Israeli culture minister decries Western culture
Culture Minister Miri Regev belittled Western education to appeal to her constituency, but these populist declarations contradict the social mobility achieved by Mizrahi women through university studies, including her own.
It is not my intention to contest the painful personal experiences that Minister of Culture Miri Regev had at home, growing up in the southern development town of Kiryat Gat.
“I, Miri Siboni Regev, never read Chekhov. I almost never went to the theater, I listened to [Israeli-Moroccan singer] Jo Amar and Sephardic songs and I am no less refined than all the consumers of Western culture,” Regev said of herself proudly, defiantly, in a kind of personal confession featured in a Sept. 12 interview with Yisrael Hayom. The interview stirred a huge public debate. “When I was young, I was convinced that Mizrahi culture is ugly, and I was embarrassed about it. I used to ask my mother, ‘Why would you go listen to [Sephardic-style] liturgical poems in the synagogue?’”
I didn’t grow up in Kiryat Gat, but the population of the development town of Migdal HaEmek, where I was born and raised, was very similar in its composition to Kiryat Gat in the 1970s and 1980s. There were immigrant populations from Morocco and Iraq and a constant, built-in tension between them and the European “Ashkenazi” immigrants. I won’t get into the question of who "won;” I will just say that from my own very subjective viewpoint, Mizrahi culture was the dominant one. It was very much out in the open, not hidden.
I still wax nostalgic over the henna celebrations women held as they accompanied young Moroccan brides to the mikvah, or ritual bath, right before their wedding. I still picture the women, dressed in their colorful folk costumes as they drummed on their darbukas. I still remember how fascinated I was by the sights, the scents and the sounds from distant lands.
