When asked about her Hanukkah traditions, Grace Osborne says that she looks forward to sharing festive food with both the Jewish and non-Jewish sides of her family.
“This year, Hanukkah starts on Christmas, so it’s perfect,” she said. “In my family, we have a tradition of Popeye’s. For Hanukkan, you do fried food… latkes – the potato pancakes – or sufganiyot, the fried donuts. We’re Black, so we do fried chicken – keep it simple.”
Osborne, who previously served as the program director of the Los Angeles chapter of the national Jews of Color Initiative (JoCI), helped launch the Jews of Color Initiative’s (JoCI) Professional Network last year. A recent gathering of the Network in Beverly Hills brought together the Network’s members and friends, and Jews of color who are seeking a more cohesive community.
Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists recognize that the American Jewish community is far more diverse than imagined. The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles is among the philanthropic organizations that support the JoCI, which receives annual grants for projects and research to unite Black, Brown, and multiracial Jewish people. In Los Angeles, these projects currently include Hillel at UCLA, Kamochah, an educational hub for Black Orthodox Jews; Jewtina y. Co, a study of the experiences and insights of Latin Jews; and Shades of Belonging, a national initiative to uplift the experiences of Jewish adoptees of color.
Related Stories:
https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org, https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/grantmaking/view-all-grants/
https://lasentinel.net/florida-congressman-promotes-unity-between-blacks-and-jews.html
Jordan Daniels is a program officer for JoCI in Los Angeles. His experiences of growing up with biracial parents and living in the diverse Bay Area and some not-so-diverse areas of Southern California have shown him the value of building community for Jews of color.
“It’s been my entire access point into Jewish life and expression,” he said. “I get to meet people, make friends, and build community … with a Jewish lens.
“I’m the grandchild of Holocaust survivors,” said Daniels. “My mom is Jewish, my dad is Black. At my last job, I was the only Jew of color. I am so fiercely involved in my Blackness, so fiercely involved in my queerness. Having the Jewishness [sic] part, especially in the JoCI, allows … all of me in one place.”
The JoCI was established in Berkeley in 2017, with chapters in Los Angeles, New York, and the Bay Area, and is led by executive director Ilana Kaufman, who has a background as a program officer in education and social justice work.
“I was part of a larger conversation in 2015, 2016, 2017 … while there was murder after murder of unarmed Black and Brown people in this country,” Kaufman said.
“The question emerged around … the experience of Black Jews and Jewish people of color. No one had really asked that question in a national way. I was invited to join an effort to find out if there was some initiative … that would help create a landing place or some common landscape for Jewish people of color as part of the larger Jewish community.”
This national call for ideas resulted in the first $160,000 grants to create programs that would build and foster a more inclusive ecosystem in the organized American Jewish community, for an estimated 1 million Jews of color in the United States.
“It let us know that there was … an appetite for building community around Jewish people of color: Black Jewish folks, BIPOC Jews; that were was energy for collaboration and passion for strengthening the Jewish community,” said Kaufman.
Kaufman said that the act of Jews of color coming together has been proven to transcend cultural and political boundaries.
“I’ve sat at tables with people where you have an Israeli person, people with family from Palestine, with people who maybe view themselves as Zionist or anti-Zionist, all able to not only be in conversation and community,” she said.
“But when we’re done with those check-ins, they can just … engage in the work of loving each other, thriving as people of color who are Jewish, and showing a way to lead by example and cooperation. Honoring different perspectives [and] different identities actually creates common ground.”
This resource was supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library via California Black Media as part of the Stop the Hate Program. The program is supported by partnership with California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.