As JIMENA's founding executive director, Sarah has led the organization's growth from a volunteer speakers bureau into a national voice for Mizrahi and Sephardic heritage, education, and rights. She conceived and directs JIMENA's multilingual Oral History and Digital Experience Program and its Arabic Outreach Program, and she founded Distinctions, a journal for Sephardic and Mizrahi writers, scholars, artists, and ideas. She has also led the development of JIMENA's educational initiatives, built to give Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews the tools to explore, preserve, and share their own heritage on their own terms.

Leadership

Building a national voice

In 2025, Sarah led the release of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States: Identities, Experiences, and Communities, the first national study of its kind. Under her leadership, JIMENA has built partnerships with universities, museums, Jewish institutions, and public agencies around the world. A central focus of her work has been moving Sephardic and Mizrahi experiences from the margins toward the center of American Jewish institutional life, while building greater collective capacity among Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations and leaders.

Sarah has briefed the U.S. Department of State and the Canadian Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and has lectured at Ben‑Gurion University and Bar‑Ilan University. In 2019, she founded AIMEE: Advocates for Inclusive Middle Eastern Education, an interfaith coalition of Jews, Assyrians, Coptic Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Indigenous Middle Eastern communities working for accurate representation in K to 12 curricula. She worked closely with Yazidi diaspora leadership during the 2014 genocide and continues to convene Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations and leaders around shared advocacy.

Across all of this is a commitment to historical honesty and human complexity. Sarah's work challenges simplistic narratives of both Jewish identity and the Middle East by insisting on histories that resist easy binaries, such as East and West, Indigenous and foreign, Arab and European, diaspora and homeland, and on the right of communities to define and transmit their own experiences rather than have those experiences interpreted for them.

Background

Before JIMENA

Sarah spent nearly a decade in Israel working in social services and community development, primarily at NATAL: Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, as well as at Jewish Agency absorption centers in Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat and with interfaith agricultural cooperatives.

In 2025, she received the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America's Young Leadership Award in recognition of her leadership and service to Sephardic and Mizrahi communities.

Writing

Selected writings

More from Sarah at eJewishPhilanthropy, JNS, J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and Substack.

Listen and watch

Podcasts and interviews

Press

In the news