In 2020, I started a focus group to better understand the needs of Sephardic and Mizrahi college students. In these conversations, students voiced their desire to have an official presence on campuses since they felt abandoned, unheard, and unseen. The students I spoke to were not only from Queens, where the conversations took place, but from all over the country. I then realized the national scale of these shared feelings of isolation.
Starting the SAMi organization was the culmination of my years of experiences and insights-it felt like a natural next step to fill the void that our students were feeling. I founded the group to help Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish students find their voice and to have a hub on college campuses nationwide.
When I founded SAMi, I thought long and hard about what symbol would best represent this new organization. Our students are proud of their unique Sephardic and Mizrahi identities, but also proud to be part of the Jewish Peoplehood.
To me, “peoplehood” means a network, bond, relationship, family, and unity without uniformity. It is a moment that hurts even when it is a thousand miles away. It is a moment of belonging to a larger family and caring for one another.
This is why I ended up choosing a pomegranate to represent SAMi. I look at pomegranates from the lens of Jewish peoplehood. To me, it represents the diversity within our larger community and the way we come together as a collective Jewish people.
Imagine holding a pomegranate in your hands. If you cut it open you will see how each part in the pomegranate has its own place. Each seed is in a unique packet. The seeds face different directions but are part of the same fruit. Just like we, as a Jewish community, have different opinions, political views, ways of observing Jewish traditions, and cultures, and yet, we are all part of the same fruit. At the end of the day, we are still one community. In the aftermath of October 7th it is more evident that the non-Jewish world, particularly when it comes to antisemitism, doesn’t see what type of Jew you are, because for them we all are part of the pomegranate.
Many like to describe the Jewish community as a mosaic. However, I believe the metaphor of a mosaic forces us to leave the distinctness of our diverse identities at the door to create a singular beautiful artwork. For me, the pomegranate metaphor allows the Jewish community to use our own words and language-lashon-when communicating with the Jewish community at large.
