Reaching a wider public with our story by Andrée Aelion Brooks

It has always been an uphill struggle to interest the Jewish world in Sephardic history. I know from personal experience. I have been working at this for nearly twenty years – with articles in Jewish publications and many lecture engagements, as well as a curriculum called “Out of Spain,” which I developed for Jewish schools on the subject.

A major reason, of course, is that the leadership of the Jewish world, especially in the United States where I live, is still in the hands of the Ashkenazim. Added to this is the fact that the teachers in the Jewish schools – whether day schools or congregational Hebrew schools – have so little knowledge that they never think about passing along even the basics to their students. Or finding it out for themselves.

We noticed this when we tried – unsuccessfully so far – to persuade them to bring their students on a field trip to the Gomez Mill House in Marlboro, N.Y. which is the oldest standing Jewish-owned home in the United States.

It was built along the Hudson River by a Sephardic Jewish merchant called Luis Moses Gomez, an international trader who started life as a converso in Spain. I am a trustee of the house. But whenever I talked about it to Jewish Hebrew School teachers, their eyes glazed over. They would take the kids again and again to places like the Tenament Museum in New York City, and of course, any and all Holocaust museums. A site of Sephardic Jewish interest was not on their agenda.

We have to therefore become more creative about getting our stories across. We have to reach out to the wider world with topics that capture their imagination. The most successful endeavor in recent years was the widely successful book, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, by Edward Kristler. He was a Jewish writer from Jamaica, formerly of Long Island, New York, who researched the archives on Jamaica for years before compiling his findings into a very readable book. I believe it is now being made into a documentary. And he was not even a Sephardic Jew himself.

I have taken the same approach with my biography of Dona Gracia Nasi The Woman who Defied Kings. We are now in the process of turning that exhaustive, yet highly readable, biography into an eight-part TV mini-has taken years to even get this far. But we now have a major Hollywood working on it.

We are already in negotiations with others who can provide the production funding and – best of all – we have an A-list actress (I cannot reveal her name as yet) who is eager to play the lead role. I was never interested in making a minor movie, or even a minor documentary. I reached for a much more important break-through. If we can pull it off, it will generate interest in more topics that do not go over the same ground, time and again, when speaking of Jewish history. Let’s all put on our thinking caps!

I will provide updates on our progress in future postings.

Andrée Brooks