Michael, a 39-year-old black Jew from Baltimore, Maryland
"Black Jews Are Being Chased Out Of the Jewish Community By Racism. Here Are Their Stories." The Forward
As a child, Michael attended Orthodox schools and went to an Orthodox synagogue. In these spaces, he and his three sisters were the darkest kids in the entire school.
Michael vividly remembers experiencing both and racism and anti-Semitism; he was called a “schvartze” by Jews and had rocks thrown at him for wearing a kippah by non-Jews. The racism from his Jewish community hurt the most, because it came from a place he thought — mistakenly — was safe. But Michael wasn’t safe, or protected. Whenever he spoke out against the racism in his school, he was ignored.
Michael says that most of the bigotry he experienced was latent, not overt. But there were times when his community’s disgust for black people was unbearably obvious. In classes there would be conversations about how “the blacks” were the worst of the goyim. On Purim, rabbis would frequently deliver “whole monologues about the schvartzes,” Michael told me. Michael was once told that at a Purim event, one of his rebbeim got drunk and delved into a racial slur-filled rant about Michael. Another time, Michael heard an influential leader in the Baltimore Orthodox Jewish community effectively say that South Africa was a much better place when “the blacks knew their place.”
Michael always felt a pang when the kids constantly insulted the mostly black custodial staff in his school. Others would crack jokes about certain janitors being Michael’s dad. That hurt the most, because his father was not only not Jewish; he wasn’t around.
Occasionally, the kids and rabbis would tell him that since he was a Jew, he was a “good” black person. And for a short time, Michael wanted very much to prove that he was not one of “those” black people. Internalized racism made him want to assimilate into the group. But he soon learned that this did nothing to help him feel less empty. So he began to embrace his position as an “outsider,” and grew to accept that to the people in his community, he would never be “enough.” “I was angry, frustrated, and fatigued with the [Orthodox] world, so I did stop engaging for a while,” Michael told me.
But stepping back from the community meant that Michael was able to practice Judaism without worrying about racism, or the pressure to be perfect. For the first time in a long time, Michael felt free.