When you think about Zionist history and the intellectual origins of the Jewish state,

you probably think of European names like Pinsker, Herzl, Nordau, Jabotinsky, or Asher Ginsburg,

who went by the pseudonym Achad Ha'am.

And when you think about the architects of Israel, you probably think about names like

Ben-Gurion and Goulda Meir, Levi Eshkol, and Menachem Began.

The art and iconography of the Zionist pioneers in the early state of Israel portrayed

women and men with strikingly

European features, often with blonde hair and fair skin, newly bronzed in the fields

parched by Israel's sun.

This version of the Zionist story captures something true, and heroic, and powerful,

but it also distorts another element about Israel's founding

that's no less true. For while many early Israelis did in fact come from the former pale of

settlement and throughout Europe, many also came from Syria and Iraq and Egypt and Yemen. Most of the

million or so Jews living throughout the Muslim lands of the Middle East up through the 1940s

made their way to the new state of Israel. And if you want to truly understand Israel,

you have to understand that these Jews from the Middle East, the Mizrahim, are not a footnote to the Israeli founding,

but central to the Israeli founding, and 70 years on,

they remain central to the formation of the Israeli character. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your

host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is the author and writer Mati Friedman, and the essay that

will focus our conversation, Mizrahi Nation, was published in Mosaic in June 2014.

Now a little over five years since that essay was published, we thought we'd revisit the story Mati tells there,

and see how it stands up over time. His argument challenges both the Ashkenazi myth of Israel's founding,

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