"This volume makes an important and welcome contribution by focusing on this particular community. Doing so allows the volume to both show and hint at a rich diversity within this one otherwise select group."—Marla Brettschneider, author of Revolutionary Legacies: Jewish Feminist Political Thinking with Jamaica Kincaid, Golda Meir, Hannah Arendt, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, and Emma Goldman
Description
Black, Jewish, and Beautiful brings together powerful perspectives and showcases the vastly divergent ways people come to inhabit a shared Blewish, or Black-Jewish, identity. These voices show that Black Jewishness is just one dimension of their multifaceted lives, as they explore how they feel, think, and make sense of who they are.
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan bring together an array of oral histories of Black Jews by birth, others who converted, and those who were raised one way only to discover later that their identity was not what they had thought. The result is a collection of myriad identities, told through rocky, sometimes-frayed structures. Contributors are open and frank in discussing the good, the bad, the beautiful, the heart wrenching, and the ugly in their experiences.
As the first anthology of Black Jewish voices to juxtapose multiple genres—interviews, essays, reflections, and more—Black, Jewish, and Beautiful is an essential read.
About the Author
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is a vocalist, composer, and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. His essays on music and culture have appeared in a number of publications, including Jewish Currents and Moment Magazine.
Sara Feldman is preceptor in Yiddish in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is a co-organizer of Harvard’s Black and Jewish: A Talk Series and co-author of “Voices from Black Lives Matter Protests / Koyles fun blek layvs meter protestn” in In geveb. Her essays, translations, and scholarship appear in Slavic and East European Journal, Apikorsus, AJS Perspectives, and Baltic Worlds, among others.
Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and is a professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois. Her books include Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth.
