Isn't it a shame that there is a kind of racism among Jews themselves?

Question: It seems that everyone is shocked by this neo nazi movement against Jews. But what about hatred that exists among Jews of different groups, Ashkenazim, Sefardim, Ethiopians. Everyone claims that they are real Jews and the others are just pretending. First let's learn to love each other. Shanah tova.

Answer: By the time the State of Israel was proclaimed, the majority of Jews in the state and the region were Ashkenazi. Following the declaration of the state, a flood of Jewish refugees entered Israel from the Arab world, most of whom were Sephardim and Jews from the Maghreb, Yemenite Jews, Bukhorim, Persian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, and smaller communities, principally from Libya, Egypt and Turkey. More recently, other communities have also arrived including Ethiopian Jews and Indian Jews. Because of the relative homogeneity of Ashkenazi Jewry, especially by comparison to the diversity of the many smaller communities, over time in Israel, all Jews from Europe came to be called "Ashkenazi" in Israel, whether or not they had any connection with Germany, while Jews from Africa and Asia have come to be called "Sephardim", whether or not they had any connection with Spain. One reason is that most African and Asian Jewish communities use the Sephardic prayer ritual and abide by the rulings of Sephardic rabbinic authorities, and therefore consider themselves to be "Sephardim" in the broader sense of "Jews of the Spanish rite", though not in the narrower sense of "Spanish Jews". Similarly "Ashkenazim" has the broader sense of "Jews of the German rite". The founders of modern Israel, mostly European-descended people, believed themselves superior to these new arrivals. With higher degrees of Western-standard education, they were better positioned to take full advantage of the emerging Western-style liberal democracy and Western mode of living which they themselves had established as the cultural norm in Palestine during the pre-state era. Cultural biases against the newcomers were compounded by the fledgling state's lack of financial resources and inadequate housing to handle the massive population influx. Thus, hundreds of thousands of new Sephardic immigrants were sent to live in tent cities in outlying areas. Sephardim (in its wider meaning) were often victims of discrimination, and were sometimes called schwartze (meaning "black" in Yiddish). One immigrant from Iraq recalls being given a tent when first arriving in Israel, while a neighbor from Germany was given an apartment. Those Sephardic Jews lucky enough to get an apartment were placed in inexpensive concrete apartment blocks that were for the most part of a lesser standard than those erected to house Europeans or Westerners. Worse than housing discrimination was the differential treatment accorded the children of these immigrants, many of whom were tracked by the largely European education establishment into dead-end "vocational" schools, without any real assessment of their intellectual capacities. Mizrahim Jews protested their unfair treatment, and even established the Israeli Black Panthers movement with the mission of working for social justice. The effects of this early discrimination still linger a half-century later, as documented by the studies of the Adva Center, a highly respected think tank on social equality, and by other Israeli academic research (cf., for example, Tel Aviv University Professor Yehuda Shenhav's article in Hebrew documenting the gross under representation of Sephardic Jewry in Israeli high school history textbooks. Every Israeli prime minister has been Ashkenazi, although Sephardim and Mizrahim have attained the (ceremonial) presidency and other high positions. The student bodies of Israel's universities remain overwhelmingly European in origin, despite the fact that roughly half the country's population is non-European. And the tent cities of the 1950s morphed into so-called "development towns". Scattered over border areas of the Negev Desert and the Galilee, far from the bright lights of Israel's major cities, most of these towns never had the critical mass or ingredients to succeed as places to live, and they continue to suffer from high unemployment, inferior schools, and chronic brain drain. While the Israeli Black Panthers no longer exist, Mizrahi Democratic Rainbowand many other NGOs carry on the struggle for equal rights in housing, education, and employment for the country's underprivileged populace - still largely composed of Sephardim and Mizrahim, joined now by newer immigrants from Ethiopia and the Caucasus Mountains. Intermarriage of all these regathered Jewish ethnic groups was initially uncommon, due in part to distances of each group's settlement in Israel, and cultural and/or "racial" biases. In recent generations, however, the barriers were lowered by state sponsored assimilation of all the Jewish ethnic groups into a common Sabra (native-born Israeli) identity which facilitated extensive "mixed-marriages".

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