Sephardic and Mizrachi New Yorkers—whose ancestry and traditions come from the Iberian Peninsula, Middle East and North Africa—have lower intermarriage rates and identify as more politically conservative than the overall New York Jewish population, according to new research presented at a UJA-Federation of New York conference.
Overall, 37% of married Jewish New Yorkers are intermarried and 63% are not, compared to 20% of intermarried Sephardic and Mizrachi New Yorkers and 80% who are married within the faith, according to a handout at the Sephardic and Mizrahi Symposium on Nov. 7 at the UJA headquarters in Manhattan.
Per the handout, which draws on data that the UJA collected for its 2023 Community Study but did not previously make public, 30% of New York Jews self-identify as politically “moderate,” compared to 39% of Sephardic and Mizrachi New Yorkers. Among the broader New York Jewish community, 16% identify as “very liberal,” 29% as “liberal,” 18% as “conservative” and 7% as “very conservative.”
For Sephardic and Mizrachi New Yorkers, 9% self-identified as “very conservative” and the same percentage said that it is “conservative.” Some 10% identified as less liberal than the broader New York community—24% “liberal” and 11% as “very liberal.” That means that Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews are some 22% less likely to identify as at least somewhat “liberal” than the larger New York Jewish community.
“We wanted to analyze the responses from our Sephardic and Mizrachi study participants and see how they compare to the New York Jewish population community overall,” Jake Brzowsky, manager of community research at UJA, told JNS.
“It’s a representative study of New York-area households, which means we feel confident taking the percentages we see and projecting them out, even though we only have 6,000 respondents,” he added.
Researchers used to call people and ask if they were Jewish (“random digit dialing”), but this study involved sending materials in the mail, and then following up via phone and email when possible.
“This is the first community study in New York that is using address-based sampling, which is the new gold standard methodology in research,” Brzowsky told JNS.
Rina Kattan Cohen, community manager at the UJA, told JNS that the symposium, which drew about 170 people, aims to better meet the needs of Sephardic and Mizrachi New Yorkers.
“Sephardic and Mizrachi communities have had few, rare, sporadic opportunities to see data about their own community,” she said.
‘Spirit of cooperation’
Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardi Federation, told JNS that the symposium was a “historic corrective” to institutional neglect of Sephardic communities in New York.
“Sephardim have too frequently been relegated to the corner of N.Y. Jewish intellectual, cultural and communal life, denigrated for their differences and even mocked in ways hard to fathom decades ago, not just in retrospect,” he said.
The symposium wasn’t a first for the city, according to Guberman, who said that his organization has convened the city’s and the country’s Sephardic communities for 50 years.
“It was notably the first organized by the UJA-Federation of NY in more than 100 years, focused on including many of the city’s major Sephardi stakeholders,” he said. “Much more work needs to be done to engage all the city’s Jews and bring all Jews together in New York and nationally.”
Guberman told JNS that “the good news is that there is a new spirit of cooperation and enlightened leadership at the UJA-Federation of New York.”
The UJA’s demographic data from the 2023 community study “confirms what we have long known anecdotally: American Sephardim in N.Y. are seriously Jewish, worldly, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial,” Guberman added, “and eschew labels that interfere with Jewish unity and most likely to adhere to Maimonidean moderation when it comes to their Jewish observances and politics.”
