In 2001, a small group of San Francisco-based refugees and descendants of Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Libya and India came together under the leadership of Gina Bublil-Waldman to form a volunteer speakers bureau to share the personal stories of Jewish refugees from the Arab and Islamic world. They weren’t academics or policy experts. They were community members determined to tell their stories — of exile, resilience and survival — on college campuses and in synagogues, to audiences who had rarely heard them.

These early leaders of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa didn’t have a single term to describe themselves. Some identified as “Mizrahi,” others as “Sephardi,” many as immigrants and all as proud Jews. What bound them wasn’t a shared label but a desire to be seen and heard. To celebrate their ancient cultures and share their stories. To inspire learning, engagement, justice and belonging for those Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews whose history had been ignored; whose culture had long been rejected in many Jewish spaces; and whose quest for recognition and justice for the forgotten Jewish refugees of the Middle East was constantly called into question.

Sarah Raanan/Jewish Life Photo Bank

A Jewish mother blessing her daughter. Sarah Raanan/Jewish Life Photo Bank

At the time of JIMENA’s founding, I was an undergraduate — one of the only Jews in my diverse friend group — grappling with my mixed Sephardi-Ashkenazi identity in the aftermath of 9/11. I didn’t feel like I belonged in any Jewish space, and I was searching for some indication that there was a place for me in the broader Jewish world. That same year, I read The Flying Camel, a groundbreaking anthology of essays by Middle Eastern and North African Jewish women edited by Loolwa Khazzoom. It changed the trajectory of my life. I began to understand that I fit into the messy, evolving space of a Jewish multicultural movement that affirmed my whole self; a movement pioneered by women like Khazzoom and Shahanna McKinney-Baldin, who planted seeds that are only now beginning to flourish.

And yet, I worry we are losing the power of that formative moment of clarity, imagination and possibility. Language that has helped so many find their place in Jewish life is now being weaponized in intracommunal debates. Words like “Mizrahi” and “Jews of color” have become so politicized, so scrutinized, that they risk obscuring the very people they were meant to elevate. Instead of building bridges, we’ve become preoccupied with who gets to set the categories — who has the power of naming, who counts, who belongs and who doesn’t. Judaism itself is often completely missing from these conversations, replaced by a spiral of semantics. There have been too many communal rifts over data and terminology while ignoring the deeper human truths they were meant to illuminate.

This is especially clear in the world of Jewish communal research. Yes, accurate numbers matter. Yes, the terms we use to describe people matters. And yes, rigorous data is incredibly important. But research is not an end in itself. Data does not create belonging. Research must be followed by meaningful action. Qualitative findings and demographic studies are most valuable when we use them to push the field forward — to design impactful programs and interventions that actually build belonging, to shift communal priorities and policies to reflect the rich diversity of our communities, to change curricula, to adjust our language patterns and to meet people where they are. Otherwise, we’re just tallying identities while real people continue to feel unseen and remain disengaged while institutions struggle to reflect the full richness of our Jewish people and heritage.

As JIMENA prepares to release three landmark studies — including a national demographic study of Sephardi Jewish Americans and two assessments of Jewish day schools and summer camps in Los Angeles and New York — we are not focused on a headline number. Yes, our study will show that roughly 10% of American Jews identify as Sephardi, according to Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, but the real power lies in the recommendations, not the numbers: the action steps, the language changes, the cultural shifts and interventions these studies propose.

That’s why JIMENA is committed not just to publishing research but to applying it, and we invite you to join us as we do so. We’re offering design thinking workshops and professional and leadership development opportunities through our Sephardic Leadership Institute. We are also creating more tools and interventions like our Sephardi and Mizrahi Education Toolkit to support our Jewish educators, leaders and institutions. We are absolutely thrilled to have strong data to back up this work — work built on a Jewish multicultural movement whose earliest leaders did not wait for data or permission from the field to act (because that’s how change has historically happened and how marginalized and misunderstood communities create change).

The founders of this movement were Sephardi. They were Mizrahi. And some were neither. They were different from one another, and that difference was what made their collective voice so powerful. It still inspires me today as we all strive to build a field that embraces our differences, from our viewpoints to our racial identities. Today I fear that their wisdom and the wisdom of our Jewish traditions that can help us navigate this moment are being lost in our rush to label and litigate identity. If we are serious about building a Jewish future grounded in belonging, we must stop treating reports like endpoints and start seeing them as starting points. We must also incorporate Jewish wisdom, ethics and even halacha back into the conversation, as these are the common threads that should weave through all efforts to build stronger Jewish communities. What ultimately matters is not how we define and measure Jewish multiculturalism, but how we live it. 

As we are reminded in the Mishnah (Avot 1:15), “speak little, but do much.”

Sarah Levin is the executive director of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.