According to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center, there are about 5.8 million Jewish adults in the United States; the overwhelming majority identify as white and non-Hispanic. In a 2021 study commissioned by the Jews of Color Initiative, an organization devoted to supporting and empowering that community, 80 percent of roughly 1,100 self-identified Jews of color from across the country said they had experienced discrimination in a Jewish setting.
One percent of Black Americans identify as Jewish, but in younger generations, that percentage is increasing, and young American Jews overall are a far more diverse group than their older counterparts.
“Jewish civilization has, can and will look like us as much as anyone else,” Mr. Twitty said.
There are clear parallels between the Black American experience and the story of Passover.
In the biblical book of Exodus, God inflicts the 10 plagues — including the killing of each family’s firstborn child — to persuade Pharoah to let the Jewish people go. (God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb and mark their doors with its blood, so the Angel of Death might “pass over” their homes.)
God then frees the Israelites from slavery in Egypt after four centuries of bondage, parting the Red Sea so they can escape; then they wander in the desert for 40 years. It is a tale of struggle and liberation — the same kind of liberation that Black Americans experienced after the Emancipation Proclamation, and still seek today.
Robin Washington, 65, a journalist and editor at large of the Forward, and a longtime prominent voice among Jews of color, tells a story about reaching for a book to prop up his laptop during a virtual Seder in 2021 at his home in Duluth, Minn. Halfway through dinner, he realized he had grabbed Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s early work and accomplishments during the civil rights movement — a divine coincidence.
“Passover, for me is empowerment,” Mr. Washington said. “As far as liberation from slavery is concerned, they’re inseparable, in my mind. I couldn’t possibly think about Jews being held as slaves without thinking about Blacks being held as slaves.”
