Black, Jewish, and Beautiful : Contemporary Blewish Voices

Black, Jewish, and Beautiful brings together impactful perspectives and showcases the vastly divergent ways people come to inhabit a shared Blewish, or Black-Jewish, identity. These voices demonstrate that people are living life in all kinds of ways well beyond this mixedness as they share how they feel, reflect, and think about Black Jewishness.

Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan bring together an array of oral histories 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 identities, told through rocky, sometimes-frayed structures. Contributors are open and frank in discussing the good, the bad, the beautiful, the heart wrenching, and the ugly in their experiences.

As the first anthology of Black Jewish voices to juxtapose multiple genres—interviews, essays, reflections, and more—Black, Jewish, and Beautiful is an essential read.