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What Are You Intersectionality The Educational The Uplifting and The Downright Disheartening

We have one father One God created all of us Malachi 2 10 1

An Introduction to the Project Hi my name is Naomi Isaac Hyman I am a proud nerd and a strange conglomeration of identities Having navigated this in various ways up to this point I am curious about what it means to inhabit the intersection of multiple minority identities particularly around Jewish identity This project is a compilation of writing poems essays etc from different people centering around one question What does it mean to exist at the intersection of multiple minority identities The anonymous writings were sent to me directly in response to my request Those that list a name I found either through my own research or were articles suggested to me by individuals as pieces to which they felt connected The authors of the collected writings are kept anonymous intentionally I find there is something powerful about reading a piece of writing with no clear idea of who the author is With that in mind the information about each author is at the end of their piece of writing Please refrain from looking ahead and read everything as it comes The entire collection has been carefully curated The information about the anonymous authors is listed at the end of their piece and is organized as follows Gender Age at the time the piece was written Identities discussed Gender M male F female NB nonbinary Abbreviations POC Person of Color JOC Jew of Color There are words in this book that you may not understand If a word is not glossed or translated it is intentional Feel free to interpret the meaning from the context of the rest of the piece or ask a friend The internet is generally an unreliable resource especially when it comes to translation 2

Does Jewish Law Forbid Racism Look for answers from various Rabbis throughout the book The most fundamental teachings of Judaism clearly dismiss racism altogether such as You shall love the stranger like yourself Leviticus 19 34 or the reminder in Genesis that all of us regardless of race color or belief system were born of the same mom and dad Adam and Eve Why did God create swarms of bees prides of lions herds of deer schools of fish and flocks of birds and only one human couple So that no one can say to another My ancestry is superior to yours Mishnah Sanhedrin 4 5 Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Fontana CA 3

Thoughts on Living at the Intersections I think for many of us in our own ways living at the intersections is complex and for me some of that is because my own intersections sometimes seem to contradict one another directly in the American racial and identity based frameworks of our time My grandparents are all from Eastern Europe Romania and Czechoslovakia and emigrated after surviving the Shoa Both sides of my family emigrated to Venezuela when my parents were infants small children and my parents were both raised in Caracas They moved to the United States as adults and my brother and I were born here as first generation US citizens raised in a Spanish speaking home while the rest of my family remained in Venezuela As a child of immigrants as a Latina and as a Jewish person I grew up with a minority identity and experience I was a minority as a Jewish Latina in my schools sports teams theater troops etc And I was definitely one of the only Latinx kids at my synagogue growing up But as a person with European roots I also have white skin and access to class privilege which gave me roles of privilege alongside the minority experiences I also held I spend a lot of time trying to parse out the ways in which I need to hold my privileges thoughtfully responsibly and transparently in my life while also knowing that the Latina and Jewish parts of me will be erased by mainstream culture unless I claim them actively White 4

America wants so badly to assimilate us for the ways we re distinct complex and different from one another and I feel that pressure all the time In my own experience Latin American racial identity doesn t always map onto the binaries we have in North America where someone is either POC or white Latin America is a huge continent full of immigrants from all over the world and our racial identities are complex So it feels important to name that the intersections for me are full of contradictions and I am always trying to let that be ok and to not oversimplify who I am I was raised in a Latinx Jewish community My parents grew up in a mixed Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish community in Caracas and in Boston where I grew up our community is one of ex pat Latin American Jews people from Cuba Argentina Chile Venezuela etc In JOC community I often hear other Latinx Jews talk about being the only one in white centric Jewish communities but for me this wasn t the case my entire context for Jewishness as a young person was Hanukkah songs in Spanish eating Venezuelan foods traveling to Latin America for simchas in my family etc Now as an adult and as a rabbi I want more diverse and complex Jewish communities where people of many identities can thrive and I want a Jewish culture that is varied diasporic and that doesn t fall into discriminatory tropes of what s considered normal I have experienced racism and ignorance in Jewish communities and I have experienced anti semitism in POC spaces 5

namely in Latinx spaces It s scary to feel like at any moment someone will tell me I don t belong in either space as my full self something that has happened to me many many times I often feel that the only spaces of racial affinity that I feel genuinely comfortable in are in Latinx Jewish spaces which is very niche I feel this way because of the intersectional nature of my identity I m not usually comfortable picking one in the absence of the other my Latinidad shapes my Jewishness and my Jewishness shapes my Latinidad and I feel most myself when both parts of me are present and I don t have to choose I feel proud of fascinated by and grateful for the ways that I m complicated My understanding of cultures families languages and traditions is that they travel from continent to continent they migrate flee wars rebuild they evolve That is certainly the lineage of my family In so many ways I feel that my layered identity is a much more realistic reflection of human experiences and human history than the narrow boxes that our culture has created for classifying and labeling us F 36 Jewish European descent 1st gen US citizen Latina 6

The Torah repeatedly urges us to engage our empathy commanding us 36 times to show our concern for strangers among us Rabbi Jeffrey L Falick Birmingham Temple Congregation for Humanistic Judaism Farmington Hills MI 7

Interlude I We too dream of a day when every Jewish child will be valued for the content of their character and not the color of their skin Akedah Fulcher Eze Founder of SULAM Africa CEO of Eze Yoffi Edutainment Studios 8

Ki Tisa Casted Bodies It s radical to read Torah to its roots When the Kabbalists imagined the Tree of Life they placed its roots in the world of mundanities physical objects and material actions which they believed was the lowest and furthest from the spiritual essence of God But Adrienne Rich the Jewish feminist thinker and poet admonishes them saying Begin with the material What happens when we start with bodies The body is assigned a role from birth In Jewish tradition this might start with a brit mila simchat bat or brit shalom an eight day old baby without a concept of the enormity of the task ahead of them is formally accepted into Judaism Our bodies take other roles at birth as well voluntarily or not sex race disability nationality and some say gender and sexual orientation When I was born I received another role caste Since my heritage is mixed my body is a casted body a Brahmin body because it is a Hindu body But it is also a casted body because it is a Jewish body Mosheh speaks with God about the consequences of the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf Pleading Mosheh appeals to God s pride even if the Israelites strayed how would God maintain appearances if God freed the Israelites only for them to have been wiped out in the wilderness Astonishingly this brazen appeal to the Divine self image succeeds and Mosheh walks down the mountain to his unscathed people 9

Hardly a dozen verses later we read Shmot 32 26 28 Mosheh stood up in the gate of the camp and said whoever is for to me And all the children of Levi gathered with him And he said to them Thus says the god of Israel every person put a sword on your thigh cross and return from gate to gate in the camp Each person murders their sibling and each person their friend and each person the one close to them And the children of Levi did as Mosheh said and on that day three thousand people fell from the people This was the beginning of the Jewish caste system In one fell swoop Mosheh established a radically new direction for the people of Israel the nation that emerged from Egypt a mixed multitude was now irrevocably partitioned into those who were for in the moment at the gate and those who were not Unsurprisingly for a society already divided into lineages Mosheh s backers were none other than the Leviim Mosheh s genealogical family At its essence any caste system is a social hierarchy that assigns societal roles and privileges based on lineage In order to control lineage and ensure that people of one caste cannot escape to another intermarriage between castes is severely limited In the caste system of the Torah and Talmud intermarriage between Kohanim and lower castes is forbidden Like in other caste systems privileges accrue to the Kohanim and Leviim from the Yisraelim and outcastes there are places Yisraelim cannot go and things they 10

cannot touch clothes they cannot wear and food they cannot eat Additionally the Torah establishes a one way flow of economic resources in the form of tithes to the Leviim and Kohanim The stark separation between castes hides at the very core of our people s relationship to God at the people s very first encounter with the Divine at Mount Sinai God calls them a goy kadosh commonly translated as a holy nation But kadosh does not simply mean holy however holiness is experienced It specifies a holiness that is set apart so the people of Israel is set apart from the other peoples and the upper castes are set apart from the lower castes In Israel holiness results from division Mosheh invokes the power of this holy division when he declares thus says because simply put God never said that While some commentators claim that for some reason or other the Torah just left out the part where God commanded Mosheh to commit a tribal massacre we see a different situation through the lens of caste Mosheh the human elevated himself to God s level to institute the caste system and seize power and access for his kin Finally we cannot forget that the caste system was forged in violence The main tool the Leviim used to assert their dominance was mass murder caste is inherently a system that enacts violence on bodies By virtue of birth and ancestry bodies are assigned this one will do violence and this one will have violence done to it So it s natural that in the days of the Temple the Kohanim were called upon to be Israel s butchers slaughtering the nation s livestock and feeding themselves on the compulsory donations of the Leviim and Yisraelim 11

What does it mean to live in a casted body as a modern Jew Certainly less than it once did no longer are certain foods locations and clothes limited to members of one caste or another After the Temple s destruction the Talmud radically limited the caste system s influence the rabbis hint that they think the whole system is morally bankrupt The Talmud rationalizes retaining the Kohanim s few remaining privileges such as taking precedence for reading Torah blessing wine and giving thanks for meals by citing darkei shalom the ways of peace an unsubtle reminder of the massacre at the foot of Sinai But living in a multiply casted body as I do permits me a different lens from the sages of the Talmud or even the medieval commentators who lived in a time before European colonialism and conquest when the idea of a Jew of Color had a dramatically different meaning or perhaps no meaning at all Two anecdotes could draw out the analytical power of this lens The year is 2008 and I with a few of my teenaged Hebrew school classmates walk into an Orthodox shul in Manhattan on a Shabbat morning A worried looking gabbai rushes over to the adult in the group my rabbi and holds a hushed conference with him eyes darting between my rabbi s kind face and the conspicuously nonwhite members of my Hebrew school class The conference concludes promptly and my friends grimace at the prospect of splitting up into our designated sides of the mechitza but we file into the sanctuary nonetheless with curiosity and reverence I later ask my rabbi what the whispering was about 12

and he responds He couldn t believe you all were Jewish let alone bar and bat mitzvahs I had to assure him that I witnessed every one of you reaching Jewish majority Wild right Flash forward a half decade A dusty white van blasting Hindi showtunes deposits me and my research team by the side of the road in Pakdi Bihar a tiny village in the North Indian countryside We came to observe the village meeting at which staff of a government antipoverty program would conduct a participatory exercise where the villagers mapped the village showing roads schools hospitals landmarks and each habitation of the village The meeting was to be held in a school adjoining a temple we sat on the temple steps before the meeting began as the villagers assembled As we were sitting the temple priest approached us and began a conversation with us His first few questions skirted the topic of caste where do you live wasn t very helpful to him and we knew better than to answer what are your names with accurate responses like in Judaism last names are a direct link to your caste He quickly noticed our evasion and soon enough he asked us directly what is your caste We demurred and even though he pressed he never did learn our castes The common theme that unifies these two anecdotes is the suspicion that someone is not where and who they should be When our surroundings organize themselves with the principle of kedushah holy separation we can always find ourselves in violation of that separation When the criterion of exclusion is invisible like 13

one s surname or one s Jewish identity suspicion multiplies and maneuvers around the normal barriers of perception A person who s not used to living in a casted body might protest at the comparison between these two anecdotes Sure sitting at a Hindu temple caste is definitely relevant they might say but how is davening in New York a caste issue The answer is less uplifting than we might hope When British Orientalists first visited India our texts describing the caste system fascinated them especially the ones that mentioned varna one of the words that they translated directly to caste Since varna literally means color the British misunderstood as saying that a person s level in the caste system was identifiable by their skin color But now in an ironic twist a Jewish casteism that was once defined by lineages stemming from our patriarchs Ya akov Levi and Aharon has expanded to incorporate color the British misinterpretation of the Hindu caste system With whiteness seen as the default Jewish skin color Jews of Color know that our presence can always be met with suspicion that we are breaching holy separation Usually when we show up in Jewish community we are not indiscriminately slaughtered Few community leaders call to their kin to murder their siblings friends and close ones But as the entire Jewish community faces attacks from a world of 14

antisemitism Jews of Color feel the heat of suspicion that we are outsiders separate from the real Jews While White Jews are fast tracked to Israeli citizenship a Black Jew is required to fast in public for six days before an Israeli ministry recognizes his claim to Jewishness Police and congregants with guns patrol synagogues vigilant for anyone who seems out of place And racism and casteism intertwine in many communities prejudice against converts to Judaism more than half of Jews of Color say they have been treated like they don t belong mistaken for non Jews interrogated barred access Even after God accepts us like after the golden calf upper caste Jews take their own initiative to exclude us through separation and suspicion The casted body reacts to suspicion like a doughnut reacts to icing first it absorbs then it coats then it hardens on the outside When we read Torah to the roots we read it as a body and with our bodies So when we encounter a text like Ki Tisa the part of suspicion that lives inside our bodies says your ancestors died at Sinai The part that coats says yes but I am a Jew and no one can take that away from me And the part that hardens says my difference makes me strong M Ashkenazi Jewish Hindu 15

Jewish law forbids reminding converts to Judaism of their earlier background we might extrapolate from that to a prohibition on for example asking Jews of color in shul whether they are actually Jewish which seems to go on all the time Nothing keeps one safe from othering except perpetual vigilance and a constant choosing of our yetzer ha tov or good inclination unity over our yetzer ha ra or evil inclination separation Rabbi Gilah Langner Congregation Kol Ami Arlington VA 16

Interlude II My love My darling My love My friend I see you I see you standing bereft and feeling confused I see you pained and know your anger as one more person expects more of you than they do of themselves The world is not upside down There s just more of us owning a reality openly denied a litany of survival Audre Lorde warrior woman poet wrote we were never meant to survive As she lay her words upon the page did she struggle like we Of course she did She too was mortal Remember Audre warrior woman poet who spoke our longings textualized our scar languaged wounds we did not know we had until Nurse D vorah licked the wounds 17

clean of pus and Judge D vorah applied medicine songs and Kohenet Mir yam sutured them with loving laughter Our Mothers returned us to the world with we are expected to love ourselves tattooed backwards on our foreheads so that whenever we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror we would quickly lean in and kindly touch our reflection Owning our worthiness We shout Thank you Great Love For loving me Thank you Great Love For loving me Thank you Great Love For loving me Sabrina Carpenter 18

Regardless of whether we believe this creation story its position as one of the very first lessons of the Torah gives it a place of high priority All human beings are created equal Rabbi Dr Laura Novak Winer Fresno CA 19

Thoughts on Being a Queer Jew When I was applying to rabbinical school I wrote Coming out as transgender inspired me to deepen my daily prayer practices to include laying tefillin and wearing a tallit katan The more out of the box queer theory I come to embody the more deeply Jewish and observant I feel Queer theory is a lens through which I gain access to critical thinking power analysis and alternative ways of living Judaism is a text a deep rooted story that is full of ritual and community and history Queer theory deconstructs the very foundation that my Judaism stands on Queerness feels so new and infinite And Judaism feels so rooted and ancient Without Judaism queer theory would leave untethered Without Queerness Judaism would confine me and ultimately betray me Now 15 years later these words feel true and untrue Now Judaism feels so much more creative It teaches me new ways to ask questions and approach conversations with true openness Queerness feels increasingly playful I find myself most at home in Queer Jewish spaces where the identieis intersect and create their own mini cultural habitat to which I belong fully M 39 Jewish Queer Transgender 20

A POEM WITH TWO MEMORIES OF VENEZUELA The first time her hair was sunlight and it moved in loud wet rivulets and it warmed me and it darkened my eyebrows to be so close to her She passed small beads of fruit into my mouth My teeth became seeds and my blood became guava My own hair became highways knotted and tangled and she patted my exhaust fuming head to tell me I was beautiful I was a child squinting into how huge and how warm and how mine and not mine her body The plane ride home was always about something unhitching and floating away A sterilizing dream bleary goodbye Arriving home with one less limb or finger buttons wiggled loose on their threads tongue slack on jangling teeth Later when I became too busy for her lines of age scored both our cheeks and skin spattered from the cloud lust of storms From great distances I spoke her name aloud then less then more her gales up throating a continent scaling a continent like a stairwell to sweep a voice through the wind chime of my memory She carved me out of distance condensation certain objects stowed in the closet in the room my grandmother would stay in when she d come to visit She carved me out of oil slick waters salt encrusted rains mud cascading over city hills becoming clay carrying dust of human origins She carved me out of pixelated images of street protests socialist revolutions grocery stores with barren shelves She slid a tongue into my mouth so I ve made do with two She 21

taught me supple light and forests lacing between coasts and pregnant mammals braying on their haunches in the always summer wind It s hard to say what an immigrant is A cluster of ants held in the palm See how they circulate urgent on skin see how they spiral how their legs never stop moving Certain children are prone to tip over the rock and upturn a whole city of ants then track their escape routes It s hard to say what an immigrant is There is a place in you fertile as soil but changeling as weather There s a place in you It raised you and gave you the letters of too many languages it gave you your tenderness your distance your rage What a child of an immigrant is Thrice born three sets of eyes Belonging to no one Carrying documents written with invisible ink Speaking languages scavenged from cousins and radio hosts Or else speaking the silence that primary language of people who have been exactly everywhere and nowhere excavated and learned by the gaps in between F 36 1st gen US citizen Venzualan 22

Interlude III Once I Was Here Once I was the child of a Sandinista jumped over cliffs on horseback in my father s saddle fulfilled a revolution My inheritance a jagged broken holy heavenly land and my grandmother s proof of God clouds kissed mountains the scent of coffee farms mist inhaled in love Once I was prayed for to a man nailed to a cross hope poured into a vessel like thread stitched onto cloth I was wished to be washed in water bearing blessings destined for the quincea era dress unborn baby betrothed to the baptism Once I was the remote recipient of a ritual recitation the next number among the stars nothing but a future fist held to the heart or member of the minyan Yet I was thought of when the priest led his blessing and wondered at when I would appear I was felt every Saturday the beginning of every year and now finally I am here Gabriela Orozco 23

For the Jewish queers Yes it s true I am a Jew and proud to be a queer one because if you ask me about identity don t expect to hear just one Jewish heritage I feel lucky unlucky lucky to have something my mother is my father is my grandparents were something my mother s mother suffered six seven siblings gone without a trace not a picture left of a face I am Jewish because I am a student of history I have grandparents who survived to create my mother for me Queer Jew the connection is not so hard to find read Paragraph 175 the queers were among the first to die along with the communists the mentally ill the blind They came for so many others before they came for the Jews Nazis did not care about identities you did or didn t choose And this is as much a part of me as much as desire for whoever attracts me So you cannot ask me to pick one or ditch one I don t have that luxury Why I am a Jewish queer So on my 26th birthday I could read Leviticus 18 22 in the biblical Hebrew and explain to you that in the language of its writing the word abomination has a connotation of ritual deviation not condemnation and that the translation is an interpretation the interpretation is a conversation because the same word 24

is used twenty six times in the five books of Moses and also applies to eating lobster but you don t see picket lines of signs that read God hates lobster eaters What is to lose and what is to save Destroy a language and culture to make a slave Kill the babes arrest the resistance and pass the blame And so goes humanity culture language then the soul When there is nothing that survives there is no story to be told I sought wisdom and grew reverence for any things that survived Any text that made it through the history of time we call civilized Whether a Dead Sea scroll or a Hasidic story re told This is the revenge over those who seek to eliminate a people whole Truth grows deeper than the seed of a root of a word or a family tree I won t walk away from a whole history because some parts offend me I will learn them like lyrics then switch up the rhymes and the melody Teacher didn t tell you Interpretation is not blasphemy it s necessity F 27 Queer Jewish 25

From A Juneteenth D var When my family first joined our synagogue there were very few people of color aside from my mother and me in the congregation I remember feeling uncomfortable being in services when I was young wanting to be hidden from other people I was scared someone was going to tell us to leave Now when we first joined these fears were mostly unfounded No one had ever questioned us being at services or told us to leave No one had ever told me I wasn t Jewish But I was scared because I knew that I looked different That my family looked different And I had enough life experience to know that people are often unkind to those different from them especially in spaces where they expect certain similarities In spaces where whiteness is the norm blackness is often scorned to say the least At Torah School I was much more comfortable mostly because I was in one of the first classes Torah School now is pretty large but when I started there were maybe three to five kids and all of us were in one tiny room with one teacher As far as I remember two of the kids were my age The three of us became friends pretty quickly as did our parents As our class and Torah School in general grew I remember feeling increasingly out of place for similar reasons I was uncomfortable in services I didn t really have a representation of my own identity anywhere in my life In Jewish spaces I didn t really see people of color In spaces with other people of color I didn t really see Jews I also remember that people didn t really talk about Jews of Color when I was young at least not to me I never heard the phrase Jew 26

of Color or even Person of Color I was just black or Jewish sometimes I got to be black and Jewish For a long time I didn t talk about my blackness and my Jewishness in relation to each other because I didn t know that I could I didn t know how to connect them and so I saw them as completely separate parts of my identity Looking back I used to subconsciously pretend I wasn t black in Torah School Not that I thought that I was white but I had been so conditioned into thinking that these two parts of my identity couldn t exist in the same place at the same time that I would almost shut off parts of myself It s hard to describe but the best I can do is say that while I was in Jewish spaces I would literally shut off the part of myself that was black And it sounds crazy even to me now but I really thought that I was multiple separate identities in one person Or one identity with separate entirely distinct parts I didn t know that I could be Jewish and black at the same time so I would pick one Like choosing clothes in the morning I would pick a part of my identity for any given situation Outside of my synagogue community I often picked the black part of my identity for multiple reasons For starters most people could tell by looking at me that I wasn t white so I didn t really get much of a choice in whether or not I wanted to tell that to people Also often if I told another Jew that I was Jewish but my mother was not I was told that that meant I wasn t actually Jewish Even after my Bat Mitzvah another Jew told me that I wouldn t technically be considered Jewish because neither my mother nor I officially converted to Judaism Now this comment wasn t necessarily based on my being black for the person making it But 27

for me it was entirely a race issue because my mother is black and she was the reason I wasn t actually Jewish according to them For me blackness and Jewishness were at odds with each other They were almost opposites Because my mother was the reason I was told that I wasn t Jewish and my mother is the reason I am black I felt for most of my life that my blackness literally canceled out my Jewishness That me being black meant that I couldn t be Jewish So for most of my life I ve had a really contentious relationship with my Jewish identity Last year my mom found out about a panel of Jews of Color being run by a group called JAM So my mom sent me the link and I went to the panel I was curious about JAM itself and the kids seemed really interesting so I started going to their regular meetings JAM stands for Jews Against Marginalization and is an affinity group for youth who identify as Jews of Color Sephardi Jews or Mizrahi Jews JAM is organized under the broader organization JYCA or Jewish Youth for Community Action JYCA and by extension JAM is based in the Bay Area in California But because of COVID all programming was online until a few weeks ago so I was able to attend JAM meetings regularly And honestly being part of JAM was one of the most validating experiences of my life Before I joined JAM I knew very few Jewish kids my age two of which I was friends with and neither of them were Jews of Color When my synagogue started to become more diverse as the neighborhood s demographics shifted I met more JOC but many of them were adults who had converted to Judaism later in life In JAM I met Jewish kids my age who were all JOC from different backgrounds Some were Latinx Jews others Black or Asian Jews Almost all of us were mixed race or biracial 28

and many of the kids also had non Jewish mothers who hadn t converted to Judaism For the first time in my life I was able to connect with a group of people who were struggling with the same questions about Judaism that I was Not the questions about prayers and laws but the questions about whether we counted as Jews at all and whether it was worth pressing white Jews to see us as equally Jewish as they were The last thing I did with JAM before their meetings went offline again was write an op ed about raising the minimum wage Two other kids and I supervised by one of JAM s coordinators wrote an op ed about why raising the minimum wage to 15 an hour and including service workers in that minimum wage is really important We talked about the racist history of tipping and service workers brought up the harassment faced by service workers and the disproportionate numbers of people of color in service jobs and ended the piece by talking briefly about how the Torah actually commands Jews to pay a livable wage to their workers Our op ed was published in the online magazine Alma a feminist Jewish culture site and online community bringing you a diversity of voices There is no other space I have been in in which I can imagine someone coming to me with the idea for this piece and asking me to write it alongside two other Jewish kids of color And then stepping back giving the three of us total control and really only acting as a facilitator and editor when we asked I didn t say all of this to plug JYCA or JAM or even this op ed I told you about JAM because I m trying to convey how life changing it was for me to meet people like me And it wasn t about getting answers to all these questions I have about my relationship to my Jewish identity I actually left JAM with more 29

questions than I came with But I didn t need to be a part of that group because I needed answers I needed to be part of that group because I needed to know that I wasn t alone I ve heard a lot of people argue especially more recently that having affinity groups for all of these hyper specific overlappings of identity is a waste of time That it s not important it doesn t matter and that it s plain exclusionary Someone once told me when I brought up the idea of a space for JOC specifically that there weren t enough JOC for that to make sense and that it would keep other people from being comfortable being Jewish And honestly NOT having those hyper specific groups is what kept me from being comfortable being Jewish It s the same argument people make when they say that marginalized groups of people shouldn t get special treatment I really want you to draw the parallels here Someone saying that we shouldn t have black only spaces and someone saying that we shouldn t have spaces for only JOC It s fundamentally the same argument And these groups are formed for the same fundamental reason because people feel left out or sidelined or uncomfortable or out of place and they want to be around other people that feel the same way I want to be around other JOC who have non Jewish mothers that didn t convert Not because I think that other people should be uncomfortable being Jewish but because I feel uncomfortable being Jewish and the intersection of all of those aspects of my identity is what makes me uncomfortable being Jewish Being in a group of JOC or a group of Jewish youth or a group of Jews with non Jewish mothers who didn t convert wouldn t 30

have had the same impact on me that JAM did because having to be in those three separate groups would actually make me see those parts of my identity as more separate than they already were JAM had such a huge influence on me because it included people with this same intersection of identities that I had But that didn t mean the group wasn t diverse Like I said there were different kinds of POC Some of the kids had two Jewish parents some had a non Jewish mother who converted some had a Jewish mother and non Jewish father JAM is an incredibly diverse group of kids but the nature of it allowed me to find people with very similar experiences as mine I just want to leave you with the idea that having affinity groups for a very specific set of overlapping identities isn t a bad thing It can actually be really helpful and validating for people who fall into that category But at the same time we don t necessarily need those affinity spaces in order to be more inclusive I m not out here asking my synagogue to make an affinity space for Jewish youth of color But when you encounter someone who has multiple overlapping identities please take the time to listen to them If they don t say anything ask them if they want to I wouldn t be giving this dvar if someone hadn t reached out and asked me if I wanted to talk I wouldn t have gone and asked to give this dvar Partly because I m an introvert and very unlikely to initiate any kind of interpersonal interaction but also because I wasn t entirely sure that my story was wanted or welcome or would even be seriously considered And that s not to say that my synagogue isn t a welcoming space but I ve spent my entire life being told that this story I just told you wasn t important to tell that I was being 31

dramatic that I would find my people in college and I would get over it because there weren t that many people like me in the world anyway So please reach out Invite people to share how the intersection of their identities has impacted their lives Invite POC in our community to speak but pay attention to the differences between those people Just think about the stories you are letting be told Think more carefully and more intentionally about who exactly you are inviting to the table Pay attention to how identities overlap and how that changes the story someone has to tell An Asian man who converted to Judaism as an adult has a very different story to tell than a Black biracial female teenager who was born Jewish but always felt excluded from the Jewish community because her mother isn t Jewish and never converted If you re only looking to include a story from a JOC you will miss the differences among those stories You are still seeing a butterfly instead of a Monarch a cloud instead of water droplets a snowflake instead of ice crystals a forest instead of trees that share geography but not species nor flowers nor seeds nor names Look more closely With binoculars or under a microscope if you have to look more closely and see that people are truly individual despite what few identities they may share F 17 Black Jewish Biracial 32

The Talmud makes clear that every human as an image of God is endowed with three intrinsic dignities infinite value equality and uniqueness Sanhedrin 37a Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg Riverdale NY 33

Interlude IV Both the song and music video of Water Oil explore themes of belonging and othering internalized racism and distorted self image impostor syndrome fetishization living in diaspora and searching for home and ultimately finding joy and pride in my identity Jenni Rudolph 34

EMBLANQUECER When I was born the air was pale and green and gold They came to the United States to be a bigger highway They came to Venezuela when Perez Jimenez decided to emblanquecer la raza What this country doesn t know could be another country altogether Emblanquecer looks like embalm to me How lifeless things become enshrined instead of being turned back into earth when they stop sourcing life When I was born my oxygen was pressurized a cabin in an aircraft hovering no homelands My brother making shadow puppets against corrugated walls And then more siblings came and with them the unsiblings At stake the always airplane upping me away from Small islands are affixed to me The other white kids call them freckles the cousins say lunares Lunar like my other mother calendar Continents float by like elephants Whiteness smooth and supple on the mouths and mortgages of my relations It s very hard to be something by way of boat or trunk By way of asthmatic empire Or maybe all the time I spend negating what I am is just avoidance At stake so many lives so many murderous relations Compelled by smell butterflies migrate toward milkweed miles away compelled by smell s white compass Every time I try to write this down the words start to dart away from me It is a bandaged half dream a bungled nightmare This is someone else s map I think pointing wildly in the dark No one is here but me And all my ghosts I pull the documents like eyelids over me Citizenship papers Repatriation I pull the curtains up 35

In Spanish emblanquecer means to whiten It refers to the specific whitening the race campaigns in Latin America that promoted European immigration and access to social and economic privilege for European immigrants Here it is also used to refer to the assimilation of some Latinx and Jewish people into whiteness and white supremacy culture in the United States F 36 Venzualan 1st gen US citizen Jewish 36

If we agree that G d is everything then He is every color Anything less would be a limitation and He is unlimited One is anti Semitic not when one dislikes someone Jewish but when one dislikes them merely because they are Jewish Likewise disliking someone of another race because of something they did is one thing judging them or treating them poorly merely because of their race is racism upon which the Torah frowns People of any color may convert to Judaism if they choose to accept the Torah and its guidelines for life If you believe G d created and sustains the world and everything in it then there is no place for hate or discrimination merely because of skin color Rabbi Levi Shemtov Vice President American Friends of Lubavitch Washington DC 37

Hamantaschen of Our Own Jews from the former Soviet Union didn t grow up with the typical holiday treats so I tried to imagine what we might have made for Purim I was in junior high when I was introduced to Jewish food for the first time during a string of kiddush lunches after my classmates bar and bat mitzvahs in Edmonton Alberta I d never seen a knish or eaten kugel before My family escaped the Soviet Union in 1979 when I was a toddler and compared to our Canadian neighbors it seemed like our eating habits along with everything else about our Jewish identity had been shaped on another planet Jewish food has always existed in conversation with the cuisines around us But in the Soviet Union that conversation had come to a grinding halt Soviet food policies created a national cuisine that was simultaneously standardized while also covering the breadth of the empire a totalitarian fusion cuisine as it were In the decades after WWII confronted with painful war losses continuous food shortages and the vagaries of state antisemitism Jewish kitchens became indistinguishable from their Soviet neighbors kitchens There were no Jewish delis no Jewish cookbooks no newspapers telling us how to prepare a Rosh Hashanah brisket Most Soviet Jews knew nothing of kashrut challah or cholent though we did know of mass graves university quotas and our official outsider status as Jews Today when Jews from the former Soviet Union talk about Russian or Soviet food it really includes dishes not only from Russia but from Ukraine Georgia and other former republics 38

Immigrants from the area too often identify simply as Russian even if they re not from Russia itself If we have families still in the former Soviet Union it s not uncommon for them to live in different countries When tensions rise in the region especially a crisis as severe as the Ukrainian invasion what to call ourselves becomes even more fraught When my children were born and especially since I ve started writing about Soviet Jewish food I struggled with what to serve on Jewish holidays Apart from the more obvious matzo ball soup gefilte fish and latkes my mother had never served stereotypically Ashkenazi dishes And I wasn t comfortable reflexively adopting food I d always been told I was supposed to eat It wasn t nashyi ours in Russian a word that distinguishes between insiders and outsiders It felt like I was acting out someone else s version of what it meant to be Jewish One exception My non Jewish partner took it upon himself to make brisket for our annual Hanukkah open house and I ve become an unabashed convert Instead I started to explicitly incorporate Soviet dishes into Jewish holiday meals an Armenian apricot lentil soup Georgian pkhali or Soviet shuba layered herring salad We often start our holidays with a shot of homemade cherry vodka and we include a fourth Matzo of Hope in our Passover Seder to remind my kids of our own escape to freedom I m not alone in my approach Soviet culinary traditions have a strong grip on Russian Jewish tables across North America and every holiday I m sent photos of tables filled with vinegret and Olivier salads buterbrodi open sandwiches 39

with caviar and more The same assortment of dishes was rotated through for all celebrations in the USSR so it s a natural extension to add those classics to the Jewish holiday table It s a strange moment to come to keeping a Soviet heritage alive for my children decades after my parents managed to get me out We fled the USSR but until then it was home What would I replace it with I m proud of what my parents grandparents and great grandparents survived and made of everything the USSR threw at them As complicated and painful as it was I want my kids to understand themselves as descendants of Soviet Jews especially in the face of a dominant Ashkenazi culture that tends to push other ways of being Jewish aside I don t want them growing up thinking that kugel or kreplach or even bagels and lox are the only real Jewish foods Conveniently North American Jewry overall is becoming more open about how we understand Jewish food I like to think it s an echo of what my grandmothers tables would have looked like if they had been allowed to celebrate Jewish holidays And over time I began to wonder what if that Jewish food conversation had developed in the USSR If today we can fill our hamantaschen with Nutella make matzo bark or experiment with challah flavors what would thousands of Jewish babushkas have created out of the confines of the Soviet kitchen My father once told me that he remembers his mother making hamantaschen as a child in their postwar Lviv apartment which I now understand would have been a somewhat illicit act 40

Last year when I was asked to do a Soviet themed cooking class for Purim these threads all came together Purim is an especially fitting holiday for a Soviet Jewish take Besides its general theme of deliverance from Hamans through the ages our personal Haman Stalin suffered a deadly stroke on Purim and died a few days later on March 5 1953 I knew it would have to be something savory because Russian celebrations always start with an overloaded zakuski appetizer table I landed on salmon zakuski hamantaschen filled with canned fish a Soviet staple The pickles capers and dill need no explanation The hamantaschen fit right into our Purim table a one bite reminder of where we came from and where we ve ended up and perhaps a little bit of fantasizing about what might have been My kids I should report gobbled them up though not until they clarified that it didn t excuse me from also providing them with an assortment of poppy seed apricot Nutella and marmalade hamantaschen Lea Zeltserman Born in St Petersburg back when it was Leningrad I landed on the lucky side of history to grow up in Canada I was raised between prairies and Rockies in Edmonton Alberta and now call Toronto home I m a writer speaker and cultural observer on all things Soviet Russian and Jewish if it s about our immigration food or history I m probably interested and I ve definitely got something to say 41

Rabbi Shlomo Luria nearly 500 years ago argued that with the exception of great moral deficiencies like murder stealing and deception the Torah mostly describes behavior between Jews and relies on secular law for the rest So it s not so surprising that there s no outright prohibition against being a bigot Nonetheless I think racism violates some important meta principles of the Torah particularly the thinking of Maimonides for whom there is a 614th commandment Thou Shalt Not Be an Idiot Racism is objectionable for two reasons One is that it s just stupid We are taught as Jews to notice differences rather than group things together Racism is by its nature a failure to take note of the great differences between people within a group and as such it is intensely anti Jewish Second in practice it creates a chillul hashem a desecration of God s name when people who are charged with keeping God s word alive ignore those fundamental distinctions in their dealings with other people Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein CrossCurrents Los Angeles CA 42

Leviticus 19 begins You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy The halachic authority Nachmanides 1174 1270 says this means Jews must obey not just the letter but the spirit of the law The spirit of Torah is clearly conveyed in Genesis 1 27 If all humanity is made in God s image then clearly any kind of prejudice or racism is forbidden Nachmanides introduces the phrase naval b rshut ha Torah being despicable within the permitted boundaries of Torah Loosely defined this means that being holy means not engaging in disgusting behaviors that are not specifically forbidden but are not right either Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz Temple Beth El Springfield MA 43

Jew in solitude at university What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own Adrienne Rich Yom Kippur 1984 To feel alone far from your own is a cafeteria apple and a honey packet for the new year a folded article about the war in a foreign land a rote prayer mouthed in a shared bathroom mirror Hummed kol nidre on erev Yom Kippur An anxiety hymn she sings when she tries to be radical a feminist friend who will admit to Jewish by birth No god no religion all cultural constructs Spots a gold cross suspended on a chest it shines Passes a Chabad hasid in a skull cap and black coat He invites for Shabbat averts his eyes avoids her hand His wife describes women in Leviticus as virtuous married definitely not gay She finds another ill fitting Jew they bicker over politics and poetry make one sided love on dorm room twin beds and flail underneath some common thread F 27 Jewish Queer College Student 44

To ask if Jewish law forbids racism is to ask if you have ever read the first chapter of Genesis In it the Torah presents the most revolutionary idea of ancient times which judging by the xenophobia racism and bigotry that are still prevalent remains one many cannot easily digest That idea is contained in two Hebrew words B tselem Elohim the image of God and it is very carefully inserted into the larger context of the creation story Elohim created man in His image male and female He created them 1 27 The Torah emphasizes that the image of God is a concept embedded in men and women equally The idea is reinforced in Genesis 5 2 Male and female He created them and He blessed them and He named them Adam The woman is Adam created in the image of God just as the man is The message of these verses is much greater than equality between men and women It is about the equality of all humankind The binary difference between men and women is one s first instinctive reaction upon seeing a human being the inability to clearly define a non binary person is probably the reason why there is so much bigotry towards them By equating men and women the Torah states that the image of God is not expressed physically Racism is therefore a rejection of the very foundation of the Torah This is not to say however that there are no racist Jews Rabbi Haim Ovadia Potomac MD 45

THE SYNAGOGUE MEMBERSHIP ASSEMBLES TO DISCUSS THE FASCIST PRESIDENCY Room lit with the static of stacked generations Everyone leaning out of their chairs toward everyone else leaning out of their chairs Music above and below us like water What are we and someone says cycle someone says orbit marionettes Bodies like seagrass hustle and surge against tide and nation longing for a luminous wildgrass that could weave us a home But look we have shoulders so we know we exist America menaces its new and old face We are Chinese American Arkansas Black Austro Hungarian Long Island Italian Egyptian Korean All of us Jews Our diaspora teeters on its old and old again edge Our resident linguist explains Jew is the only one syllable name for a people This is part of the violence 46

Next to him someone tilts their head and says Sikh but the theory prevails in the room Dozens of bodies re metabolize something spat something said to mean filth Bodies gathering up their own bones and their water holding them close which takes effort on this city block in America I want us to belong to each other but not because our president hates us Eyelashes slip along spines of books riotous soil beneath carpet a churning What are we out there or to one another Are we a basket wildflowers and garlic a stairwell lost coin a gun barrel jammed or unjammed by bright summer petals Whose hands whose story of hands do we belong to and can a people belong to a dreaming machine Room lit with tongues tacked up in new and old shapes song a canopy opening over our heads seafloor of song under floor beneath soil and bones What if music can t answer 47

these kinds of questions These questions jammed in the sentences our grandparents spoke in the pause between exhale and molar mouths soundless with asking and inside us an unquenchable yearning to build a boat F 36 Jewish POC 48

Where I m From I am from two worlds from Black and white I am from the snow covered evergreen outside my window Never losing its color bearing the heavy burden on its branches I am full of walking contradictions seen and unseen the privilege to choose the paths before me the expectations of my heritage overlooking me along the way I am from sweet potato and pullovers from Abraham and Sarah I m from the economists and the laborers in the field from the spirit of a dreamer and the conviction of a believer I m from the Holy One Blessed Be He with the bleating of the ram and the thousand year old prayers I utter I m from Heilprin and Rubenstein s tree from the sizzling butter on cornbread to the Manischewitz pouring in my glass From the liberty my ancestors lost To the freedom fought for in a new land far from home my home Within a folder in my drawer full of history 49

familial documents to serve as a physical reminder I am from chains and persecution broken and escaped a growing leaf on the family tree M 18 Black Biracial Jewish 50