My great-great grandmother was a nice girl from Spain. Was she Jewish? I still don’t understand why we weren’t allowed to eat pork growing up and why my mother wore a star of David. When I asked her as a kid about the former, she mumbled something about “the Old Testament.” I gave her a… Continue reading DNA Tests Lead to Questions: Jewish? Muslim? Catholic?
According to “Breast Cancer Study: Many Hispanic Women Have Jewish Ancestry”, a JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) study last year revealed a high incidence of a genetic mutation–the breast cancer gene, BRCA1–in Hispanic-American women, similar to the high incidence of that gene in Ashkenazic* Jewish American women. The study concluded that this was probably… Continue reading Can breasts be Jewish?
Who’s the monkey in the middle? Just what is a “playful humiliation”? Read Dacher Keltner’s “In Defense of Teasing” to find out. As a self-professed survivor of teasing, I’m just not buying his story. And I wonder if most Jews would after hearing time and time again that embarrassing someone is tantamount to murder.
See how far we’ve come by laughing it up to this 1977 clip starring comedian Richard Pryor. (Fun fact: One of Pryor’s daughter, Rain, is a Jew by birth of mixed race.) Click here to be redirected to You Tube.
Sadia Shepard’s op-ed piece in the Forward, “Targeting Tolerance in Mumbai”, has led to a debate about hyphenated identities. One reader, Yehuda, swears they don’t exist. (Are we a myth? I just pinched myself and I seem to be very real.) The other reader, Pamela, an African American/Carribean American (represent!) woman, says we do. Here… Continue reading I don’t exist?
In case you haven’t heard about it “Girl Meets God” is a book about a girl, Lauren F. Winner, who grows up in an interfaith family (Jewish father, Christian mother) and decides to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Then she goes and converts to Christianity. Sadia Shepard suggested I read it as part of my voyage… Continue reading Girl Meets God…Once…Twice…
I’m trying to get all the Dominican Jews in Riverdale (who attend HIR) together for a Shabbat meal. Hooray! Yippey! I found this fact so entertaining, I decided to email all my Dominican family members about it. My cousin, who has been pumping me for Jewish knowledge ever since his doorman job led to gigs… Continue reading I was a rare white panda
Check out JVoices for a great interview with Jen Chau, the Jewish mixed race founder and director of Swirl: Click here: “Jen Chau Reflects on Her Work as a Change-Maker for Mixed Race Communities”. I’ve previously blogged about Jen who I met at a JCC Manhattan talk on Jews of color. I’ve been meaning to… Continue reading America’s Mixed Race Future
According to The Jerusalem Post, “Anti-Semitism is not the same as Islamophobia”. And neither is Anti-Semitism the same as racism or Islamophobia the same as racism. This all brings me back to an early post on the misappropriation of the word racism. While both Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are forms of discrimation, of prejudice, they are… Continue reading Anti-Semitism is not Islamophobia is not Racism
When a Jewish friend railed against Barack Obama’s Jewish pick for Chief of Staff, calling it “pandering to the Jews,” I told him to suck it up. After all, it didn’t look like Obama was going to be pandering to Hispanic voters any time soon. “Consider yourself lucky,” I said in so many words. But… Continue reading Over-representation under Obama for Jewish Latino Writers
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 