Black, Jewish, and Beautiful: Contemporary Blewish Voices, with Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan
Please register for this free online program.
Black, Jewish, and Beautiful brings together powerful perspectives and showcases the vastly divergent ways people come to inhabit a shared Blewish, or Black Jewish identity. These voices demonstrate that Black Jewishness is just one dimension of their multifaceted lives as they explore how they feel, think, and make sense of who they are.
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan bring together an array of oral histories, essays, and interviews of Black Jews by birth, others who converted, and those who were raised one way only to discover later that their identity was not what they had thought. The result is a collection of myriad narratives, told through rocky, sometimes-frayed structures. Contributors are open and frank in their discussion of the good, the bad, and the ugly, the heart wrenching, and the beautiful in their experiences.
Black, Jewish, and Beautiful is an essential read for anyone interested in the exploration of belonging and the richness of nuanced identity in contemporary life.
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is a vocalist, composer, and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. His essays on music and culture have appeared in a number of publications, including Jewish Currents and Moment Magazine.
Sara Feldman is a lecturer in Yiddish Studies at UC Berkeley, having previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a co-organizer of Harvard’s Black and Jewish: A Talk Series and co-author of “Voices from Black Lives Matter Protests / Koyles fun blek layvs meter protestn” in In geveb. Her essays, translations, and scholarship appear in Slavic and East European Journal, Apikorsus, AJS Perspectives, and Baltic Worlds, among others.
Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and is a professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois. Her books include Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth..