This essay first appeared as the “Afterword” to the Second Revised Edition of Black Power, Jewish Lives by Marc Dollinger, NYU Press, 2023.
In 1985, I became bat mitzvah at a large Reform synagogue in San Francisco. Its two thousand congregants included the city’s mayor and several other prominent civic officials. And while there is no data chronicling San Francisco’s racial and ethnic Jewish diversity during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, during my formative years, nine congregants, 0.0045 percent of my synagogue’s membership, were Jewish people of color. This was a woefully inadequate representation when considering Jewish people of color have been in the United States as early as the late 1700s and early 1800s, and constituted up to 10 percent of early American communities. (1) To be clear, San Francisco’s population of Jewish people of color in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was certainly greater than the numbers at my synagogue. Anecdotally, there were my friends at public elementary school who were Japanese and Jewish who taught me how to make gyoza; there were my homegirls from public middle school who were Thai and Jewish and introduced me to their Buddhist temple, which, like my synagogue, was within walking distance of my Western Addition housing co-op; and there were my two downstairs neighbors, as well as my friend “across the way”—all of us both Black and Jewish and never reached out to by our San Francisco Jewish community.
From age seven until about fourteen years old, I spent every Sunday at Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco. Founded between 1851 and 1854, Sherith Israel is one of San Francisco’s oldest synagogues, established to grow San Francisco’s Jewish community. Sherith Israel also represented a physical manifestation of division among San Francisco’s earliest Jews. Sherith Israel was created to follow the minhag—tradition—of Polish Jews, while its competitor, Congregation Emanu-El, also founded in the 1850s, was built to serve San Francisco’s German Jewish community. As a child, I always understood that Sherith Israel was for San Francisco “brown-haired Jews,” while Emanu-El was for the “blond-haired Jews.” Whether it was the proximate geography to my low-income co-op or my first-generation Polish/Romanian mother’s roots that more naturally connected our family to Sherith Israel, Sherith Israel would become our home synagogue for the first phase of my formal Jewish education. Before I dropped out of Sunday and Hebrew school in the late 1980s, my family regularly engaged in religious and social events at the synagogue—sometimes in the larger Jewish community—where I experienced being called “Blewish” or “Schvartze” but never “Black.” Even still, I was a trusting participant in Jewish life because that was expected of me, as a follower of the congregation’s core culture and senior clergy.
As was expected, every Sunday morning I would leave my low-income co-op apartment in San Francisco’s Western Addition and begin my just-over-half-a-mile stroll out of The Square, into Japantown, through the Fillmore, and up the hill into Pacific Heights to attend my Reform Jewish religious school. I remember being taught good Jewish values, how to make tiny challot (but not that one should pray as they braid), and all the basic prayers in transliterated Hebrew. I was taught about Israel and falafels and even the Jewish Defense League but was never taught how to study Talmud or invited to grapple with text or informed that Palestinians exist.
“Social justice,” a concept that looks very different in 2023 than it did in the 1970s and 1980s, is a term that has been retroactively affixed to the legacy of the then–senior rabbi, of Blessed Memory, who dominated every aspect of my Jewish education from 1979 until 1987. He was a grand figure in both physical stature and reputational esteem, gracing the bimah during services in a billowing white robe with ballooned sleeves and pontooned yarmulke mimicking a pope’s miter more than what we think of as a contemporary Jewish skullcap. The senior rabbi was both respected and revered; he attracted numerous families to Sherith Israel, fortified the synagogue’s fiscal position, fed those who were experiencing food insecurity, and helped lead communal efforts to rescue and resettle Jews from the former Soviet Union. He was a man of great impact and also a spiritual leader who, contrary to some versions of history, missed the mark when it came to social justice. He was absent on issues related to women’s rights, LGBTQIA equality, and racial injustice—both in his San Francisco community and right there in the synagogue he led with such power and potency.
On several occasions in the 1980s, our religious school’s class time focused on supporting the freedom of Soviet Jews. As a group, we would walk—well, march, if I am being accurate—from the synagogue to the Soviet consulate about a mile away. There we were with poster boards and marker signs demanding that Soviet Jews be free. And while trekking with signs and chants reflecting the refrain made famous by Moses but universal by the civil rights movement, “Let my people go!” it never occurred to me—and no religious-school teacher or clergy ever pointed out to us as a class—the connection between our chant and those of Black Americans decades ago, the Black historical roots of the neighborhood through which we walked, and the Black history of the pedagogy of our protest.
It was certainly a missed opportunity to engage students with an integrated Jewish history, but I understand that neglecting to teach me (and others) our Jewish history may have been an oversight rather than an intentional historical omission. But such an oversight by respected, esteemed, and highly educated Jewish community leaders suggests a level of intellectual and cultural laziness. It also makes me wonder if intentional racism was at play. That we were not taught the tools that powered the Soviet Jewry movement were borrowed from the Black Power movement seems like a pedagogical and subject-matter failure.
As an alternative to dropping out from organized Jewish education, what could have been of a young, Black Jewish kid in San Francisco if her religious-school education had taught her that the tools used to liberate Soviet Jews were the same as those of the Black Power movement? How did educators miss the power and profundity found in teaching that the tools she was now using to free Jews a world away had been used by others to liberate her own family from the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow? Instead of pushing that history to the margins, what might it mean to the generations of Jews of Color like me, who began their formal study in a religious school, to experience Jewish education and learn a Jewish history that intentionally and deeply connects us to our Jewish community and leverages our whole identity to shape us into the Jewish leaders the United States so desperately needs now and for our future?
In 2023, 20 percent of U.S. Jews are part of multiracial families, and 15 percent to 20 percent of U.S. Jews are people of color.
I dropped out of religious school in 1987 in favor of spending more time in my urban San Francisco neighborhood and high school. It is not that I felt any pressure from neighborhood peers to do so—in fact, nobody cared that I was Jewish. My San Francisco generation was filled with children of immigrants with heavy names, lunches with pungent flavors and aromas from various homelands, and religiously observant parents. Rather, there was no gravitational force pulling me into synagogue. I could see my Jewish friends at school. At home in my Black/Japanese neighborhood, I could have meaningful and provocative conversations about core values with people who shared some of my experience as part of a multiracial community. Steps from my apartment front door led me to daily interactions with Black Panthers, survivors of Japanese incarceration camps, and Holocaust survivors, all of whom lived in and were part of the fabric of my larger community.
***
Given that my Jewish education lacked a diversity of perspectives and depth of Jewish history, for me reading the first many chapters of Black Power, Jewish Politics was a bit like a church revival. I was filled with “uh-huhs” and “Amens” every time a truth was revealed about the complex, sometimes-harmful-to-the-Black-Power-movement involvement of Jewish organizations supporting civil rights. Many Black Americans know there is truth to the beloved narrative that Jews were an integral part of the civil rights movement. But we also know there is more nuance to the stories Jews have told over the decades. It was affirming, meaningful, and satisfying to see this more dimensional truth documented in the first edition of Marc Dollinger’s Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s.
And, as I read into chapter 5, “Black Power, American Jews, and the Soviet Jewry Movement,” deeper emotion stirred in me. I do not think it was Dollinger’s intention to elicit feelings of disappointment toward Jewish leaders working so hard to free Soviet Jews. But something did not sit right with me when recalling my own experience of Jewish educators not teaching me this important history of Jewish leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement “emulating” the strategies of the Black Power movement.
After several reads of chapter 5, I settled on the right word to encapsulate how I felt about Jewish leaders borrowing the strategies of the Black Power movement for the Soviet Jewry movement and never teaching people like me this history—my history—in religious school. The word is betrayed: betrayed by my Jewish educators of the 1970s and 1980s for not seeing and understanding me as both Black and Jewish, betrayed by depriving me of the opportunity to know about and be proud of what my Black family taught my Jewish family about ensuring a life free of enslavement and full of liberation. I even felt betrayed by the omission of Jews of Color from the first edition of this very book—Black Power, Jewish Politics. That an esteemed historian could fail to properly consider the existence of Jews of Color illustrates the lack of imaginative capacity of our communal historians who so comfortably leave us out from a U.S. Jewish history that in reality has never been and will never be white.
The notion that all Jews in the United States are white is a myth we can dismantle with data dating back to the 1700s. In 2023, 20 percent of U.S. Jews are part of multiracial families, and 15–20 percent of U.S. Jews are people of color. (2) Those numbers increase every day. This means that what is good for the Jews cannot be framed by, taught by, and responded to by only white Jewish leaders and educators. Such an approach risks teaching Jewish young people and responding to Jewish communal needs through too narrow a lens. In this scenario, content, curricula, and perspectives related to Jewish life, learning, and other areas of engagement are informed only by white experiences and white needs. Moreover, by excluding the stories and perspectives of Jews of Color, the Jewish community’s teachings and work risk leaning toward bias. This dynamic is problematic in general, as any group speaking for another reinforces a dominant-subordinate dynamic that certainly has never served Jews well.
By clergy, educators, and communal leaders, U.S. Jews have been taught to maintain and pass down—L’dor V’dor—from generation to generation, this notion that “the North American Jewish narrative reflects clear distinction between Blacks and Jews,” where white is “integral to . . . who and what we imagine when we think about the organized Jewish world.”(3) So it is particularly interesting that Dollinger writes an epilogue offering the reader potent, sometimes provocative insights and thoughts to reframe, even recontextualize, the first 250 pages of Black Power, Jewish Politics. Intersectionality is real. Black lives matter. Jews of Color exist. The epilogue’s reframe, the recontextualizing of the entire text, creates some level of content chaos. Had intersectionality, Black Lives Matter, and Jews of Color been integrated into the corpus of Black Power, Jewish Politics, that sort of integration would have rendered the book unwritable, complicating the very premise and construct of the book itself and, as Dollinger says, “forc[ing] a retelling of the Black-Jewish relationship and a reappraisal of what ‘good for the Jews’ means.” This historical-truth-integrated retelling would mean a dismantling of the historical and communal story that has predominated the post-1940s narrative about who is a U.S. Jew. This retelling would also inspire and invite a rebuilding, a strengthening of the U.S. Jewish communal fabric, because our new narrative would be not only honest and inclusive but also intersectional. This more accurate, intersectional understanding of ourselves as multiracial Jewish community would far better equip us as U.S. Jews to fight antisemitism—one of the foci of white supremacist hate—along with racism, the combination of which creates a uniquely U.S. brand of hate that is strategically designed to separate us from one another as U.S. Jews and to divide us from our coalition partners whom we need to survive and thrive as a racially diverse U.S. Jewry.
I lead an organization focused on Jews of Color with a particular expertise in field building, grant making, and research. Because we are people of color who are also Jewish, I am regularly invited by white Jews into moments of reminiscing about the civil rights movement and the Jewish notion that without white Jewish participation in the fight for civil rights, my family and I would still be living under Jim Crow or, even worse, still enslaved. This walk down memory lane inevitably makes a stop at the question, “What happened to the Black-Jewish partnership?” followed by a desire to know how a bridge between “Blacks and Jews” can be rebuilt. To date, this wonder is always framed by nostalgia for the not-entirely-accurate stories of Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. Even though it is general knowledge among Jews, I am often first asked if I know the contributions of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white, Jewish young adults who were murdered working and volunteering to advance voter registration and education as part of the civil rights 1964 Summer Project supported by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Next, I am invited to join the affection for the 1965 Selma march that crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a march that included Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Bunche, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. At this point in the conversation, the white colleague usually looks to me for some sense of kinship and shared history—and also for what feels like a desire for appreciation.
While possibly these exchanges about Blacks and Jews are unintentional, I believe that they are designed to try to evoke in me feelings of Black gratitude. These conversations, when driven by a white Jew, never include discussion of both the contributions of Jews to the civil rights movement and also the harm caused by those white Jews and organizations that were racist and, by extension, intimidated by Black Power and Black Freedom.
***
As Black Americans, we know that whiteness and the privileges that come with whiteness can create a divide between Blacks and whites—one filled with experiences of racism, marginalization, systemic inequity, and racial harm. And these race-based ills transcend religion and faith. Jewishness has not served as a prophylactic protecting European-background Jews from experiencing antisemitism. Jewishness and Jewish values have also failed at preventing a kind of osmosis experienced by many white Jews, an osmosis into the very racist systems of power and privilege that they claim to have once fought against in the 1960s. Similarly, Jewishness does not protect Jews of Color from the racism of white people in the United States, Jewish or otherwise.
In the groundbreaking text Once We Were Slaves, Laura Leibman chronicles the epic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family journey of Sarah and Isaac Moses as they move through Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and New York, during which they transform themselves and their lives from enslaved to becoming free. This book documents early communities of Jews of Color, in this case the largely forgotten population of people of mixed African and Jewish ancestry.
Jewishness and Jewish values have failed to prevent a kind of osmosis experienced by many white Jews into the very racist systems of power and privilege that they claim to have once fought against in the 1960s.
Leibman also establishes a historical context for the struggle against racism that Jews of Color consistently experience when assuming our rightful space as part of the established U.S. Jewish community. Leibman extracts from historical records that the established Jewish community has always required Jews of Color to shift our racial identities to conform to various Jewish-community race-based policies—policies that, for example, define and inform who may hold leadership roles in synagogues and Jewish day schools, and demonstrate the burden that Jews of Color have always carried in order to thrive among white peers in U.S. Jewish communities.
For the United States, including the U.S. Jewish community, the late 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s were informed by systemic racial hierarchy and enslavement. In the contemporary context, in which the institution of enslavement does not exist, how do we justify a contemporary U.S. Jewish communal era that in some cases continues to operate utilizing racialized policies and racist gatekeeping? Especially when we are empowered with the knowledge of racial equity and justice, we are driven by Jewish values like אלקים בצלם / B’tzelem Elohim / All people are made in the image of G-d, and the values of the civil rights movement inform so many areas of work and life.
Every day in the United States, when Jews are born, the percentage of Jews of Color ticks higher, urging, compelling U.S. Jewish communal leaders and educators not only to be informed about the history of Jews of Color in the United States but also to understand the role that racism has played in keeping us in and out of Jewish institutions, Jewish leadership, and Jewish life. Given the legacy of Jews of Color in the United States and the centuries-old efforts to marginalize Jews of Color from Jewish communal life, we must not wait a moment longer to rethink our approach to community building. How can predominantly white leaders working in predominantly white organizational contexts adequately represent contemporary, diverse U.S. Jewry and address our communal concerns? In what strategic universe would we assign a monoracial set of leaders and perspectives to serve the diversity of U.S. Jews who must not only survive but thrive in the face of racism and antisemitism?
There is no chance that this multiracial country and our racially diverse Jewish community will survive white-supremacist-fueled antisemitism and racism without Jews of Color and other people of color included as leaders.
Our current communal-leadership approach exists within a much too narrow frame to fully understand, represent, and be in service of the communal needs, including safety, of all U.S. Jews.
***
Brought to the United States enslaved, with national origin stripped from family identity, my family and I have had to learn to navigate and defy racism to thrive and survive. Enslavement, Jim Crow, Donald Trump—my family is born of the forge: my grandparents Rosa and Roy Taylor Sr., born in 1917 and 1916, respectively, both of Blessed Memory, met at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, defying trends and expectations for African Americans attending college in the 1930s. My uncle Ervin Rollins, of Blessed Memory, was the first Black procurement officer at Sterling Oil, out of Houston, Texas. And in the 1980s, my aunt Barbara Rollins, of Blessed Memory, was one of the few Black, female school principals in La Marque, Texas, public schools. And here I am, in 2023, more than one hundred racially exhausting years after my grandparents’ birth, as quite possibly the only Jewish philanthropic-fund executive in the United States who is not white. If we are here, meaning alive, our very existence is evidence that we are quite expert at resisting, responding to, and surviving racism. We have inside us a kind of tenacity and brilliance that has outsmarted the enslavers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Proud Boys. And there is no chance that this multiracial country and our racially diverse Jewish community will survive white-supremacist-fueled antisemitism and racism without Jews of Color and other people of color included as leaders in and of the conversations and the movements focused on freedom.
So why exactly do white Jews need coalitions with Jews of Color and other people of color to survive antisemitism in the United States? Not only do we have the tools and experience to survive and thrive in the face of a hate so potent that sometimes it kills us, but we understand what it means to be Black as part of the United States. We understand our rights and responsibilities, especially to other people of color and minorities marginalized by white supremacists. I wish more white Jewish leaders shared this understanding, commitment to allyship, and sense of loyalty. But that is often not the case, especially when leadership frames our U.S. Jewish community as generally white and functions as if that were the reality.
Given that U.S. Jews are just 2.2 percent of the United States population, 15–20 percent of us are people of color, 20–25 percent of us live in multiracial families, and by 2042, 50 percent of the United States will be nonwhite, white Jewish leaders could and should be much more open, vulnerable, and sometimes honorable about their relationships with Jews of Color. Rather, it strikes me as racist when white Jewish leaders want to talk with me about how to leverage Black folks, particularly Black Jews, to solve antisemitism but speak nothing of the hate-filled experiences endured by people of color. They seldom care to explore where there is space and purpose in fighting racism and antisemitism together.
It is like wanting to solve an equation but either choosing benignly or willfully to use just some of the required variables to complete the function. While I do not know if this is a case of unintentional ignorance or willful neglect, this kind of racism has a deeply negative and corrosive impact on Jews of Color and other people of color, and it retards the opportunities for collective safety for the U.S. Jewish community. If leaders embraced the reality that the U.S. Jewish community is multiracial and if more leaders reflected and embodied this reality, more minds and hearts would grow their capacity to be more racially inclusive and less racist, and to work in diverse and resilient coalitions. This multiracial mind-set and these diverse and resilient coalitions provide the very best chances for our racially diverse U.S. Jewish community to be safe, thrive, and survive.
I do not know what it is like to be Jewish in the United States and the progeny of two European-background parents whose racial and ethnic journey in the United States includes moving from once being nonwhite to becoming white. However, given the safety, security, and mobility that comes with whiteness, I can understand how compelling white power and privilege must be and why one would be recalcitrant at the idea of relinquishing such power and privilege—a potent combination that gives unearned, unencumbered access to authority and freedom in this country.
And I know from existing within a religious communal ecosystem predominated by whiteness and white power that this potent position that is occupied by most white Jews is also one that is at times uncomfortable, rife with complexity, and always tenuous. For many white Jews, without external expression of Judaism like yarmulkes and peyos, it must be terrifying to exist in a climate of antisemitism while hiding in plain sight from antisemitic white supremacists.
Sometimes not fully understanding and accepting the power and privilege that comes with whiteness, and while leading and educating from the location of that power and privilege, also means existing in a possibly unintentional-conflict position at odds with Jews of Color and other people of color. In the United States, Jews of Color and other people of color share pervasive experiences of being marginalized, aggressed upon, sometimes terrorized, and sometimes hunted because we are not white. And as expressions of racist power and privilege are systemic in the United States, white folks, including most white Jews who have shed their sheitels and head scarves, have to hold that they cannot be an ally to Jews of Color and other people of color while consciously simultaneously benefiting from that race-based systemic power and privilege. White Jews benefiting from white supremacy are also exposing people of color, including Jews of Color, to racial harm and reinforcing that harm.
And while I do not share the experience of being white, as a scholar and Black person with light-skin privilege, I absolutely understand the appeal of racial power. Power is a vehicle to important benefits like safety (or at least the illusion of) and access to resources denied to others, like money, influence, an excellent formal education, and the opportunity to live in a fine home in a safe neighborhood. To give all that up to align oneself with Jews of Color and other people of color means that the vulnerability of being Jewish is much more real, as relinquished is the opportunity to blend in with other white folks. Aligning oneself with Jews of Color and other people of color also has great benefits. Alignment means through experiencing, understanding, and living racial equity and justice, one chances to be part of this multiracial millennium—the millennium in which Jews of Color, Jewish multiracial families, and more than 40 percent of the United States currently exist.
***
In 2015, the white supremacist, white nationalist, and neo-Nazi Dylan Roof murdered nine church parishioners attending Bible study in a Charleston, South Carolina, African Methodist Episcopal church. When Roof was captured and arrested, after being given a custom Burger King meal, during his confession, he admitted that his murderous efforts were intended to ignite a race war.
We must retire the white Jewish manufactured binary construct of “Black and Jewish,” and for the survival of us all, align and ally ourselves to a multiracial community, coalition and nation.
In an effort to stop the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in 2017, armed white supremacist, white nationalist demonstrators at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” For many U.S. Jews, this was a startling and shocking reminder of the place white Jews are truly situated in the religious, racial hierarchy of the United States.
In 2020, a then-eighteen-year-old Black, Jewish young woman was stopped at a Wisconsin traffic light. On her driver’s side, she was approached by a car holding four white men. They yelled racist epithets, sprayed her with lighter fluid, and then threw on her an ignited lighter, setting her aflame.
We live in a national context in which Black folks, all people of color, and also white Jews are vulnerable. Therefore, this binary notion of Blacks and Jews as separate is inaccurate, dated, and forces rosh katan /small-minded thinking. The Black (distinct from) Jewish construct is counterproductive to building the multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith coalitions and alliances that together can fight racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy. White Jews must move on from leadership platforms that center and serve only white Jews and call social justice a singular focus of antisemitism. In addition, leaders must cease the strategy that leverages Black folks and an incomplete civil rights historical memory to respond to white Jewish fears about antisemitism. In 2023, Jewish in the United States should conjure up images of Asian, Brown, Black, Indigenous, multiracial, and, yes, white Jews too. We must retire the white Jewish manufactured binary construct of “Black and Jewish” and, for the survival of us all, align and ally ourselves to a multiracial community, coalition, and nation.
By invitation to teach and present, I have been back to Sherith Israel on several occasions since the 1980s. When I enter the Social Hall, I do feel a sense of nostalgia for the numerous Hanukkah nights when I could be found spinning dreidels on the Social Hall floor. In that very space, I even once won a Sunbeam barbeque at a Chaggim raffle. But it is when I enter the sanctuary that I get uneasy. It is a gorgeous space renowned for its stained-glass windows and phenomenally conceived dome several stories up from ground level. It is also a space that never ever felt like home to me. After all the childhood years standing on the bimah and sitting in the tidy rows of wooden pews, in spite of the curriculum that was forced on me all those years ago, I understand that my Jewish education, really reeducation, happened after I left shul. After my own Jewish education diaspora, returning to Sherith Israel has power and meaning.
Months after one of my presentations, I ran into a young-adult congregant who asked if I remembered them from a session I led (I did—their brilliant questions and very loud outfit were unforgettable). They mentioned how powerful it was to learn historically accurate and expansive Jewish content, and how much they appreciated the effort I extended to make my teaching relevant to the point that they felt deeply connected to Jewish history. It was wonderful feedback, and it would have been enough, dayenu. But then they went on to say, “When I was little, I thought I wanted to be a rabbi. But a lifetime of one-dimensional Jewish education and Jewish leaders killed that dream. Seeing you lead our community, having you open our minds by expanding what we thought we knew, all while being yourself, changed everything. Not sure being a rabbi is for me, but a Jewish leader, yes! I start my Jewish leadership program in the fall.” I was grateful for the feedback and the opportunity to know that I had touched a young leader. May every Jewish person feel so connected, so inspired, and so committed to our Jewish community and Jewish future.
NOTES
1 Laura Arnold Leibman, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a
Multiracial Jewish Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), xvi, 37.
2 See Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” May 11, 2021, www
.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/; Jews of Color
Initiative, Counting Inconsistencies; Jewish Community Federation and Endow-
ment Fund, “A Portrait of Bay Area Jewish Life and Communities,” accessed
February 2018, https://jewishfed.org/community-studies.
3 Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s,
1st ed. (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 180.
