We Are Am Yisrael—So Why Don’t We Know Each Other’s Stories?

When I was growing up in London, I attended Orthodox Jewish day school where Ashkenazi culture shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life. I was one of just a few Mizrahi kids, and I have distinct memories of being looked at as an “other.” My food was different. The way my family celebrated holidays was different. Even the Jewish studies curriculum — whether it was history or Torah — reflected a tradition that felt unfamiliar. The way we prayed in school—the melodies and pronunciations — felt foreign, though I didn’t fully understand why until much later.

I never truly felt like I belonged.

There were many reasons for that feeling — being Iranian in that environment was one of them. The fact that I was also clearly gay was another, though that’s a story for another article. But the result was the same: I was made to feel that my identity was somehow outside the boundaries of what it meant to be a “normal” Jew.

Recently, I participated in the Jewish Federations of North America and Leading Edge’s JPro Conference, representing JIMENA—Jews Indigenous to the Middle East & North Africa—where I serve as Director of Community Outreach. We presented a session and were asked to lead a trivia game to engage participants and introduce them to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish heritage. I reimagined the game — previously used in Hillel Houses nationwide for over a decade — and titled it “How Well Do You Know Your Jewish History?” Because this isn’t just my history, or JIMENA’s history — it’s our shared Jewish history.

And while the game was lively and the energy was positive, it quickly became clear that most attendees didn’t know the answers to even some of the most basic questions about Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. That’s not a critique of those individuals; it’s a reflection of a much larger gap in Jewish education.

Shortly after, I spoke at the closing plenary of the SRE Belonging Summit in Baltimore. I shared my story and spoke about the need to expand our understanding of what it means to be Jewish. I urged us to stop seeing the histories of Jews whose Diaspora experiences were in places where our own ancestors did not live as separate or peripheral. I spoke about Am Yisrael — our identity as one people — and how we cannot be truly unified unless we recognize one another’s stories as part of our own.

After my talk, quite a few attendees came up to thank me — not just for what I said about Mizrahi history, but for speaking about Am Yisrael, and about how we can better be unified as one people. There was a shared recognition in that room that while the need to name and explore our differences is vital, we must never forget that what divides us should never be greater than what binds us.

Being Am Yisrael, one people, one nation, doesn’t mean flattening out our diverse histories and subcultures — it means incorporating them, honoring them. True unity comes not from sameness, but from shared recognition.

It might feel good to say it, but saying it is not enough. It must be put into action.

In school, I learned about the Holocaust, the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and, to a lesser extent, the Inquisition. These were powerful, formative stories — deeply important, and ones I understood to be part of our collective Jewish memory.

But I never saw the stories of Jews like my ancestors — of Iranian Jews, Yemenite Jews, even Babylonian Jews — reflected in the curriculum. I never questioned whether the European Jewish stories belonged to me; I accepted them as part of my history. But the absence of my family’s experiences from the Middle East made it feel like our story didn’t count. As though it existed outside the boundaries of “real” Jewish history.

I was never taught about the Allahdad in Mashhad, Iran, where Jews were forced to convert. I didn’t learn about the Farhud, the violent 1941 pogrom in Baghdad, driven by Nazi ideology and traditional religious and Islamic antisemitism. No one told me about the Orphan Decree in Yemen, a law rooted in Islamic supremacy that enabled authorities to abduct Jewish orphans and raise them as Muslims, or the mass expulsions of Jews across North Africa and the Middle East in the 20th century.

I wasn’t taught about Ethiopian Jews either — except for a single line, that they were a “lost tribe” who had “returned to Israel.” That was the entire story. No mention of their culture, their unique traditions, or the extraordinary journeys they endured.

And I had no idea there were Jewish communities in places like China, India, Greece or Afghanistan. No one ever explained how they got there or how they sustained Jewish life across centuries. Why wasn’t this ever part of the curriculum? These aren’t fringe stories. These are essential chapters in the Jewish story.

To understand the Jewish people — to understand Israel — we must understand these histories. Jewish identity is vast. It spans geography, culture, language, and experience. And yet, we are still so often taught only a narrow slice of it.

These stories aren’t just Mizrahi or Sephardi or Ethiopian stories. They are Jewish stories. They are your stories. Just as the stories of Auschwitz and Babi Yar are mine. We are one people — and our histories belong to all of us.

That’s the message we need to embrace: My family’s history is yours. Your heritage is mine. We are each other’s story.

Too often, Jewish history is presented in fragments. But Judaism is not just a set of beliefs — it is a shared identity, memory, and future. Jewish history does not begin and end in Europe. It stretches from Baghdad to Berlin, from Tehran to Warsaw, from Addis Ababa to Kyiv, to Kochi, Kaifeng and Thessaloniki.

This is the work I do at JIMENA. We’re committed to preserving and achieving recognition for the history, heritage, and rights of Jews from the MENA region. Our Sephardi Toolkit — available free at sepharditoolkit.org—has already been adopted by schools, and even some university and college professors have used it in their classrooms. Through our Speakers Bureau, survivors of the Farhud and other anti-Jewish riots share their firsthand stories. Our Sephardi Leaders Fellowship welcomes all Jews, including Ashkenazi Jews, because this work is not just for Mizrahim — it’s for all of us.

These are real successes. But they are just the beginning. Building an inclusive Jewish communal ecosystem — where every Jew sees their history reflected and taught — is the goal. And we still have a long way to go.

Mizrahi and Sephardi history must not be relegated to the margins. They must be embedded into the center. Because until we see each other’s stories as our stories, we will remain fragmented. And that fragmentation weakens us.

It also blinds us.

Perhaps if these histories were widely taught, our students would be better equipped to push back against the erasure and disinformation that plagues not only Middle Eastern studies departments, but social studies, religious studies and just about every other academic field. And not just at some universities — at most.

Perhaps if we embraced the full range of Jewish experience, we would have been better prepared to understand what happened on Oct. 7. That day was horrifying for all of us. But for many Mizrahi Jews — those whose families lived in Muslim-majority countries — it felt tragically familiar. We recognized the ideology. We understood the language — the same chants screamed during countless Islamic attacks on Jews across centuries. The sexual violence. The mutilation. The participation of civilian mobs. Our parents and grandparents had seen it before.

This intergenerational memory is part of Jewish resilience. And it should have been part of our communal story all along.

I always say: telling the Jewish story without including Mizrahi, Sephardi, and other global Jewish histories is like reading a book with half of its chapters missing.

Being Am Yisrael, one people, doesn’t mean flattening out our diverse histories and subcultures — it means incorporating them, honoring them. True unity comes not from sameness, but from shared recognition.

Jewish unity begins with shared memory. And shared memory means recognizing that there is no “them” and “us” among Jews. There is only us. My family’s story is part of your identity. Your heritage is part of mine.

You don’t need to wait for permission to engage with Mizrahi, Sephardi, or other underrepresented Jewish histories—they are part of your story, too. Honoring that history means making space for the people who carry it. Share it. Teach it. Amplify it. Highlight the voices who live it. This isn’t someone else’s story. It’s yours, and it’s ours.

Let’s stop reading just half the book. Let’s start reading our book — together.

Matthew Nouriel is an Iranian Jewish activist, content creator, and Director of Community Outreach at JIMENA—Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.