Press

The challenge for white American Jews is to understand that they can be both targets of white supremacy and also accomplices.

In recent years, Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists have come to recognize that the American Jewish community—widely presumed to be white-skinned and Ashkenazi (from Central and Eastern Europe)—is far more diverse than they imagined. With the help of philanthropic partners, the Jews of Color Initiative, a Berkeley, California-based fund led by Executive Director Ilana Kaufman, is raising consciousness about underserved Jews of color and working to create a more inclusive and welcoming ecosystem in the organized American Jewish community.

American Jews of color say their racial and ethnic identities shape their Jewishness in important, positive ways, but that they also face bigotry in settings where white Jews predominate, according to a study released Thursday, the largest-ever of this group.

In a 1963 speech in Chicago attended by Martin Luther King Jr., theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously described racism as an “eye disease, a cancer of the soul … making us see the generality of race, but not the uniqueness of the human face.”