New program seeks to support Jews of color
27th March 2023 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
New Orleanian Terrell Mims was born a Christian, a son of a pastor, but while growing into adulthood, he began to question the faith in which he was raised.
As a result, he turned to study to find answers about his beliefs and the world around him.
“I was getting disenchanted, so I wanted to try to get closer to Jesus,” Mims said, “and I believe in going straight to the source.”
For him, that meant getting to know Jesus as a person and as a historical figure. In his quest, he found Jesus was a devout Jew who lived that faith in his lifetime. Because of that realization, Mims found that Judaism itself started to make sense for him.
“I really found a kinship to Judaism,” he said. “I felt, ‘This is who I am.’”
Now Mims, an African-American born and raised in New Orleans, loves his Jewish faith and is an active member of Gates of Prayer, a Reform congregation in Metairie. “I live my life,” he said. “I made my decision on the way I am, and it works well in my life.”
Mims certainly isn’t alone as a Jew of Color in America. According to the Jews of Color Initiative (JoCI), 12-15 percent of American Jews identify as people of color.
Now, the JoCI, a nationwide organization dedicated to generating and enhancing racial equity in the U.S. Jewish community, is launching a pilot program that will provide Jews of color the opportunity to develop philanthropic skills and strategies aimed at such diversity in the Jewish population.
JoCI Philanthropy Fellowship is a 12-month program that will recruit up to three Jews of color (JoC) who will subsequently be taught the knowledge and skills necessary to be active in various philanthropic roles that help foster a more representative and equitable Jewish communal ecosystem. The yearlong course will also help participants network with leaders in the Jewish community and gain valuable philanthropic experience.
JoCI Senior Program Officer Gabi Kuhn said the Philanthropy Fellowship was created to counter the lack of a multiracial pipeline for JoC philanthropy professionals and program officers in Jewish foundations.
“Many JoC feel inadequately supported by Jewish foundations, and much of this is related to funding practices,” Kuhn said.
“As it stands, the Jewish philanthropic landscape is predominantly white. This program offers JoC the opportunity to learn about the Jewish communal philanthropic ecosystem through a racial justice framework and gain hands-on experience in grant making, to contribute to building a funding landscape that has more JoC in philanthropic decision making roles and support funding practices that represent our multiracial Jewish reality.”
Kuhn said the JoCI Philanthropy Fellowship follows up on “Beyond the Count,” a comprehensive study undertaken by the organization to survey, analyze and document the experiences of Jews of color. The report was published in 2021 and found that 80 percent of Jews of color have faced discrimination in Jewish settings.
The Jews of Color Initiative (Joci) was)was formed in 2017. The initiative’s three main activities include grant making, research and community education, all of which have already made substantial progress in the effort to enhance Jewish diversity, Kuhn said.
The New Orleans Jewish community strives to grow its diversity and expand its reach beyond its traditionally white and Eastern European background, said Rabbi Katie Bauman, senior rabbi at Touro Synagogue, a Reform congregation that has been operating in New Orleans since 1828.
Bauman said building such varied demographics in the community “is a beautiful phenomenon to witness. It is very important for us to build inclusive spaces in which Jews of every background feel a sense of belonging.”
She added that “Jews are in more and more diverse family systems, diverse not just in terms of race but in terms of religion. We have many faiths represented among the loved ones in Touro families, and creating an atmosphere of welcome and connection is a high priority for our congregation.”
Bauman said Jewish leaders and congregants need to be responsive to everyone in the kahal, or congregation.
She added that the kahal must re-examine traditional assumptions about Jewish identity, an effort that includes listening to its congregants and learning from leaders representing the diversity within the Jewish experience.
“Culture change requires continual and deep attention to our norms and ways and an openness to change,” she said.
“These are not easy ways of being, but they are vitally important to build the community and world we wish to see.”
Bauman believes the JoCI will certainly enhance the Jewish community by supporting Jews of color in their effort to grow their unique voices and leadership ability.
“This is a good thing for the Jewish community,” she said. “Jews of color bring vitally important perspectives that enrich the whole, and a program that amplifies these perspectives is a significant step in the right direction.”
Touro member Anamaria Villamarin-Lupin identifies as a Jew of color.
Born in Colombia, Villamarin-Lupin came to New Orleans when she was 12. She said for much of her childhood and young adulthood, she “lived a pretty non-religious life.” She met her husband, a devout Jew, while they were in college and eventually married, but Villamarin-Lupin didn’t convert to Judaism at that time.
After a few years as a married couple, they had their first child, which prompted Villamarin-Lupin and her husband to discuss how they wanted to raise their child in terms of religious faith.
Nearly a decade after being a life partner with a committed Jew but not adopting Judaism herself, Villamarin-Lupin now felt she was ready to become Jewish. “It felt right,” she said. “My catalyst was my son turning 4 and our decision as a family.”
Villamarin-Lupin said she was welcomed into the Touro community, which helped her develop a closeness with Judaism that was more than just superficial.
“I didn’t want this to be about going through the motions,” she said. “I wanted [her faith] to be genuine.”
Villamarin-Lupin said her own story and development as a Jew of color from Colombia might offer a unique view of the global Jewish diaspora, especially its complexity and diversity.
She said the Colombia department of Antioquia (similar to a state in the U.S.) features a small community of Jews who are descended from people from the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere who, in an effort to escape persecution in their homelands, came to the area of the Spanish empire in Latin America that is now Antioquia.
Those descendants developed and maintain their own unique form of Judaism and Jewishness that still thrives today even though they are also “completely Latino,” Villamarin-Lupin said.
“I now have this [unique] lens to see things through,” Villamarin-Lupin said, adding that there are “little legacies of Judaism” all over the world.
According to Villamarin-Lupin, identity plays a large part in the lives of Jews, both in terms of self-identity and the attempts of others to impose identities upon them. Although traditionally most Jews are white and of European descent, even white Jews have their own battles with bigotry, hatred and imposed identity, challenges that white Jews continue to face in America.
Those struggles of ethnic identity and acceptance become even more challenging when Jews identify as other ethnicities – for example, Black, Latinx or Middle Eastern – in addition to their Jewishness. Villamarin-Lupin said her own children live such dual identities.
Another example is the Beta Israel community, Black Ethiopian Jews with traditions stretching back a millennia. Many such Ethiopian Jews settled in Israel itself, where even there, Beta Israelites endured persecution from other Israelis.
“It’s important to give [all Jews] a voice,” Villamarin-Lupin said. “The narrative for Jews [traditionally] unfortunately has been that they’re all white, but we have to start peeling away that narrative of Jews being a uniform group. We need to dismantle and deconstruct the idea that people have to ‘look Jewish,’ because there is no single ‘look’ of being Jewish.”
Beyond Touro and Gates of Prayer are other Jewish organizations in the New Orleans metropolitan area that actively work to recognize and encourage the diversity of the local Jewish community.
One such entity is the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans (JFGNO). Its mission is “to inspire members of our community to explore and share their unique Jewish identities by connecting to a vast array of opportunities to engage with our local Jewish community, with the Greater New Orleans community, and with Jewish communities in Israel and around the world.”
The JFGNO sponsors the Goldring Family Foundation’s Center for Jewish-Multicultural Affairs, whose focus includes fostering Black-Jewish relations in the city, as well as Latin-American relations and LGBTQ relations.
JoCI leaders hope that the Philanthropy Fellowship program can help Jews of color overcome the racism and stereotyping that unfortunately permeate both the Jewish community and American society as a whole.
“JoC often face feelings of alienation and ostracization from Jewish communal spaces,” Kuhn said. “They will often find their Jewishness subject to deep scrutiny and question. They can also feel excluded from Jewish narratives, which too often center Ashkenazi experiences. They can also fail to see JoC representation in Jewish leadership. All this contributes to a feeling of aloneness and isolation.”
Kuhn said the JoCI’s Philanthropy Fellowship program has already paid dividends in combating such prejudice and misunderstanding.
“We have had an overwhelming, positive response,” she said. “This really is a one of a kind program in our community, and we’re very excited to meet a need.”
This article originally published in the March 27, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
