Ashkenazim: did you actually grow up not knowing that Sephardim/Mizrahim/other Jews exist?

I’ve been reading As a Jew by Sarah Hurwitz (highly recommend it ), and one thing she talked about has started to really bug me.

Basically, she had almost no Jewish education growing up (which she has remedied beautifully), and if I understood correctly, she didn’t know until she was an adult that there are Jews whose ancestors never lived in Western/Central/Eastern Europe. I’ve seen people make similar statements here and I’m curious how common that is.

I grew up going to Jewish day schools so I realize my education was more extensive in the Jewish department than a lot American Jews. But I was racking my brain and I’m pretty sure my first direct exposure to the terms Ashkenazi and Sephardi was a segment in a Rechov Sumsum video from the ’80’s. I watched those from a really young age.

I also happened to live in a city with a very old Sephardi congregation, and there were always other people floating around my life one way or another, even if the majority of Jews I knew and interacted with were Ashkenazi. So I tend to be kind of shocked that people say they never learned that basic piece of Jewish history. Was it really all that niche a concept?

For the record, my own ancestry is 100% European but 0% Polish or Russian (except in places that changed due to post war border adjustments), which also seems to be beyond a lot of people’s awareness, although that’s more of a gentile issue than a Jewish one. I just always bristle when I see Ashkenazi defined as “Eastern European Jews.” My German side would like a word…