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living, breathing challenge to everybody’s pet narrative about Israel. Perhaps if I were the only Mizrahi who feels this way, the book I wrote would just be a memoir. But it’s not just me.

Mizrahim don’t need a history book. We don’t need a memoir. We need a manifesto.

Without Mizrahim, the Jewish story is incomplete. It’s more than just our history, cuisine and culture that needs to be understood and recognized.

My story dives deep into the real contradictions of our Mizrahi lives, grapples with the invisibility that taints our experiences and explores concrete ways we can achieve full equality and dignity. The Mizrahi

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Under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary experience cannot be boiled down to a simple assortment of artifacts under plexiglass at a museum. It is a power ful force that we must take out of its case and touch, and maybe even leave a few fingerprints.

While we are not asking for much, some Mizrahim will feel uncomfort able reading this. They may say that my advocacy for our recognition and respect is bad for the Jewish com munity, or even claim that we should focus on what unites us as Jews even if it results in the exclusion of Miz rahi heritage.

The truth is that Ashkenazi and

Mizrahi are not racial identities. Blackness and Ashkenazi heritage are not opposites. The same goes for Miz‑ rahi—although all of us originated from the Middle East diaspora, we are a multitude of races.

The Jews of Kaifeng, China, origi nate from Iran, so they are Asian and Mizrahi. Sephardi communities cross racial lines as well; while many Sep hardi Jews are from Latin America or North Africa, many others are white skinned with origins in Spain and Portugal.

I’ve argued that Mizrahim share a heritage and identity, but I also be‑ lieve the same goes for me and other Jews of color. We all experience rac ism in addition to antisemitism and have shared experiences within and outside the Jewish community. None of us will see our faces as the “default Jew” on a Jewish holiday card out side of Israel and Jews like us rarely appear in movies or on television.

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It is in the best interest of Mizra him to identify as Jews of color and to deliberately join forces with those communities. However, we must overcome major obstacles to get there. The first is colorism. While some Mizrahim are very dark skinned, others have lighter complex ions. The hatred of us is often rooted in orientalism, which is the study of the East, particularly the Middle East, by Western scholars with an out sider, often prejudiced and colonial perspective. This bias is expressed in how other Jews talk down our food as basic and too spicy while eating plates of it and appropriating it, along with our language and traditions.

The second issue is that there is a political schism between Mizrahi Jews and many other Jews of color. Mizrahim, particularly those in Israel, have largely adopted a very right wing political outlook, while many other Jews of color primarily lean left. It’s important to understand that this is an outcome of our specific traumas.

Since most Jews of the Middle East come from families that have been brutalized and exiled from Arab countries, they tend to be hawkish in their approach toward Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Iran and those Arab states that support terror against Israel. Young Mizrahim are at war with the very people who murdered and expelled our grandparents. The animosity is deep. I’ve found that this sentiment stretches far beyond Israel and includes my Mizrahi friends in Los Angeles and Great Neck, N.Y.

To get to where we need to be, we Mizrahim must follow the lead of our ancestors, from as far back as the Exodus to the modern-day departure of Jews from Arab lands. In ancient times, they walked across the desert with tattered shoes and huddled in tents without basic necessities because they knew that they deserved nothing less than full equality. More recent generations leaving their birthplaces showed they were willing to do anything necessary to achieve liberation. Today, I’m calling on everyone to follow in the honorable footsteps of our ancestors.

It’s time that the Mizrahi story is told fully and that the rest of world Jewry listens. I call on all to love Mizrahi Jews as much as you love the food that we cook, the music that we compose, the history that we’ve lived, the country that we’ve helped build and the soul we gave to her. If you do this, your love will be reciprocated.

Hen Mazzig is an Israeli writer and the co-founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, which combats antisemitism online. His first book, The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto, from which this excerpt was adapted, was published in October by Wicked Son Press.