Jews of Color: One Term and Many Communities

Jews of color are much in the Jewish news. We hear about how there are a lot of Jews of color—more than we knew! We hear about how that is wrong—there are not so many Jews of color after all! We hear that politically, they are to the left of the Jewish community. We hear that they experience racism within the Jewish community. But who are Jews of color? This talk explains the history of the term Jews of color; the wide array of racial, cultural, and life experiences of the people we call Jews of color; and touches on some criticisms with the term Jews of color. After the talk, we will have a conversation about how to make Jewish spaces more welcoming to a diverse range of Jewish experiences.
 

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of the National Jewish Book Award finalist Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); a book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023); and God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (under contract with University of North Carolina Press). She is the primary investigator on a research project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures and is working on a history of Jews of color in the United States over the past 100 years for Princeton University Press.

Cosponsors: Department of History, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Institute for Global Studies, Department of Sociology, Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas