Why do many people persist in mistakenly referring to north African and west Asian Jews as Sephardic rather than Mizrachi? It seems like everyone is hesitant to take on the Arabic label, including most Muslim Arabs, who have been preferring to identify by faith rather than by ethnicity.

I was recently traveling in Catalunya, and there again the local communities want to disentangle their Jewish history from Spain’s — the Jews of Girona should also not be referred to as Sephardic, because Girona is not Spain, either.