MIXING IT UP: The Nuances of Being Black and Jewish

We’re late. Again. What else is new? If there is one thing I know for sure, it’s that anywhere I go with my father we will be late. 

The cool crisp air feels good as we get out of the car and walk up the street towards the temple. They won’t let you park in the parking lot for some reason. Reserved for the richer Jews I guess? They hire one or two security people to ensure the parking lot is kept empty except to the elite of the elite. I nod at the Black security guard as we walk past him as we cross the parking lot on foot. 

It’s Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, and one of the few times I go to temple. There’s a term for people like me, “High holiday Jews”. I don’t want my dad to have to go to temple alone for these holy holidays. He’s not as close with his siblings and his parents are deceased. I’m the only child who lives nearby and my mother no longer joins us at temple for the high holiday services. In fact, she now goes to church on Sundays. 

We head inside and go sit in the balcony section. It’s our usual spot because we always come late and there are better seats available up there when you’re not on-time. Maybe people forget it exists? We’re lucky and there is plenty of space in the front so we grab two seats in the second row. We have a great view of the beema where the Rabbis are already leading the service. I can also look out and see the congregation below. 

As we rise for the next portion of the service, I start to play “I Spy” in my head. I spy my best friend and his family towards the front of the temple. They have almost the whole row. I spy his grandma is with them, whom I love as if she were my own. I spy some old family friends on the other side, also towards the front. “Bet they weren’t late”, or so I think to myself.

I think I also see one or two people from my high school who seem to be there with their husbands and new babies. I chuckle to myself because you couldn’t pay them to show up to Temple back when we were actually in Hebrew School. In fact, you never saw most of those kids again after their Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Most kids do their time and move on. Some of them become “high holiday Jews”. Others become just Jewish in name (aka Jew-ish). 

I’ve been coming home for the high holidays for years, sitting in relatively the same spot in the balcony. But something feels different this time. As I look out at the congregation, I see the choir. There are some old staples, and by old I mean that quite literally. I spy Marilyn who used to run our Hebrew School plays. I loved being in the plays. I would fight tooth and nail each year to beat out my best friend for the lead role. He usually won. He also went on to act professionally so I shouldn’t feel that bad about losing out to him. But one year, when it really mattered, I beat him out for the lead role of “Sticky Wing Johnny”. Sticky Wing was cool, had swagger, and was a character from one of the most famous stories written by our lead Rabbi. Oh, did I not mention that all our plays were stories from the best-selling books written by our celebrity Rabbi Dr. Marc Gellman? 

I’m drawn back from my flashback as we are asked to sit down again by the Rabbi.  A few minutes later we are back up standing and reciting another prayer and I continue my game of “I spy”. Something is different this time as I look out. And that’s when I notice it for the first time: everyone in this temple is white. 

I know what you must be thinking...duh! It's so simple and not that surprising because yes, aside from maybe Safardic Jews (Iranian), the majority of all other Jews are white. But we are part of a Reform temple. That means it’s the most liberal version of a temple in Judaism. We couldn’t join a Conservative temple even though that is how you would describe my father’s level of religiousness. My mother isn’t Jewish and she never converted, so we could only belong to a Reform temple. 

I look back out at the crowd, scanning more urgently. There must be a bunch of mixed race couples out there in the crowd. Someone that I’m missing. Clearly there must be some other kid that looked like me. I wasn’t even demanding to see another black parent like mine. Maybe an Asian parent? I saw nothing. 

My thoughts are racing in my head. It’s been 20 years since I had my Bat Mitzvah in this temple. Twenty years have passed. Two decades. I look down again. The voices in my head get louder. Are you really telling me that 20 years have passed and as I look down at the congregation that I am still the only non-white person in this whole building aside from the two ringers in the choir? 

“Please be seated”, says the Rabbi again.

It’s been almost a full year since I had my “Sixth Sense” moment at temple (e.g. I see white people everywhere). Why was I still bothered by this? Why was I still shocked by this? It started to come together one afternoon as I watched the documentary “Little White Lie”.

The documentary is about a nice Jewish girl who grew up in Woodstock, NY. She went to temple, she hung out with her family, and she had a seemingly normal life. Except for the fact that she looked much darker than her family and friends. No one said anything about it though so it just became a strange fact that everyone ignored. As she got older, she started to question the story being told to her. And then she applied to college. After sending in a picture, but not checking the box on race, the college admitted her and welcomed her to the Black Student Association. She starts to live her college life as a Black woman and finally confronts her family about it when she returns home. Turns out, her mother had an affair and so she really was half-Black, not white as she was raised to believe. 

There was something about that experience of being the odd-man out in a Jewish community that struck me. And that is when I started to realize why it bothered me so much that day in temple to realize everyone else was white. 

Growing up, it was uncomfortable to be the only black kid in the Hebrew school. And all these years I kept telling myself that I was just ahead of my time. I was a revolutionary paving the way for others as interracial marriages and interfaith marriages were becoming more and more popular. Yes I was uncomfortable, but others who came after me wouldn’t have to be. Except somehow, looking down at that room 20 years later, I realize I’ve been lying to myself. I paved the way for nothing. My suffering was for nothing. I changed nothing. And more importantly, to many in the Jewish community, I am nothing. 

About 3 years earlier, I had found a shoe repair store close to my apartment. I really liked a pair of boots that I had and wore them pretty much every day from the start of fall until the beginning of summer. At this point they were in desperate need of a repair. I walked into the shoe repair store with my boots in tow and greeted the man at the counter. I’m pretty friendly so I greeted him and asked how he was doing.

“I’m so tired”, he told me.

“Why are you so tired?” I asked.

“I was at a Bar Mitzvah last night and got home super late,” he replied.

“A fellow Jew! Something I can connect with him on”, I naively thought to myself.

The long story short goes something like this. I engage in a conversation with the store clerk who proceeds to tell me a lot about the Bar Mitzvah he attended and his family. Turns out he is a modern Orthodox Jew, which is one of the most observant types of Jew. He also complained to me about his sister, whom he is slightly estranged with as she married a Hasidic Jew, a different type of ultra-religious Jew. Apparently this type of inter-Jewish marriage was not approved by the store clerk. Who knew? And this oversharing by the clerk goes on for a while with me trying to engage pilotely, still aware of the fact that we have not looked at my boots yet. At some point I say something about being Jewish myself and so he looks at me a bit funny and asks, “You’re Jewish?”

“Yes,” I say proudly. “I’m also Black. My mother is Black and Catholic and my Father is white and Jewish. They raised us Jewish so I was Bat Mitzvahed,” I say, still rather proud. 

He looks at me funny.

He tells me I should consider converting to Judaism. 

I’m confused, as I had just told him that I was Jewish and had a Bat Mitzvah. So I nicely correct him and remind him of this information, but he poo-poos it and says again that I’m not really Jewish and so I should convert. I’m stunned. I’m offended. I’m confused.

Is this the first time I’ve heard someone so casually reject my identity as if they are the authority on me? No. I’ve heard people tell me, “Oh, so you’re not really black” when I tell them that my father is white. I wrote an entire article on the microaggressions I have experienced as a mixed race person, so I guess I should have been prepared for this behavior. 

I always knew that Orthodox Jews would most likely not recognize my Judaism since my mother is not Jewish. Judaism is supposedly passed down through the Mother’s side. I guess this was just the first time I’ve had someone say it to my face. Maybe I thought they’d change their minds if they heard I was Bat Mitzvahed and understood that I took the same steps as every other child in my Hebrew School.

Except that’s not true. I took many more steps than the other kids in my Hebrew School. In fact, I have always known that people would look at me as if I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t belong. Not just because my mother was Catholic, as there were many other kids in our reform temple whose parents had interfaith marriages. However, I was the only one (aside from my siblings) who had a Black parent. I never wanted someone to be able to dismiss me as Jewish so I decided back when I was 7 or 8 years old that I would just become the best Hebrew School Student the temple had ever seen!

That’s right. I approached my Hebrew School studies the way kids approach actual school. I did all my homework assignments on-time while the rest of the grade quickly scribbled them while waiting for class to begin. I studied for every test, while others didn’t bother. I approached these Hebrew School classes as if my performance was going to be the difference between me getting in Harvard vs. a state school. 

In psychology, we would categorize my behavior as that stemming from “stereotype threat”. Whenever I was in that Hebrew School and Temple, I felt like I had to prove my Jewishness. One mistake and I would be dismissed. We usually see stereotype threat arise as it relates to someone’s gender or racial identity, particularly at school or work. This was the first time I realized it could arise as it relates to a religious association.

And yet it wasn’t just me who tried hard. My mother was one of the most involved parents in the temple. She and I ended up running the Temple’s annual Purim carnival for many years. We spent hours organizing prizes, creating prize boards, and setting up booths for our “Jewish Halloween” carnival. All of this to prove ourselves as “good enough”. And yet, here I stood almost 15 years later, in a dingy shoe repair store with a complete stranger telling me none of that mattered because I was just not Jewish.

Six million Jews lost in the Holocaust and yet we stand here decades later denying those who want to be Jewish and are offering to raise their children Jewish.

As an Executive Coach and Consultant I constantly talk to my clients about the importance of “solving the right problem”. If we frame up the problem incorrectly, we can get stuck on one solution that is actually not the most effective solution. In the case of Judaism, the emphasis seems to be on Jews marrying Jews. That seems to be their solution to the problem of replacing the six million Jews lost. But that’s an ineffective solution.

What we really need is to raise Jewish children. And when you frame it like that, you can understand that marrying a Jew is not the only way to ensure you raise a Jewish child. But these blinders seem to create a circumstance where we either ignore or exclude those individuals in interfaith and interracial marriages because we assume they will not or can not raise Jewish children.

I remember one year I was attending high holiday services while in college. The college would organize different services for different religiousness of Judaism such as one Reform and one Conservative style service. I decided to attend the Reform service, which ironically was being held in the school’s Chapel. My roommate at the time was also Jewish and so I asked her if she wanted to join me. She declined. It was Yom Kippur and I was fasting. She was not. So off I went to attend the service alone.

Just like in my own hometown Temple, the Rabbi decided to give a sermon. On this particular occasion his sermon topic seemed to be on the importance of Jews marrying Jews. So here I am, on one of the holiest Jewish holidays, sitting in Temple alone, starving due to the fasting required for this holiday, and listening to a Rabbi basically invalidate my Jewish experience. All the while my Jewish roommate who has a Jewish mother sits in her dorm room watching trashy reality TV and noshing on the food I so desperately wanted. But according to that Rabbi, my roommate would be the Jew he would pick simply because her mother is Jewish.

The best and worst part about my experience is that I am not the only person with a similar experience. I am not the only non-white Jew. In fact, about a year ago after my realization that everyone at the temple was white, my best friend’s grandmother told me about an organization called Be’Chol Lashon. Their mission according to their website is to “strengthen Jewish identity by raising awareness about the ethnic, racial and cultural diversity of Jewish people and experience around the globe.” This is how I found out about the documentary “Little White Lie” as they were promoting a screening for it. It turns out there are many other Jews like me who are from diverse backgrounds. Part of me was angry when I first learned about this because I wished I had been introduced to the community two decades ago. I also felt resentful that I should have to go out of my way to seek and find a community to embrace me. Why couldn’t my local Jewish community do so? 

All of this and I have to admit that I don’t have a conclusion for this story. I simply have an experience that I have never been able to share for fear of being ostracized by the very community that I have tried to fit into for all these years.

As I have gotten older and wiser, along with studying diversity dynamics from a psychology lens, I have felt more comfortable sharing my truth. I am Jewish and yet there are many in the community who would not embrace me. And that is ok. My experience is my experience. And more so, there are many Jews out there who are diverse and I know that deep down they are not any less Jewish than myself or that damn shoe repair man.