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Mizrahi Jews

Left: Right-wing media personality Yinon Magal attends a hearing at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem on May 9, 2025. Right: Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party and a former IDF chief of staff, speaks during an election campaign rally in Nordiya, August 31, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90, Gili Yaari/Flash90)
October 18, 2026, 2:40 am
Pro-Netanyahu pundit calls Eisenkot a ‘monkey,’ appearing to slur his Sephardi heritage
Yashar party likens remark to infamous 1981 ‘chah’chahim’ speech that slurred Likud voters; Yinon Magal says he used the term to mean a puppet controlled by others, not as racist jab
By ToI Staff
Shas party chief Aryeh Deri (left) and Yashar head Gadi Eisenkot seen at the funeral of Lt. Col. Roee Yohay Yosef Mordechay at Kiryat Shaul Military Cemetery, on January 7, 2024. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
August 21, 2026, 2:59 pm
Eisenkot threatens to siphon traditional voters away from a panicking Shas
Fearing a mass voter exodus over the draft crisis, Aryeh Deri staged a show of unity with Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef to save his party from a humiliating collapse
By Shalom Yerushalmi
Israeli singer Yishai Levi, November 8, 2024. (Moshe Shai/FLASH900
June 7, 2026, 12:51 pm
Singer Yishai Levi, staple of Mizrahi music genre, dies at 63
Artist, whose career spanned decades from the 1980s, remembered for unique voice that ‘touched the hearts of millions of Israelis’
By ToI Staff
Dried up fishponds in Emek Maayanot, April 2026 (Courtesy)
April 19, 2026, 4:38 pm
Green in the valley: Israel’s abandoned fishponds are turning into a solar goldmine
In a pathbreaking deal, a project in northern Israel will generate clean energy, restore natural habitats, and share profits between local kibbutzim and the city of Beit She’an
By Aviv Lavie
Israeli artists Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen are partners in life and in music. (Gil Rouvio via JTA)
January 10, 2026, 8:38 am
Speaking the language of music, Israeli-born couple brings Moroccan roots to US university
Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen draw on rediscovered heritage to connect with students at the historically Black Xavier University in Louisiana, where many have no exposure to Jews
By Asaf Elia-Shalev
The Moreno Family from Tangier dressed up to emulate the Andalusian past in an instance of ‘Reenactment Tourism.’ Photography Studio in the Alhambra compound, Spain 1953. (Courtesy of Daniel Moreno)
March 10, 2025, 8:28 am
Morocco’s Spanish-speaking Jewish minority illuminated in prizewinning book
National Jewish Book Award recipient Aviad Moreno’s work focuses on northern Morocco’s Hispanic Jews, whose yearning for a ‘homeland’ was often for Spain, not elusive Israel
By Rossella Tercatin
Former Israeli Politician David Levy at a conference of the Israeli Television News Company in the Jerusalem International Convention Center (ICC) on September 3, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
June 3, 2024, 4:02 am
‘Trailblazer’ David Levy remembered for forging space for Mizrahi voices in politics
Former foreign minister, who died Sunday at 86, praised by politicians on both right and left for fighting on behalf of underserved communities from Middle East and North Africa
By ToI Staff
Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir (L) with fellow members of the Likud party David Levy (C) and Ariel Sharon at a Likud party meeting in 1986. (Moshe Shai/ FLASH90)
June 2, 2024, 8:09 pm
David Levy, who mainstreamed Mizrahi involvement in politics, dies at 86
Likud politician was for decades Israel’s leading Mizrahi political figure, rising to deputy PM and three-time foreign minister, but faded after primary loss to Netanyahu in 1993
By Charlie Summers
Owner and proprietor Tzvi David makes baba qadrasi at Konditorei David, March 2024. (Courtesy)
March 23, 2024, 8:14 am
Heavenly Purim treats at this Iraqi Jewish confectionery are a window into a bygone era
Customers line up in Petah Tikva for an ancient nougat named for manna and a trip back in time, as they fear 70-year-old Konditorei David may too soon be a thing of the past
By Eliyahu Freedman
Israeli Black Panthers founder Charlie Biton as a Knesset member for the mostly Arab left-wing Hadash Party on December 22, 1988. (Ayalon Maggi/GPO)
February 25, 2024, 1:52 pm
Charlie Biton, Black Panther founder who fought for Mizrahi equality, dies at 76
With others from his working-class Jerusalem neighborhood, the activist and Knesset member shook up a country that had for years discriminated against non-European Jews
By Charlie Summers
Interior of the Meir Tweig Synagogue in Baghdad, Iraq, on January 7, 2022. (Sabah ARAR / AFP)
February 21, 2024, 1:38 am
Search this new list of Jewish family names from across the Middle East
Former Israeli ambassador Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch might be Ashkenazi himself, but his meticulous lists of names from ancient Cairo to Baghdad have earned him the title of ‘genius’
By Asaf Elia-Shalev
Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli (center, white shirt) excavates the synagogue in Tamanart, Morocco, in November 2021 with her daughter Shoham (left), student Adi Gura, and Mona Naji-Goeury, daughter of researchers Salima Naji and David Goeury. (Courtesy Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli/Yuval Yekutieli)
May 1, 2023, 4:24 pm
Abraham Accords allow Israelis to excavate two huge ‘genizas’ found in rural Morocco
Normalization lets Israeli researchers formalize ties with Moroccan experts to investigate remnants of Jewish life – with aid of Israelis who once lived in those abandoned villages
By Melanie Lidman
Students at the Horev girls high school in Jerusalem in a Purim skit mocking Mizrahi Jews. (Screenshot; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
April 13, 2023, 8:06 pm
Religious students face backlash for Purim skit mocking Mizrahi Jews
Clip from Ulpanat Horev in Jerusalem goes viral online; Shas chief Aryeh Deri labels it ‘wretched and outrageous racism’; school apologizes, education minister calls for probe
By ToI Staff
Zohar Argov seen in 1981. (IDF Archive)
November 14, 2022, 5:07 am
Unfit to be ‘the king’: How singer Zohar Argov’s legacy continues to be whitewashed
35 years after his death in a jail cell, the music of the legendary Mizrahi singer and convicted rapist is more popular than it was in his lifetime – even in the post-#MeToo era
By Amy Spiro
Then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman (left) and then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset, on October 23, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
October 6, 2022, 7:38 pm
Yisrael Beytenu pans own digest calling Likud ‘a party for Jews from Arab nations’
Text published in Russian-language bulletin lamented that rival party’s leaders ‘have the cultural and psychological norms of those ethnicities’
By ToI Staff
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