No Zionists in Habibi City

New York Magazine spent an issue mapping Southwest Asian and North African New York and could not find the Jews of Aleppo, Baghdad, or Sana'a.

The cover story, by Zaina Arafat. Twenty pages on the diasporas of Southwest Asia and North Africa in New York.

It’s something that you can only do in New York City. At least, that’s my opinion. Explore any culinary scene in the world, and you can do it within the five boroughs. When I lived in the city, I ate my way around the Middle East without once thinking about the politics. It was my way of being in the region from afar.

Miznon or Taim on the way home, Miss Ada or Laser Wolf when someone else was paying, 12 Chairs when I wanted jachnun on a weekend. Not only Israeli places. There was also King of Falafel and Shawarma in Astoria, the most Palestinian establishment I have been to in North America, where I was careful not to talk politics.

Israeli food tells the story of where Jews were forced to leave and where they found new homes. It might be the only cuisine where someone thought to put hummus on an Austrian schnitzel, and it works. Not only does it work, but it’s delicious.

There is also kubbeh in beet soup, which you have to eat with rice, at a spot on Sixth Avenue called Kubeh. Iraqi Jewish food, my family’s food, sold in Manhattan to people who mostly had no idea. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, though hers was always better.

I was once brave enough to try rolling kubbeh in our apartment on the Upper East Side, but the dumplings came apart in the pot. I wanted to impress my girlfriend (now, my wife) and failed miserably.

That was when I understood I did not have my savta’s technique, and neither does my father. He settles for the occasional omelet and challah French toast.

Melanie Shurka, who opened Kubeh, did the smart thing. After she looked for that technique in cookbooks and found almost nothing, she flew to Israel to learn it from Kurdish, Iraqi, and Persian women, because their kitchens are the only places it survives. Their expulsion is the reason it does.

New York Magazine has now published an entire issue about that world, and it has a rule about which Jews belong to it.

The issue is called Habibi City, and the cover story is by Zaina Arafat. Partway through, she stops to define the term on which the whole package rests. Belonging to the SWANA community (Southwest Asia and North Africa), she writes, meant holding a set of common beliefs: Palestinian human rights, Gaza as a genocide, social justice over capital, caring as nonnegotiable.

Only one of those beliefs is a test. In the piece, Arafat describes Kimia Zakerin’s Farsi Club, which started after the Woman Life Freedom marches in Washington Square. She also interviews El Atigh Abba, the owner of a Crown Heights café, who cannot return to Mauritania because a fatwa was issued against him for his writing about the Arab Spring.

Neither Kimia nor El Atigh risk their place in the SWANA community by speaking out against their regimes, nor would they lose it by staying silent. Israel is, of course, the only country where that determines membership.

In the essay, every Jew is described as anti-Zionist, an Arab Jew, or as someone’s non-Zionist partner. That label comes first and is what lets them be included. To be a Jew in Habibi City, you have to answer the Israel question the ‘right way.’ Criticizing the Netanyahu government isn’t enough for Arafat; most Israelis I know do that all the time. The real test is about the state itself, whether it should exist at all, and no other group faces that kind of standard.

Arafat knows this. She grants that Israel is geographically part of the region, but that is where it ends: topographic acceptance. Whether Israelis can claim a connection depends on the politics surrounding SWANA, and on a person’s ethnic background. She has just raised the Mizrahi question, and she leaves it where it fell.

About 75,000 Syrian Jews live half an hour from Abba’s café. They came from Aleppo and Damascus in the early 1900s and settled along Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. Syrian-American writer Joseph Sutton called what they built Aleppo in Flatbush. Later, the community took in Egyptians, Moroccans, and Persians as each of those countries forced out its Jews. Shaare Zion is a synagogue on Ocean Parkway, with a dome visible from the street.

Many Ocean Parkway families are more religious and keep to themselves, which someone will point out. Tens of thousands of Israelis in New York City do not, many of them Mizrahi, running restaurants, throwing parties, and filling the same rooms Arafat counts as a scene. They are not in the essay either.

My family was forced out of Iraq in 1951, along with almost all of the country’s Jews, a community that had been there for 2,500 years. Their belongings were confiscated on the way out. They moved to Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert; the city was built mostly by immigrants who arrived the same way.

Arafat writes about exile and expulsion throughout the piece. El Atigh Abba, who cannot go home to Mauritania. The Yemenis picked up at the airport and fed on Atlantic Avenue, but not once about the 850,000 Jews displaced from “SWANA.”

Listing what SWANA New Yorkers still face, Arafat names xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism. Two bigotries and a national movement, filed together without comment.

About half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa, and they are in Israel because the region threw them out. Netanyahu’s government is a disgrace, and there are things Israel has done in Gaza that are unacceptable, and growing settler violence in the West Bank is a disgrace to Zionism and to Jews. I can hold all of that and still notice exactly what listing Zionism beside Islamophobia is.

The one person I felt a connection to in the piece was El Atigh. He is different. He hosted a Hebrew-Arabic language exchange only to see his comments flooded with people telling him to cancel. He refused.

In July, he hosted a Palestinian singer and an Israeli musician on his stage together. He spends the essay pushing back on his own side. Arafat clearly admires him, but she does not seem to notice they disagree.

So 20 pages celebrating the SWANA diaspora in New York City. The Jews of those countries appear only if they publicly disown the state that took many of them in.

And that brings us back to the Syrian families living on Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. They have lived in New York longer than most SWANA countries have existed, and are not mentioned at all. I don’t think it was intentional; they were simply not considered, and most would not have passed Arafat’s test anyway.

Arafat ends her piece on sumud, the Palestinian Arabic word for steadfastness, referring to a quiet refusal to disappear. She should know she has spent thousands of words asking us to do just that.

The Jews of Baghdad had a word for it too. In their Judeo-Arabic, ḏ̣all meant to stay, and when put in front of another verb, it meant to keep doing something. Staying and persisting were the same word. They were there for 2,500 years, and spoke Arabic for the last 1,300 of them. They were in Baghdad before the language was.