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David Sitton David Sitton (1909–89), born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family, was a writer and an activist intellectual for many years, both before and after 1948. He was a younger associate of leading figures in the Sephardic community of Jerusalem , including Elie Eliachar, with whom he later founded the World Sephardic Federation. During the time of the British Mandate, Sitton was arrested for underground activity and spent time in prison. After the founding of Israel, he became very active in the Sephardi Council in Jerusalem (Va‘ad ‘adat haSefaradim bi-Yerushalayim), and founded and edited its main publications Ba-Ma‘arakha (The struggle) and Shevet ve-‘Am (A tribe and a people). From the outset, both journals were the main publications representing not only the Sephardim, but also the Mizrahim. Both focused on social, political, and cultural issues of the day. Ba-Ma‘arakha’s official title was Bit’on ha-tsibur haSefaradi u-vene ‘adot ha-Mizrah (Journal of the Sephardic public and the eastern communities), and Shevet va-‘Am was subtitled “The Forum for Discussing the Problems of the Sephardic Public in Israel and the Diaspora.” With Sitton as editor, both journals were, for many years, effectively the only arena in which social, political, and cultural issues pertaining to the Mizrahi experience in Israel were discussed critically. Most significantly, one of the first articulations of the link between “backwardness, equality, and [Ashkenazic] hegemony”— the three keywords in post-1970 Mizrahi political and academic discourse in Israel—was published by Sitton in an essay of that title in Shevet ve-‘Am in 1958. In addition to being an editor, Sitton wrote numerous works on Sephardic and Mizrahi culture, folklore, and ethnography, as well as works of fiction. ...

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