Usually less than people fear on matters of practice, and more than people expect on matters of family.
Neither tradition is a subset of the other, and neither is the default against which the other is measured. They are two long-standing streams of Jewish life with different customs, liturgies, foods and family cultures.
What actually differs
Custom, extensively. Different liturgy and melodies, different pronunciation of Hebrew, different rulings on some matters — the best-known being kitniyot on Pesach, permitted in most Sephardic communities and avoided in most Ashkenazi ones. Different customs around weddings, mourning, naming children. Ashkenazi communities generally do not name a child after a living relative; many Sephardic communities specifically do.
Food, completely. Sounds trivial. It is not. Food is how families express care, and what a holiday table looks like carries a great deal of feeling.
Family culture, often. Broad generalisations are risky here, but one pattern comes up repeatedly: in many Sephardic and Mizrahi families — particularly Persian, Syrian, Moroccan and Iraqi communities — parents are closely involved in a serious relationship early, and extended family is part of daily life rather than an occasional event. Many Ashkenazi-American families operate with more distance between the couple and the parents.
Neither is better. But a couple where one person’s normal is weekly Friday nights with twenty relatives and the other’s is a phone call on Sundays will need to negotiate that explicitly.
What is expected at a wedding. Different customs, sometimes different expectations about size, cost, and who decides.
What does not differ
Jewish status. Both are entirely Jewish, and any suggestion otherwise is prejudice rather than halachah.
Observance level. Both traditions contain the full range from secular to strictly observant. Knowing someone is Sephardic tells you nothing about how observant they are.
The honest part about preference
Many people, and many families, have a preference. Sometimes it is the family’s more than the person’s.
Having one is not shameful, and it is worth being specific about what it actually is. Usually it is one of three things:
- Custom. Wanting your own traditions in your home. Reasonable, and largely solvable — most couples end up following one tradition at home while honouring both.
- Family culture. Wanting a particular level of family involvement. Also reasonable, and genuinely important — but it is about family culture, not ethnicity, and plenty of families do not match their community’s stereotype.
- Family pressure. Worth separating out. If the preference is your parents’ and not yours, you need to know that before you act on it for twenty years.
Where a preference tips into treating one background as better than another, that is something Jewish communities have historically done to each other and should not. JLov records background as a multiple-selection with no ranking, and records whether background is a preference for you — without treating any answer as the correct one.
What to actually discuss
- Whose customs does the home follow — and for the ones you are not keeping, how do you explain that to the family who does?
- How involved is each family expected to be, week to week?
- Whose customs govern the wedding, and who is disappointed either way?
- What do the children learn — which pronunciation, which melodies, which holiday table?
- Is either family unhappy about this, and if so, what is our position?
Couples who handle this well generally do the same thing: they treat it as two traditions being combined rather than one winning, and they decide in advance rather than discovering it at the first holiday.
See also: Dating someone from a different Jewish background and the Family & In-Law Alignment tool.