Politics & Power Quote by Isaac Mizrahi

Mizrahi’s line lands with the offhand bite of someone who’s spent a lifetime translating himself for an audience that thinks “American” has a default setting. The sentence stacks particulars - “Sephardic Jew,” “Brooklyn,” “Syrian food,” “temple” - not as exotic flavor, but as evidence. He’s listing a full, specific life that many people still treat as an asterisk to the national story. Then he flips it: “it was still America.” Still, as in: even if you don’t recognize it; still, as in: stop acting surprised.

The intent isn’t to romanticize assimilation or to stage a triumph-of-diversity poster. It’s closer to a corrective. Mizrahi, a fashion designer whose career is built on taste, codes, and presentation, understands how identity gets read - and misread. Sephardic, Syrian, Brooklyn, temple: these are signals outsiders might file under “ethnic,” “immigrant,” “other.” His subtext pushes back on that sorting. America isn’t what you imagine when you picture a generic suburb; it’s also the kitchen, the synagogue, the neighborhood where languages and recipes and rituals make a home.

Context matters here: a Sephardic Jewish upbringing is often flattened in American pop culture into a vague “Jewishness” dominated by Ashkenazi reference points. Mizrahi’s specificity quietly insists on internal diversity, too. The most pointed move is the calmness of the claim. No pleading, no apology. Just a statement of jurisdiction: we were never outside the frame.