New anthology explores the myriad ways of being Black and Jewish

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(RNS) — Shoshana Akua Brown was one of few students of color at her Orthodox Jewish day school in New York City in the 1990s. Hoping to fit in, she decided to go by the name Tiffany — a nod to “Saved by the Bell” actress Tiffani Amber Thiessen — for an entire year.

“Somehow in that white Jewish space, I wanted what I deemed as whiteness (read: Christian) more than I wanted to be Jewish, which I am,” Brown writes in an essay in a new anthology titled “Black, Jewish, and Beautiful: Contemporary Blewish Voices.” “‘Shoshana’ was too ‘ghetto,’ whether you meant that as in a Black ghetto or a Jewish ghetto, and in the fourth grade I rejected both.”

As a teenager, Brown — the daughter of a white, Ashkenazi mother and a Black, non-Jewish father — would come to embrace her mixed identity. One December, she developed a guide for celebrating Kwanzakkah (a combination of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah) with her family.

“It was there in my mother’s living room that I felt complete, seen, and held,” she writes.

“Black, Jewish, and Beautiful,” to be published Oct. 15 by Syracuse University Press, includes…