Why Did Josephine Baker Hire a Torah Tutor for a Non-Jewish Orphan?
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
To populate this “world village,” scholar Heather Roberson explains, the expat entertainer in the early 1950s set about gathering orphans of different origins. A Japanese orphanage contributed a Japanese boy and a Korean boy. She found a Finnish boy, and a Muslim boy and a Catholic boy from Algeria. “Eventually,” Roberson writes, “she had 12 children of diverse backgrounds.” She had trouble, however, procuring a Jew for her gorgeous mosaic.
But Baker was nothing if not determined.
Roberson writes:
When necessary, Josephine fudged the facts. Israel refused to hand over a Jewish child for her project, so she adopted a boy from a nearby orphanage and converted him, procuring a tutor of Hebrew and the Torah, and hiring a chef to keep the child kosher.
(Alas, the article is not online.)
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
