Drawing upon experiences of raising their young sons as well as a desire to create positive representation, Tameika Minor and Tonia Respes began a mission to create a graphic novel that celebrated the nuanced, intersectional identities of Black Jewish families and young Black Jewish boys.
Ronay-Jinich hopes the findings of this study will inspire communities to continue to offer and expand support to multi-ethnic Jewish families and communities, creating a community of inclusion and multiculturalism for future generations.
A central goal of this cohort is to elevate and invest in Black, Indigenous, Jews of Color, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as wisdom-holders and educators in the open mikvah environment, advancing the movement by making Jewish ritual leaders representative of our Jewish community’s multiracial reality.
Rabbi Miller’s experiences navigating and serving as a leader in different Jewish organizations—educational, religious, philanthropic, and DEI oriented—have endowed her with rich wisdom and perspective applicable to myriad issues that affect the Jewish communal ecosystem.
The Jews of Color Initiative is excited to highlight the JoC Pro Network, an initiative featuring professional gatherings and convenings that create access and community for Jews of Color seeking to expand their careers in the Jewish nonprofit ecosystem. Previously, UJA- Federation of New York managed the Network. Today, the JoCI is proud to lead it.
In her chapter in Racial Equity-Informed Philanthropy: A Funder Resource from a Jewish Perspective, Imani Romney-Rosa Chapman unpacks bias, power, privilege, decolonization, and structural racism, providing a framework to ground readers of Racial Equity-Informed Philanthropy in a common knowledge base.
In August 2022, the JoCI hired two incredible leaders to become part of our expanding Grants team. Sarah Starks and Jordan Daniels are JoCI’s Junior Program Officers and represent a generation of JoC whose leadership experiences and backgrounds contribute to the richness of our ever-expanding field.
By engaging with older generations about their experiences of intersectional identities, the CARE research team is providing more nuance to our communal understanding of the JoC community across generations.
Merging their knowledge and skills, these organizations created a retreat that simultaneously centered immigrant rights and helped white Ashkenazi Jews see similarities to their own family and community immigration histories. The result was the Darchei Tzedek/Caminos a la Justicia retreat, which took a cohort of JoC leaders to Nogales, Arizona collectively witness and experience the border.
“The power of fully embodying JoC experience is made possible only when JoC are able to congregate and learn from one another’s experiences,” said Silverstein. This means that we must continue to forge a future where all racialized identities can fully embody their Jewishness—to achieve a state of radical belonging where being JoC is “part of how you move and exist in the world… something you don’t even have to think about, because it is so deeply a part of what you are.”
