Black Jews and the 2008 Presidential Election
One of my favorite Soviet jokes goes like this: An old Jew is taking a walk in a Moscow park when he sees a young black guy sitting on a bench reading a Yiddish newspaper. "What, it is not enough for you that you are black?" asks the Jew, sighing.
In the land of the free, however, multiple minority identities are celebrated, if not always understood, as today's Christian Science Monitor article on African-Americans' embrace of Judaism points out:
Numbers are hard to pin down. Besides well-known conversions such as that of the late entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., black Jews remain an unfamiliar part of the American religious landscape. Yet Lewis Gordon, director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, estimates there are as many as 1 million blacks with Jewish blood in...