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 Arabic Outreach Program, and founded Distinctions Journal as a platform for Sephardic and Mizrahi writers, scholars, artists, and ideas. She has also led the development of JIMENA's expansive educational initiatives, built to give Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews the tools to explore, preserve, and share their own heritage on their own terms.

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 produced nearly one thousand educational and cultural events nationwide and 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–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 this work is a broader 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—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.

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

2026 Selected Writings

• Times of Israel, "What the Arab World Taught Us About Anti-Zionism Long Before Ezra Klein" (April, 2026)
• Times of Israel, "Campus to K12 Classroom: Anti-Zionism in Education" (March 2026) 

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

Select Podcasts and Interviews

• Hadassah Magazine, "Sephardic and Mizrahi Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience," panel with Deputy Editor Libby Barnea (July 2026)
• WUWM 89.7, Milwaukee's NPR, "A Chat with the Head of JIMENA" (May 2026)
• Just For This with Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch, "Sarah Levin: Unapologetic Identity" (November 2025)
• Stanford Berman Jewish Policy Archive, "Understanding America's Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews" (September 2025)
• Elluminate, Crown JEWEL Conversation with Sarah Levin  
• Jewish Women's Archive, Can We Talk?, "JIMENA: Mizrahi and Sephardi Voices"
• Jim Joseph Foundation, "Learning with JIMENA: Insights from Leaders in the Field"
• Shalom Hartman Institute, Identity/Crisis, "How California Jews Grappled With a New Curriculum" 

In the News

• The Forward, "Sephardic and Mizrahi groups accuse New York Magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews" (August 2026)
• Hadassah Magazine, "A Snapshot of the Sephardic American Experience" (July, 2026)
• JNS, "Two groups ask Trump admin, House ed panel to probe California program for K-12 teachers over anti-Israel bias" (May 2026)