Shades of GrayPosted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Religion, United States, Women on 2010-08-26 16:08Z by Steven |
American Jewish Life Magazine
January/February 2007
E. B. Solomont
Lacey Schwartz had the typical middle-class Jewish upbringing in upstate New York. Until her 18th birthday when her mom told her she was the product of an affair with a black man. Now Lacey is making a documentary about her newfound life as a black Jew.
The problem was the boxes on her college application. The ones where you check white or black. Lacey Schwartz didn’t know which to check, so she sent a picture instead, which led the school administrators to enroll her as a black student, one who inexplicably had two white Jewish parents. That’s how she made it 18 years before blowing the lid off the family secret: That her mother had an affair with a black man, that she was the product of their union.
In a certain sense, the boxes still haunt a 30-year-old Lacey — now a Harvard-educated lawyer and successful film producer in New York City. American culture seeks to compartmentalize people, she tells me during a discussion of her work-in-progress documentary about black Jews in America…
Read the entire article here.