Caroline
Favorite Jewish food: Latkes
Favorite Jewish holiday: Passover How would you describe your identity? I am a biracial Jewish girl. My mother is Ashkenazi Jewish and my dad is African American. Do you feel like your looks and experiences are included in the general picture of what a Jewish person is? No. I don’t think Jews of color are represented in the general Jewish communities in America. I think that’s partially because Jews of color are a minority, and just numerically there aren’t quite as many. It’s more because the Jewish communities that exist are Ashkenormative to the point where I think a lot of Jews of color choose to be more involved in other communities that aren’t the Jewish community. |
How does this affect your feelings about Judaism?
Judaism as a religion, no. Judaism as a community, yes. I really wasn’t involved in the Jewish community until after I left college. I didn’t go to the Hillel. After my bat mitzvah, I didn’t do anything else at my synagogue, which I think was partially because my full identity wasn’t reflected in the community, and partially because growing up with a mixed identity I preferred to be in spaces that emphasized diversity over spaces that highlighted a specific identity. I didn’t go to Jewish communities, but I also didn’t go to homogeneously Black communities. I chose to find mixed groups instead. Do you feel like you’ve generally been welcomed in Judaism? Why or why not? Yes, I do. My initial interaction with the Jewish community was highly connected to my elementary school growing up. I went to a very diverse private elementary school where most of the Jewish people in the community were also part of that school. I think because my initial interactions with Jews were not in a homogeneously Jewish space, I felt like I saw that as one of many identities in my early forming in what it meant to be a part of a Jewish community. Because we were such a small community, it was very welcoming. I was in a bat mitzvah class of three, there wasn’t really much of an option. I did Masa Teaching Fellows, which was my first serious dive into a Jewish community post-college, which was very welcoming. At the point, I was in Israel, so there was a lot more Jewish diversity in the space I was working in with Mizrahi Jews and things like that. Can you tell me a little more about the Masa Israel Teaching Fellows experience? Masa Israel Teaching Fellows (MITF) is one of the programs that the Israeli government has created to bring in Jewish people in the diaspora to spend extended periods of time in Israel. I taught English, I was an English assistant, in a 3rd in 4th grade classroom the year after I graduated from college. I was working in an Orthodox elementary, Modern Orthodox and in Beer Sheva, so it was primarily Mizrahi Jews. I think that being brown there was all very complicated. Being in Israel, I can be confused as Mizrahi, or I can be confused as Arab, or I can be confused as Mexican. There’s a lot of different shades of brown in Israel that you don’t see here. For me in that space, it was more confusing to my students that I was American and Jewish than that I was brown and Jewish. They didn’t understand the concept of Judaism existing outside of Israel because a Magen David (Jewish star) to them is an Israel star. It felt like a very strange combination of things, but it was one of the less relevant experiences. I think if I was fully Black it would have been completely different. I definitely think a lot of the people I worked with were very racist against Black people, but because I’m brown, I fit into an understanding of things within their worldview. |
"Being in Israel, I can be confused as Mizrahi, or I can be confused as Arab, or I can be confused as Mexican. There’s a lot of different shades of brown in Israel that you don’t see here." |
"It’s important to me because I didn’t meet another Jew of color until my senior year of college, other than my brother. Having grown up in a relatively affluent, very white community, it didn’t dawn on me that there was something missing..." |
Have you felt excluded from other spaces because of your Jewish identity?
No. I don’t think so. I think my Jewish identity is second to my African-American identity in the way that it’s observed and the way I’m treated based on identities. It’s actually significantly easier for me to lean on my brownness to be welcome into spaces that are racially and ethnically diverse than it is for me to lean on my Jewishness. Do you feel like you’ve been able to find communities where your whole identity is accepted? Yeah. I was a dance major, so the majority of my world has been artists. In that community, I’ve always felt significantly more welcome as a fully mixed person than I have in any space that tries to focus on identity as a purpose. I talked to Bella last week, and she mentioned that you two had talked about a group for people with intersecting identities. Can you tell me more about that work and why it is important to you? Yeah. It’s important to me because I didn’t meet another Jew of color until my senior year of college, other than my brother. Having grown up in a relatively affluent, very white community, it didn’t dawn on me that there was something missing until I was like, “Oh my gosh there’s another one of us!”. It blew my mind. Working in Hillel and working in a Jewish community, I want to make sure that is not an experience my students have to deal with. On the other side of that, there are so few Jews of color who want to be a part of a Jewish community or have made the effort towards being part of a Jewish community that it also scares me to try to build those communities and then find that there aren’t actually enough people interested in being involved. The last thing I want to do is build a community where one person shows up and feels even more alone than they did before. It’s a complicated thing to try to build a community when you don’t actually know if there’s anyone who is looking for it. But it’s very important, especially now when there is so much conversation about race in all spaces. It’s such a specific place to be in this world where your politics and your understanding of yourself and others and Israel intersects in a way where they don’t for most of the Jews you are interacting with. |
What do you think we could do as a larger Jewish community to make our spaces more welcoming for people who identify differently from the norm?
That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and I don’t think I’ll ever have a real answer. In general, Jews who present as white accepting and recognizing that whiteness is really important. The conversations that are the hardest with me are white people who, walking down the street will be perceived as white, feeling like they aren’t white in conversations about race. It discounts a lot of the experiences that Jews of color face, and makes it impossible to get past that in conversations about racial inequality. I think also putting an effort into staffing and hiring as many diverse people as possible within Jewish communities. I just don’t see, at any point, a lot of people who are going to want to join a community where they don’t see themselves in it, which is kind of an ongoing cycle. To be the only person [like you] in the room is never going to keep more Jews of color in a space for a longer period of time. My fellowship gave us mentors within our own mixed identities, so I have a Jew of color who is also working in the Jewish community who I talk to every once in a while. She worked for Hillel for a few years and then left because she was like, “I did my time, I represented, but I’m over being that token”. The only way to fix that is to make sure you’re hiring enough people of color so that they see themselves represented in the room all the time and don’t always feel like they have to be that voice. Do you feel spaces like the Metro Chicago Hillel and other Jewish organizations that you’re a part of have done a good job hiring Jews of color and Jews of other diverse identities? That it happens, yes? I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s being done well. I’m a Springboard fellow, so I’m in a group of 50 fellows that Hillel International places on different campuses. Out of that 50 or 55 of us, three of us are people of color. Having met my first Jews of color that wasn’t me two years ago, it was great that I wasn’t the only one. But one of them quit within the first semester because she felt like, even though in the cohort there were a couple of us, on her own team there wasn’t. It’s the first step, but in order to make it work, there has to be more effort put into recruiting, and also more effort put into hiring and supporting Jews of color who don’t present as about as white as they could while also being Jews of color. I feel like everyone who has been hired and is both Jewish and a person of color is very used to being that only person in the room, and you have to push past that to the point where people don’t feel like they have to adjust to be easy to interact with in spaces where people aren’t used to having people of color. But I do think a big part is just numbers. If, out of 50, 10 of us were people of color, I don’t think everyone would leave after a year. |
"The conversations that are the hardest with me are white people who, walking down the street will be perceived as white, feeling like they aren’t white in conversations about race. It discounts a lot of the experiences that Jews of color face, and makes it impossible to get past that in conversations about racial inequality." |
"I love that Hebrew is a part of being Jewish. I think there’s something really beautiful about having a tradition where, regardless of where you are in the world and what language you speak in your day-to-day life, the language in which you pray is the same everywhere." |
Does Judaism/identifying as Jewish play an important role in your life? Why or why not?
Yeah. It definitely does. I grew up in a conservative synagogue, so a lot of my habits and traditions are totally tied into that. I definitely feel like it is something that will be the case for my whole life. It also has become a very mixed and integrated experience. My dad is African-American, but he learned to do all the Jewish cooking because he’s the better cook in my family. Those kinds of things— he doesn’t go to synagogue with us, but he understands various aspects of it so that we’ve been able to create traditions in my life that feel like they represent all of the parts of my family. That feels more important than very Ashkenazi Jewish traditions that I didn’t grow up with. What is your favorite part about being Jewish? I love that Hebrew is a part of being Jewish. I think there’s something really beautiful about having a tradition where, regardless of where you are in the world and what language you speak in your day-to-day life, the language in which you pray is the same everywhere. That’s a really beautiful, unifying thing about Judaism that isn’t really the case in a lot of other religions, regardless of whether you actually speak Hebrew or not. Travelling and going to different places and recognizing things is a really beautiful part, especially when we’re such a small minority. I also think the concept of familiarity in Judaism. Especially in Israel, but kind of everywhere, finding another person who is Jewish is a true sense of connection. In Israel, if you’re Jewish, you have a home for Shabbat anytime, anywhere, whenever you want. If you’re backpacking and you meet someone else Jewish, they’ll send you to their grandpa’s house. That feeling of everyone being a part of the same family is my favorite part of being Jewish. |