Mixed-race Jewish children locate their communal comfort zone
The Jewish Chronicle Online
2009-11-12
Sue Fishkoff
Dafna Wu, a 48-year-old San Francisco nurse, was born to a Jewish mother and Chinese father. She was raised Jewish but looks Asian, as does her daughter, nine-year-old Amalia, whose father was also Chinese.
The Hebrew School Amalia attends is filled with mixed-race children, but the parents in the congregation are all white, as is the majority of American Jewry. That concerns her mother.
“All my life I’ve had to defend being Jewish,” says Ms Wu. “When I go to a new synagogue, people ask who I’m with. I don’t want her to have to explain her Judaism, or be exoticised for it. I just want her to be a kid, not ‘that special, multi-racial kid’.”
That’s why Ms Wu brings Amalia to Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), a San Francisco-based organisation for ethnically and racially diverse Jews. At the group’s most recent retreat last month, at a camp north of San Francisco, Amalia played with other Jewish children who are black, Hispanic and Asian. They sang Hebrew songs, built a succah, and learned about tzedakah, but they also talked openly with their counsellors about what it means to be Jews of colour, to have an identity people do not see due to the colour of their skin.
About 5.4 per cent of America’s Jews are either non-white or Hispanic, according to the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey. A 2004 study by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, Be’chol Lashon’s parent organisation, puts that number at about 10 per cent. Nevertheless, say activists in the field, the prevailing assumption is that Jews are white, and that Jews of other racial or ethnic backgrounds are adoptees or converts. Sometimes they are, but increasingly they are not, as the children of mixed-race couples grow to adulthood and begin raising their own Jewish children…
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