Aliza Hausman is a mixed-race Dominican Jew, and will do whatever it takes to secure a playdate for her son. She recently got up the nerve to approach a Japanese woman in the lobby of her son’s Modern Orthodox day school in Los Angeles. “I thought, am I a crazy person if I just go…
Arizona statehouse candidate Alma Hernandez said there was a time some people had trouble comprehending her background. “Oh my God, you’re Mexican and Jewish?” she told the Forward some folks would ask whenever she traveled outside the state. Hernandez, 25, is part of a group of Jews of color running, and winning, in areas where…
This is the story of how a game taught a young, Black Jewish girl that she didn’t belong. The game is Jewish Geography. The young girl is me. Urban Dictionary defines the diasporic pastime of “Jewish Geography” as what happens when “two or more Jews get together and discuss who knows whose Jewish friends and…
If someone asked you to name the most urgent crisis facing the Jewish community, “anti-blackness” or “intra-community racism” might not be among your first thoughts. But it should be. That’s because anti-blackness in the Jewish community is pushing black Jews out. Countless black Jews have made the difficult decision to leave Judaism completely, no longer…
In the sweltering March winds, a group of fellow volunteers from my high school in San Francisco and I trudged up a dusty road towards the Samarpan School in New Delhi. I was thousands of miles away from home, about to teach kids I had never met, unsure of whether or not I’d be able…
I’ve gotten a lot of questions since I started introducing my opinions in these pages. Some have been good questions. Some have been difficult ones. And some I won’t even dignify with an answer. But the most common question I’ve received, and the one I feel compelled to discuss this Martin Luther King Day, is…
I am a Jew of color. I think. I’ve always been confused by this idea, of being “of color.” I’m Sephardic, but I grew up in a white town, and my parents grew up in an Ashkenazi area of Israel, so, culturally speaking, I always felt identified with some degree of whiteness. It was a…
When Rabbi Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas took the helm of the aging Yonkers, New York, synagogue Lincoln Park Jewish Center 15 years ago, the hope was that the Cuban-born Orthodox Jew would breathe new life into the sleepy congregation. And over the following years the strategy seemed to work. Membership swelled, garnering acclaim from the media….
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