Why read Black, Jewish, and Interracial?

Book cover of Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Book description

How do adult children of interracial parents-where one parent is Jewish and one is Black-think about personal identity? This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay's Black, Jewish, and Interracial. Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Black, Jewish, and Interracial as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg

Author

Too often, “Black-Jewish relations” has been used as a shorthand for “African American non-Jewish/white Jewish relations. Gibel Azoulay, herself both Black and Jewish, not only shatters the myths of this dichotomy, but plunges into deeper questions of what constitutes identity and lived experience in the first place.

What shapes one’s “Jewish” or “Black” identity? What is “biracial” or “multiracial” and can it be disentangled from its American political and historical context?

Ultimately, she concludes, these ways of “being in the world” serve to both challenge and undermine the essentialist and confining classifications surrounding us.

From Cheryl's list on The best books on Black-Jewish relations.