Yes, real Jews speak Hebrew and even Ashkenazi Jews know that Hebrew is more accurately spoken with a Sephardic dialect (what you learned) than an Ashkenazi one.
Before the Migdal Bavel (that’s the Tower of Babel for all of you in Rio Linda) where mankind went from one language to seventy, the single language was Hebrew. Mankind is on track to speak a single language again and from what I can see it will be Hebrew again or some proto-Semitic language that sounds similar.
Teach your children and grand children today how to speak it and they’ll be ahead of the curve.
Don’t know how that got posted twice.
It’s been so long that I don’t even remember what form we learned, but it must have been ashkenazi. I wish I remembered more, but time takes its toll. Not long after we finished the course, I got sent out to Teheran for a couple of months. While out shopping for souvenirs one afternoon, I stumbled on to a jeweler’s shop on the main drag, Takht-i-Jamshid. It was owned and operated by Jews, whom I assumed to be Sephardic. I tried speaking with them in Hebrew, but failed miserably. A few years later, I got stationed in Saudi Arabia, and while there, my late wife and I took some Arabic lessons in the embassy. There were a lot of similarities between Arabic and Hebrew, the most obvious being the tri-radical root system of the verbs, and sublineal diacritical marks. I didn’t do very well at Arabic either. Turns out I do a lot better with the Romance languages. I did well to teach my kids English. If they want to learn Hebrew, they’ll have to do it on their own. At my age now, I wouldn’t take on anything as challenging as Hebrew or Arabic.