and Ronald Bronstein; cinematography; editing; production design; and costumes.

“Marty Supreme” was also nominated in the brand-new category of best casting, acknowledging a supporting cast stacked with ringers, many of them Jewish — including Odessa A’zion, Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard and Isaac Mizrahi.

Elsewhere in the nominees, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a film about the death of a Palestinian child during the Israel-Gaza war told from the perspective of the Palestinian Red Crescent, was nominated for best international feature.

The film, submitted by Tunisia and co-produced by upstart pro-Palestinian distributor Watermelon Pictures, won a groundswell of support from the pro-Palestinian filmmaking community during the awards circuit. Jonathan Glazer, the British Jewish filmmaker behind the acclaimed Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” whose Oscars speech last year took aim at Israel’s conduct in Gaza, co-produced the film.

In addition, Jewish super-producer and director Steven Spielberg was nominated as a producer for best picture nominee “Hamnet,” which picked up eight nominations total.

A critical and box-office hit for distributor A24, “Marty Supreme” follows an aspiring ping-pong athlete in the postwar Lower East Side as he prepares to sacrifice everything for the chance to play in the world championships in Japan.

It is loosely based on the story of Marty Reisman, a real-life Jewish ping-pong champion and street hustler, though much of the rollicking tale — which includes detours into Auschwitz and the Pyramids of Giza — is fictional. Marty’s journey also puts his own American Jewish identity under the microscope as he tangles with an antisemitic businessman and a dog named Moses.

The film is the most evident Jewish rooting interest among the Oscar front-runners this year, especially since beloved Jewish actor Adam Sandler — who memorably starred in Safdie’s previous film “Uncut Gems” — missed out on a supporting actor nomination for his work in “Jay Kelly.”

“Blue Moon,” a biopic of Jewish songwriter Lorenz Hart, picked up two nominations: best actor for Ethan Hawke and best original screenplay. Other films with prominent Jewish angles, including the World War II drama “Nuremberg,” came up empty-handed.

By contrast, last year’s nominations brought a slew of Jewish-interest selections including “The Brutalist,” “A Real Pain” and “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic that also scored a nomination for Chalamet. Several of those films went on to win in major categories.

A few minor Jewish connections can be found in the year’s second-most-nominated film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s political-rebel action drama “One Battle After Another” (which picked up 13 nominations, second only to “Sinners” with 16).

The British composer and Radiohead band member Jonny Greenwood, who has faced backlash from some fans over his collaborations with Israeli musicians, was nominated for best score for the film. Israeli-American actress and musician Alana Haim, a frequent Anderson collaborator, also has a small role, and one of the movie’s storylines involves a secret cabal of white supremacists who restrict membership to the “Gentile-born.”

The Brazilian espionage drama “The Secret Agent,” nominated for four Oscars including best picture and best international feature, also notably features a cameo from recently deceased German actor Udo Kier. In one of his final roles, Kier plays a German Jewish refugee hiding out in Brazil whom the state’s fascist-friendly police force mistakenly believe is a Nazi.

The Safdies cast a longer shadow over the morning’s nominations. “The Smashing Machine,” a different sports biopic directed by Benny Safdie — Josh’s brother, his collaborator on “Uncut Gems” and other films — was nominated for best makeup. And “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” directed by Jewish filmmaker Mary Bronstein and produced by her husband Ronald — a Safdie collaborator nominated this year for co-writing “Marty Supreme” — picked up a best actress nomination for star Rose Byrne.

Diane Warren, the Jewish songwriter and erstwhile Oscar nominee, was once again nominated — for the 17th time — in the category of best original song. This time, Warren’s nomination came from writing a song for “Diane Warren: Relentless,” a documentary about herself.

The post Timothée Chalamet and ‘Marty Supreme’ net 9 Oscar nominations for Jewish sports fable appeared first on The Forward.