Mixed Race Studies

Jews of Color Get Personal and Political at First-Ever National Gathering

Forward
2016-05-04

Sigal Samuel, Opinion Editor

If you want to get black Jews, Mizrahi Jews and a Palestinian-American Muslim to burst into tears at the same time, invite Yavilah McCoy to talk about hair.

Speaking at the opening plenary of the Jews of Color National Convening, which took place May 1–3 in Manhattan, McCoy gestured at the woman beside her, a fellow black Jewish leader named April Baskin . “I was there one night when she was just a girl and she was crying with joy on the shoulder of another black woman, because that was the first time she’d worn her hair in a full afro in a Jewish space — the first time she felt like she could show up as her full self.”

Hearing this memory brought to life, Baskin teared up and diverted her gaze from the 100-plus Jews of color who had piled into the synagogue sanctuary at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which hosted the conference.

But McCoy wasn’t done. She turned to the audience and said, “Everyone here needs to hear this: You are beautiful. You are gorgeous. Anyone who told you otherwise was lying in the name of white supremacy.”…

Read the entire article here.

The New Jewish Diaspora?

Forward
2016-04-28

Sam Kestenbaum
Shavei Israel

For centuries, world travelers dreamed of finding distant Jewish tribes in the faraway corners of their known world — over the mountains, in remote villages, practicing customs preserved in isolation.
Today, a quick Google search will do.

In Facebook groups and on Skype, on Whatsapp and Instagram, communities from Africa, Asia and the Americas gather to explore Judaism — and, as many see it, to rekindle ancestral connections to their ancient faith.

Individuals and communities have emerged in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, China, India, Spain, Peru, Portugal and elsewhere. Estimates vary about the numbers of broadly defined “emerging” communities — and range at the upper end in the millions.

Is this the Jewish Diaspora of the 21st century?

That’s the question that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is now considering. The State of Israel, for the most part, has kept many of these groups at a distance, wary of making blanket decisions and of parsing out each community’s complicated ancestral claims or individual religious practice…

Read the entire article here.

On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Hebrew Israelite Rabbi from Harlem

The Assimilator: Intermarrying high and low culture
Forward
2016-03-31

Sam Kestenbaum, Staff Writer

Wikicommons / Solomon Souza / YouTube

When Rabbi Mordecai Herman would visit the Lower East Side of the 1920s, then teeming with Jewish immigrants from Europe, he cut an intriguing figure.

He was a wizened black rabbi and former sailor from Harlem who spoke Hebrew, some Yiddish, and was a pioneering spiritual leader of the early black Hebrew Israelite movement.

Now, nearly a century after his life’s work, Herman has been memorialized on the streets of Jerusalem — a Jewish homecoming for a forgotten religious figure.

This is thanks to Solomon Souza, an Israeli artist who has transformed Jerusalem’s central Mehane Yehudah market into a pop-up art gallery, emblazoning the enclosed market’s shuttered metal doors with over 150 graffiti portraits of iconic figures like Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the biblical prophet Moses…

Read the entire article here.

Jewish Uses and Abuses of Martin Luther King’s Memory

Forward
2016-01-18

Jared Jackson, Founder/Executive Director
Jews in ALL Hues

Four years ago, I made a promise to myself: I would not accept any more invitations to speak to the Jewish community on Martin Luther King weekend. Since then, I have dutifully kept that promise. But this year, I’m breaking it.

Here’s the thing: I used to love MLK weekend. In fact, I still have a deep love for it. The service projects, the gathering of people from different religious and humanistic traditions, and learning just a bit more about the civil rights era from people who were there — it was always a time I could look forward to. As a Jewish professional, I noticed that this was also the time when many communities reached out to Jewish leaders of color for speaking engagements. And I used to go to those events and speak to some of those communities.

Then I realized how many Ashkenazi Jewish communities take credit for a social justice heritage to which they are not currently contributing. It’s fine to have an event honoring the legacy of Jewish involvement in the civil rights era, so long as there is a clear plan to continue the work that King, Abraham Joshua Heschel and many others started…

Read the entire article here.

Meet April Baskin, the Multiracial Face of Reform Judaism

Forward
2015-11-28

Allison Kaplan Sommer (Haaretz)

Image: Haaretz

See also: “Black and Jewish: New Reform Leader Works to Bring Marginalized Groups Into the Tribe” on 2015-11-25 from Haaretz.

To meet April Baskin is to see the change in American Jewry personified. A tall, confident, 32-year-old with an impressive mane of curly hair and a wide smile, the self-described “multiracial Jewish woman of color” is the newest executive in the Reform Jewry movement.

Her offbeat job title—vice president for audacious hospitality—incorporates the catchphrase that the Union for Reform Judaism has embraced as its central mission. It is meant both to include aggressively welcoming newcomers into its institutions, along with widening its tent by inviting groups that have traditionally felt marginalized from mainstream Jewish institutional life – this includes interfaith couples and families, as well as adults who grew up in interfaith homes, LGBT Jews, Jews with disabilities, unaffiliated Jews and multiracial Jews like herself. “The Jewish community has been by and large marginalizing these groups and put them on the back burner if they have even been on the stove at all,” she says.

Her job is to put these groups front and center. Baskin sums up the philosophy with which she is approaching her admittedly “enormous portfolio”: “It is the belief that we will be a stronger Jewish community when we welcome and incorporate the diversity that is the reality and future of Jewish life.” Since unaffiliated Generation X and millennials are another important target for her outreach work, her young age is an advantage, rather than an obstacle.

…It is language, however, that Baskin’s family hasn’t really been able to avoid. She was raised in a Jewish home by her Ashkenazi mother and African-American father. Early on, they regularly received questions about “what” she was, and thus sought out the expertise of a psychology professor, who recommended they tell Baskin she was “multiracial and Jewish.” The couple raised April and her brother in Sacramento, California “enmeshed in Jewish life” complete with a close-knit Reform congregation and Reform Jewish summer camp…

Read the entire article here.

Does ‘Half Chinese, Half Jewish’ Condemn Me To Being Neither?

Forward
2015-08-21

Rachel E. Gross

When I was four years old, my father introduced me to his colleague, Jing. “Are you Chinese?” I asked, eyeing her shrewdly. “Yes,” she replied. “So am I,” I said. “And shoe-ish, too!”

My father likes to tell this story, I think, because it illustrates my self-assurance: Even at that young age, I knew exactly who I was.

What I didn’t anticipate was that others might have opinions, too. That hit home recently when I wrote a NPR column on being “half-Chinese, half-Jewish.” Suddenly, people on the Internet were dictating my identity to me. “The author is not half Jewish,” one wrote in the comments, citing Orthodox halacha that deems you Jewish only if your mother is. “She is not Jewish at all.” How did he know which of my parents was Jewish? “I Googled her,” he wrote…

Read the entire article here.

I’m a Mizrahi Jew. Do I Count as a Person of Color?

Forward
2015-08-10

Sigal Samuel, Deputy Digital Media Editor

Eye of the Beholder: Sigal Samuel has been considered white and non-white, depending on who’s looking. (Image: Martyna Starosta)

Am I a person of color?

You’d think there would be a straightforward answer to a question like that. And for a while, I thought there was. I thought the answer was yes.

When I look at my grandparents — four Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab lands — I see people who were born in India and Iraq and Morocco, who grew up speaking Hindi and Arabic. When I stand in Sephora buying makeup, the shade I choose is closer to “ebony” than to “petal.” When I walk down the street, perfect strangers routinely stop me to ask: “Where are you from? Are you Persian? Indian? Arab? Latina?” When I go through airport security, I always — always — get “randomly selected” for additional screening.

I was pretty sure all this made me a person of color.

And then an acquaintance, who is Jewish and African-American, told me in the course of a casual conversation that no, actually, I don’t count…

Read the entire article here.

The Original Rachel Dolezal Was a Jew Named Mezz Mezzrow

Forward
2015-06-16

Seth Rogovoy

As we all know, Rachel Dolezal was by no means the first white American to take on aspects of African-Americanness in her persona — calling Elvis, is anybody home? — although she will go down in history as one of the all-time champions of the syndrome based on the sheer chutzpahdik of her transformation. But blackness has always been an integral part of American identity, and has only grown more so with the passage of time (think of white-rap pop star Eminem and black President of the United States Barack Obama for two recent mirror-image examples), so that for any American, it’s nearly impossible not to take on some degree of Afritude without even trying.

But for all her efforts at “crossing the line,” including attending Howard University, changing her name, and becoming an official of the NAACP, Dolezal might not merit the crown from the all-time champion of race-crossing. That honor still and forever may belong to jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, born Milton Mesirow to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Chicago in 1899. We have yet to hear the full story from Dolezal herself, and to understand just what her motivations were in creating a new African-American identity for herself to such an extreme that her parents felt impelled to out her as a liar. But Mezzrow’s story may at least provide help in understanding or at least contextualizing the Dolezal phenomenon…

Read the entire article here.