Minutes before Shabbat falls upon the home of Rabbi Sandra Lawson and her wife, Susan Hurrey, the rabbi rushes to complete her final preparations.

“The hope is that we’re going to kind of complete each other. In our relationship as co-instructors, we’re going to model what black-Jewish relationships should look like.”

The Latin American Jewish & Gender Studies project, a new initiative of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, will explore myriad aspects of Latin American Jewry.

The affinity between Jews and Asians has some grounding in culture, according to Kim and Leavitt. In 2012, they published a study that sought to explain what draws these two ancient cultures together.