This article explores the North African Jewish community's establishment of Or Haemet Sephardic School as a response to the forced "Ashkenazification" of Sephardic students in the Orthodox Jewish day school system. The establishment of the school signifies the North African Jewish community's refusal and resistance to an essentialist Jewish identity as reflective solely of Ashkenazi identity, culture, and ways of being. The author argues that homogenous and exclusive claims of authentic Jewish identity marginalize diverse realities of Jewish experiences and identities that reflect different social, historical, geographic, economic, and cultural contexts. (Contains 7 footnotes.)