The differences between me and an author like Etgar Keret, who has parents who survived the Holocaust, are obvious-but so are the similarities. In a … - Dorit Rabinyan

(about what happened to the Sephardic Jews in Israel.) Well, we prefer to be called Mizrahi, that is, Oriental or Eastern. The term Sephardic isn't used so much anymore, and actually refers to people from Spain. The answer to your question is one of the great failings of the Zionist movement. The movement started in Europe and spread out from there, and as a result, the hegemony in Israel is European, which is foreign to this region. I believe that the conflict in the Middle East is what it is today because the Mizrahi Jews who emigrated here from Muslim countries have been so passive...They were persuaded to come to the new land by the European Jews. Most of them had in fact dreamed of it for years, but they never actively left their countries. So in effect they came here as 'guests' of the Zionist movement, and they groveled and apologized as they came. The pioneers were European, and the greater part of Middle Eastern Jews became second-class citizens, the proletariat.

The Holocaust effectively spewed the Jews out of Europe. Nothing even close to similar ever happened to the Jews in the Muslim world. Seen cynically, it seems strange that the Jews who were in effect exiled nevertheless continue to look to the European lifestyle with great veneration and try to recreate it in their own homeland. It makes you want to shout: 'Listen, people, you could have created something beautiful here, if you had only turned backs on those who killed six million of you, and instead accepted that the people who live in this region have never done anything like that.' I think that the majority of Jews who used to live with the Arabs were more peaceful, friendlier, more natural and humane than the European Jews. For example, the Sephardic rabbis in Morocco used to preach a pragmatic, sensible Judaism. Orthodoxy did not exist in those communities. Here in Israel, everything has become stricter and more extreme, like an echo of the Ashkenazi rabbis who had their religion influenced by a Catholic environment, where guilt and punishment were key concepts. (“What happened to the Sephardic culture here in Israel? Does it still exist at all?") DR: It was given no recognition. The European hegemony was so strong that it suppressed the very idea that there might be such a thing as Sephardic or Mizrahi culture. ("But has it continued to exist in one form or another?") DR: Behind closed doors, yes. In formal situations, no. But if we look back over the past ten years, there has been a dramatic change. Today, the notion that Israel is a pluralistic and multicultural place is more accepted. The very fact that my books and books by Sami Michael are being published is proof of that. Now you can listen to Middle Eastern music on the radio, watch TV dramas about families in Iraq or Iran, and it is all mainstream. It has received the Israeli stamp of kosher, as we say here. So now we are basically 100 percent Israeli. But that is something very recent.

If you allow only one perspective, you narrow the world. [Then] something is missing for us to interpret our future. Where we are heading.