The 2025 edition explored the complex relationship between Sephardi Jews and the global left, focusing on their role in shaping political movements, intellectual thought, and social activism across diverse geographies and historical contexts. 

Spanning from the late 19th century through the 20th century, the series traced the involvement of Sephardi Jews in socialist, communist, and anti-colonial movements, as well as their place in postcolonial thought. 

Topics covered included Sephardi Jews’ contributions to labor movements, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles, and the promotion of equality and justice in both Jewish and broader societal contexts. The series also engaged with the tensions that arose within Sephardi communities regarding Zionism and the broader Jewish left, highlighting the internal debates and diverse political trajectories.

By exploring the often-overlooked history of Sephardi Jews within global leftist movements, this lecture series aimed to offer new insights into the multifaceted role of Jewish identity in shaping modern political history and the enduring legacy of Sephardi political activism in global progressive movements. 

Gabriel Abensour (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Colonized Outsiders: Reflections on Fanon, Memmi and North African Jews

Moshe Behar (University of Manchester) Leftist Arabised Jews, Arab Nationalism and the Question of Individual and Collective Rights

In their session, Moshe Behar and Gabriel Abensour offered two perspectives on Sephardi Jews and leftist thought in the Middle East and North Africa. Behar examined Palestinian Jews in the 1920s, anti-Zionist Marxist Jews in Iraq in the 1940s, and Arabic-speaking communist Jews in Israel in the 1960s. He argued that, in colonial contexts, a genuinely leftist position must fully account for the rights and political existence of indigenous peoples. He proposed the term Arabized Jews to capture the complexity of Jews from the Middle East before 1948, and presented these figures as articulating political visions based on shared rights, anti-fascism, anti-nationalism, and Jewish-Arab coexistence.

Abensour approached the question through Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, presenting them as two contrasting models of anticolonial thought. While Fanon tended to read North African Jews through a European framework and denied them full native belonging, Memmi offered a Sephardi-centered account of Jewish identity as shaped by both belonging and exclusion. For Abensour, these opposing views raise urgent questions about minority belonging, equal citizenship, and the place of Jews in postcolonial national projects. Together, the session showed how different understandings of Jewish identity produced different forms of anticolonial and leftist thought that continue to shape contemporary postcolonial and decolonial debates.

Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago) The Other Iraqi Feminism: Three Silenced Leftist Heroines,1941-1979

Rami Ginat (Bar-Ilan University) Transnationalism and Nationalism: Jewish Communists and the Development of the Egyptian Left (1920-1965)

Bashkin and Ginat explored the experiences of Arab Jews who joined non-sectarian leftist movements in Iraq and Egypt, where they sought egalitarian forms of political belonging but were ultimately marked by exclusion. Bashkin focused on Iraqi Jewish women communists, marginalized as women, Jews, and communists, while Ginat examined Egyptian Jewish communists and their complex relationship to language, nationalism, and international communism. In both cases, Jewish communists devoted their lives to the futures of Iraq and Egypt, yet were increasingly treated as foreign, Zionist, or suspect elements. Their trajectories reveal how nationalism, state violence, and geopolitical pressures undermined multiple belongings and Arab-Jewish solidarities, turning many of these activists into a postcolonial diaspora rooted in the loss of the political worlds they had helped build. 

Yali Hashash (Isha L'Isha Haifa Feminist Research Center) and Shirly Bahar (Columbia University)

Weaving Transnational Threads: Mizrahi Feminist Thought and Organizing at This Global Political Moment

 Yali Hashash and Shirly Bahar talked about the ethical voice of Mizrahi feminism as a potentially transformative force in the current political climate. They presented Mizrahi feminist thought as the result of a transnational community of thinkers, artists and activists. They discussed the importance of exposing ourselves to the other’s ways of seeing and being, following Gloria Anzaldúa’s expression.

Bahar posed the question of who are our ancestors and elders that brought us to where we are now and whose world we want to pass onto the next generations. She reflected on the possibility of answering the question of who we are in this political moment. Bahar mentioned different categories that summarize different Jewish experiences such as Mizrahi, Arab-Jews and SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) Jews. These categories, in different ways, present a criticism of certain dichotomies and are used by a global diaspora that engages in feminist, queer, Mizrahi and decolonial debates. Among other things, Bahar presented the work of Simone Bitton where Mizrahi and Palestinian identities and appearances are shown as so close to each other and yet forcibly separated. Hashash spoke about the impact of Evangelical Christians on Israel. She explained how this anti-semitic movement supports the settler movement and turns Israelis into “soldiers of the Armageddon” and transforms Judaism into something unprecedented that serves their reactionary agenda. As examples, she cited Evangelical involvement in abortion regulations, anti-prostitution laws and the third temple movement. She stated that Mizrahi feminism today must stand with Palestinians in so far as it must stand with the right for identity and difference in histories, traditions and cultures. She stated that Mizrahi feminism doesn’t negate the universalism of mainstream Western feminism. She said that “we are always local and universal” and emphasized that being only local is dangerous for the vulnerable. What happens to us in our world, communities, and homes, said Hashash, can and should be appealed and called out from the outside.

Aviad Moreno (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) and Ani Avetisyan (University of Cambridge)

Navigating Bourgeois Status, Socialism, and Nationalism: Comparing Armenian and Jewish 'Repatriations' From Egypt

Aviad Moreno and Ani Avetisyan presented a comparative study of mid-20th century Armenian and Jewish middle classes in Egypt. Both groups, shaped by waves of migration in search of refuge and opportunity, formed multilingual middle classes with complex identities and historical ties. Despite geographic proximity (just a train ride from Palestine, as Moreno put it) Zionism had limited appeal among Egyptian Jews, and Soviet Armenia was not always attractive to Armenians who had found stability in Egypt. Their bourgeois lifestyles clashed with the socialist ideologies of Israel and the Soviet Armenia. Moreno and Avetisyan’s presentation reconsidered concepts like Diaspora, Return or Repatriation as determined by multiple factors and not as a single or straight-forward path that would connect past and present, and center and Diaspora. They referred to Armenian and Jewish leftist circles and their anti-colonial and socialist activism beyond community-centered politics. They explained how Armenian and Jewish leftist involvement moved beyond questions of identity, homeland and cultural preservation  to imagine a different future of justice and equality. Like Anni Avetisyan pointed out, these two cases show how Diaspora politics is about the world you want to build and who you choose to build it with. The Jewish and Armenian Egyptian case show us an experience of Diaspora based on transnational networks and identities rooted both locally and globally. These cases also show us how this kind of diasporic existence that holds space for multiple belongings is threatened by nationalism, which imposes sharp divides and exclusionary identities.