First book-length treatment of the history of Sephardic Jews in America

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties.
The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

"The obscure documentary evidence Ben-Ur has unearthed gives the content of this book a provocative critical edge...this book brings to the fore issues of race, identity, marginalization, and displacement, which in a globalized world are issues of profound and enduring relevance." - Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Sephardic Jews in America is...a scholarly landmark...[its] multilayered trove of ethnographic and historical detail will interest scholars of ethnicity as a rich basis for comparative studies." - Journal of American Ethnic History

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - Reporter

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - Intermountain Jewish News

"The story Ben-Ur has to tell . . . is largely one of miscommunication. But failures to communicate can be as revealing, in their way, as successes, and the ways Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews thought about one another in the early 20th century offers some surprising insights into the construction of modern American Jewish identity. That is why Sephardic Jews in America offers so much food for thought." - Jewish Tribune

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - JJ Monthly Magazine

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - Heritage Florida Jewish News

"An intriguing and academically rigorous book. . . It provides an invaluable survey into an overlooked component of the Jewish American experience and it provides keen insights into the religious dislocation between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews in the US." - History In Review

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - Greater Phoenix Jewish News

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - New Jersey Jewish News

"The most detailed and thoughtful discussion on why Sephardic Jews have been excluded from mainstream Jewish life in the United States." - Moment

"Carefully documented with particular reliance on the Ladino press, this book addresses a shortcoming involving both scholarly and communal engagement. Ben-Ur underscores the failure of academics and Ashkenazic Jews to acknowledge Sephardic Jews, which has resulted in historic oblivion." - CHOICE

"Ben-Ur’s book is a valuable contribution to American Jewish historiography, within which treatments of the Sephardic experience have either focused exclusively on the “Old” Sephardic “Grandees” who came to the America before 1776 or, in a contemporary context, have limited themselves to a primarily ethnographic concentration on the folkways of particular communities." - American Historical Review

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - American Israelite

"A landmark contribution to the history of those Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who were all too often invisible to the mainstream Jewish community and to the historiography of American Judaism." - American Jewish Archives Journal

"Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage." - Buffalo Jewish Review