Product details
- ISBN 9780815612209
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Syracuse University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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 preceptor in Yiddish in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. 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.
