These prohetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.
Told with captivating images and haunting music, here is the remarkable story of a group of rural African people who converted to Judaism eighty years ago and, despite ensuing hardships, have stuck by their faith. Abayudaya features 100 full–color photographs and a CD filled with powerful music and songs.
Ariel Samson is just your run of the mill anomaly: a 20-something black Orthodox Jewish rabbi looking for love, figuring out life, and floating between at least two worlds.
The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.
Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared.
Lisa Jones brings the wit and candor of her infamous Village Voice column, "Skin Trade," to a much larger audience. Chock full of the "fierce black girl humor" that has made her column so popular, this provocative collection of essays and observations on race, sex, identity, and the politics of style speaks to a young generation of blacks who were raised in an integrated society and are now waiting for America to deliver on its promises of equality.
A compilation of matters relating to the Jews of Kʻai-fêng Fu.
Nearly fifty years after his death, Albert Einstein remains one of America's foremost cultural icons.
See "Jews of Kaifeng, China" (2009) pages (1160-1167). "Jews in China" (2009) pages (1155-1159). "Jews in Shanghai"(2009) pages (1172-1176). "Jews in China"(2009) pages (1182-1185).
They number barely a million today, less than one-tenth of the world Jewish population. But long ago, on Iberian soil, they were the magisters of their people, and the leaven of Mediterranean civilization altogether.
This book is a long awaited work on discovering and re-discovering the long standing relations, at times warm and supportive, and at other times, conflicted and troubled linkages between Jews and African Americans in the context of American history.
The history of Jerusalem as traditionally depicted is the quintessential history of conflict and strife, of ethnic tension, and of incompatible national narratives and visions. It is also a history of dramatic changes and moments, one of the most radical ones being the replacement of the Ottoman regime with British rule in December 1917.
Some two thousand years ago, a group of Jews settled in Ethiopia and was for millennia cut off from the rest of world Jewry, preserving its heritage with great self-sacrifice. When this community, the Beta Israel, ultimately made its way to Israel to rejoin its brethren in the late twentieth century, a host of complex dilemmas emerged.
An engrossing and counter view of one of the most dangerous elements of American urban history, this graphic novel tells the true story of Benjy Melendez, a Bronx legend, son of Puerto-Rican immigrants, who founded, at the end of the 1960s, the notorious Ghetto Brothers gang.
The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family's multigenerational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality wit regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.
JewAsian is a qualitative examination of the intersection of race, religion, and ethnicity in the increasing number of households that are Jewish American and Asian American. Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt’s book explores the larger social dimensions of intermarriages to explain how these particular unions reflect not only the identity of married individuals but also the communities to which they belong.
The tale of an unlikely group of swashbuckling Jews who ransacked the high seas in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition. The most adventurous among them took to the seas as freewheeling outlaws. They attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding.
Some years ago John Offenbach decided to embark on a series of portraits of Jews from different ethnicities, such as those from India and China and Ethiopia. Not just the great and the good, it had to include the homeless Jew, as well as the rich Jew. The incarcerated Jew, and the heroin addict. Offenbach took inspiration from People of the Twentieth Century, the series of portraits of German people of the 1920’s by the Cologne-based photographer August Sander, but unlike Sander, he decided not to include the background or the setting for any of portraits, as he didn’t want this collection to be documentary in style or intention; Half way around the world to each other but surprisingly close.
Jokes My Father Never Taught Me answers that poignant question and many more. It is an unprecedented look at the life of a legend of comedy, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the tortured man within.
What does it mean to be a Jew in the twenty-first century? Exploring the multifaceted and intensely complicated characteristics of this age-old, ever-changing community, Judaisms examines how Jews are a culture, ethnicity, nation, nationality, race, and religion. With each chapter revolving around a single theme—Narratives, Sinais, Zions, Messiahs, Laws, Mysticisms, Cultures, Movements, Genocides, Powers, Borders, and Futures—this introductory textbook interrogates readers’ understanding of the Jewish community. Written for a new mode of teaching—one that recognizes the core role that identity formation plays in our lives—this book weaves together alternative, marginalized voices to illustrate how Jews have always been in the process of reshaping their customs, practices, and beliefs. Judaisms is the first book to assess and summarize Jewish history from the time of the Hebrew Bible through today using multiple perspectives.
"Lovesong" is the moving account of a life and a spiritual odyssey, of a major writer's path from his boyhood as the son of a black Methodist minister in the South to his conversion to Judaism.
March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation.
Although all of the stories told in Peacesong DC are based on actual events in the author’s life, the book is classified as fiction rather than non-fiction because the stories bend toward the arc of storytelling rather than that of rigid facts. If something in the story appears particularly improbable, it is likely to be the truth.
This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West’s most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X.
Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers is a collection of recipes and stories from the times of the Crypto-Jews who were hiding and pretending to be Catholic during the Spanish Inquisition while practicing their Judaism underground through the present. The grandmothers of the family devised clever ways to disguise the fact that they were still keeping kosher while appearing to be eating pork.
Norman Stillman's Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity is a sympathetic attempt to describe religious aspects of the Sephardi and Oriental encounter with "modernity" and the consequences of that encounter.
Many people are familiar with the story of Jewish support for the American civil rights movement, but this history has another side―one that has not been fully told until now.
Siddur Masorti is the world's first Hebrew-English egalitarian Sefaradi prayerbook! Our first volume features the entire weekday prayer service in a beautiful four-column layout (text, translation, transliteration, commentary). Amongst the prayers you'll find seven custom-made plates of beautiful calligraphic artwork done by Noam Sienna.
Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
Yelena Khanga tells the compelling story of growing up black in Russia and journeying through cultures to learn about her forebears and meet relatives she had never known. From the days of slavery in the cotton fields of Mississippi to the Moscow of Stalin and Brezhnev, from Jewish New York and Harlem in the twenties to modern-day Los Angeles, Long Island, and Zanzibar, Soul to Soul is a four-generation family memoir.
This book explores the extraordinary differentiation of the Baghdadi Jewish community over time during their sojourn in India from the end of the eighteenth century until their dispersion to Indian diasporas in Israel and English-speaking countries throughout the world after India gained independence in 1947.
A monumental work that traces the development of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish communities and their cuisine over the centuries. The 800 magnificent recipes, many never before documented, represent treasures garnered bu Roden through nearly 15 years of traveling around the world.
An unforgettable memoir about a mixed-race Jewish woman who, after fifteen years of estrangement from her racist great-aunt, helps bring her home when Alzheimer’s strikes.
First published in 1995, James McBride’s memoir tells the story of his mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylaska.
A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.
A rich trove of contemporary global Jewish cuisine, featuring hundreds of stories and recipes for home cooks everywhere The Jewish Cookbook is an inspiring celebration of the diversity and breadth of this venerable culinary tradition. A true fusion cuisine, Jewish food evolves constantly to reflect the changing geographies and ingredients of its cooks.
A fascinating photographic record that illustrates four historical migrations of Jews to China: Yuan dynasty Jews in Kaifeng, mid-nineteenth century Baghdadi merchants in Shanghai, early twentieth century migrants from Russia, and mid twentieth century refugees from Nazi Germany. Black and white photographs, Chinese and English commentary throughout.
From stand-up comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish comes The Last Black Unicorn, a hilarious, edgy, and heart-wrenching collection of autobiographical essays that will leave you laughing through tears.
Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue.
The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s.
In this ground-breaking collection of poems, Samuels examines the beauty and contradictions of his own mixed identity with gut-wrenching narratives, humor, and passionate verve.
