The People the Hyphen Erases

What Black Jews can teach Black America and American Jewry

Black–Jewish dialogue usually begins with an image of two communities sitting across from one another. Blacks bring the history of slavery, Jim Crow and racial inequality; Jews bring the history of antisemitism, pogroms, the Holocaust and Jewish vulnerability. The language is so familiar that it can disappear into the background. Yet the arrangement contains a problem before anyone begins speaking: some of the people at the table are both Black and Jewish.

Black Jews are not a third party positioned between two communities and available to translate one to the other. Their lives expose the weakness of the categories themselves. They can encounter anti-Black racism in Jewish institutions and antisemitism in Black spaces, experience Jewish religious belonging without being white, and understand racialization in America without treating Jewish vulnerability as an abstraction. If the purpose of reconciliation is to replace stereotype with historical truth, Black Jews belong near the center of the conversation rather than in a footnote added after “Blacks” and “Jews” have already been defined.

Yavilah McCoy and Belonging Inside Jewish Life

Yavilah McCoy provides one of the clearest examples. She has described herself as having been born an Orthodox Black Jew and raised by parents who taught her that Judaism and the Jewish people were hers even when other Jews questioned her belonging. The questioning was not theoretical. McCoy has said that the body she moved through the world in caused people to ask whether she was really Jewish, even though she grew up deeply immersed in Jewish language, text and practice. Her phrase “I had to make space for myself in the Torah” carries the weight of belonging and exclusion at the same time.

Jewish readers should not hear that sentence merely as evidence that some individuals were rude to a Black woman. It describes a structural problem inside communal belonging: when Jewishness is unconsciously imagined as white and Ashkenazi, a Jew of Color can be treated as a visitor, a convert, a security employee or someone whose Jewish literacy must be proved. The problem is not solved by remembering that Jews themselves have experienced racialization and exclusion. A community can carry a history of being stereotyped and still reproduce racial assumptions toward people within its own boundaries.

Black readers should hear another implication. McCoy’s experience makes it difficult to speak as though Jewishness were simply a form of whiteness. She can experience anti-Black racism precisely while remaining fully Jewish. Jewish history, ritual, peoplehood and vulnerability are not external to her Black identity; they belong to the same person. The same human being can be racially marginalized in one context and religiously or ethnically vulnerable in another without one experience canceling the other.

Noa Fay and the Limits of Selective Lived Experience

Noa Fay offers a different generational and political case. Raised in Brookline in a Black, Native American and Jewish family, Fay grew up in a religious Conservative Jewish household and later attended Barnard. She had marched alongside progressive peers during Black Lives Matter protests and understood herself as part of a culture that took marginalized identities seriously. After October 7, however, she experienced a rupture. In a Times of Israel interview, Fay said that when she spoke about Black and Native issues, people listened, but when she identified something as antisemitic, “they don’t listen.”

Her account matters because it cannot be dismissed as a white Jew asking a racial-justice movement to make an exception for someone outside its categories. Fay inhabits the categories. In a later Jewish Journal profile, she recalled thinking that her combination of Black, Native, Jewish and female identities would enable her to translate competing narratives to people who had previously made her feel accepted. Instead, she described Jewish students as becoming “not seen and not heard” after October 7.

Fay’s politics also resist a simple sorting. She has explicitly said she supports a two-state solution and Palestinian self-determination. Her argument is not that Palestinian rights must disappear for Jewish self-determination to be legitimate. It is that Jewish national self-determination should not become the one form of peoplehood that progressive politics treats as disqualifying. One can disagree with some of her analogies or conclusions and still take seriously the grievance underneath them: a movement that asks people to trust their own experience of racism should explain why Jewish experience is sometimes treated as suspect before it is heard.

Beyond Two Individual Stories

McCoy and Fay should not be turned into representatives of all Black Jews. The Jews of Color Initiative’s Beyond the Count study is particularly helpful because it offers broader evidence while warning against exactly that kind of simplification. The 2021 project collected survey responses from 1,118 self-identified Jews of Color who opted into the study and conducted in-depth interviews. Eighty percent of survey participants reported experiencing discrimination in Jewish settings, 60 percent said they had felt tokenized, and 65 percent judged American Jewish leaders as doing poorly or very poorly at addressing racism in the Jewish community.

Those numbers are significant, but the methodological caution is equally important. The study does not claim to be a statistically representative survey of every American Jew of Color. Its researchers describe a diverse population with differing racial, ethnic, religious and political identities and explicitly reject the idea of a single Jews-of-Color perspective, including on Israel. That is exactly the point this series needs. Black Jews should not be recruited as referees whose job is to tell Black Christians or white Jews which side is correct. They disagree among themselves because they are a community, not an argument.

What the Hyphen Hides

The phrase Black–Jewish relations remains useful because it describes real histories of coalition and conflict between Black institutions and predominantly white Jewish institutions. But the hyphen can mislead if it becomes a wall. It can quietly turn “Black” into “Black Christian” or “Black non-Jew” and “Jewish” into “white Jew,” leaving anyone who crosses the categories conceptually homeless.

That matters well beyond questions of terminology. If anti-Blackness can occur within Jewish life, then Jewish opposition to racism cannot be limited to solidarity with people outside the community. If antisemitism can occur in Black spaces, then Black opposition to oppression cannot stop at the edge of Jewish vulnerability. Black Jews force both communities to confront prejudice not only as something one group does to another but as something that can occur inside the very coalitions and institutions through which people understand themselves.

They also offer a more useful way to think about privilege. McCoy’s reflection on Esther as “both privileged and oppressed simultaneously” resists the temptation to rank human beings according to a single axis. A person may possess education, professional authority or class privilege and still be racially marginalized; a white-presenting Jew may benefit from whiteness and still face antisemitism; a Black Jew can experience anti-Black racism and antisemitism without needing to decide which identity is more authentic.

A Better Table

A mature Black–Jewish conversation therefore should not simply add a Jews-of-Color panel after the major issues have been defined. Black Jews change the questions themselves. They complicate the assumption that Jewish success eliminates vulnerability, the assumption that Jewishness is synonymous with whiteness, the assumption that Black political memory points automatically toward one position on Israel, and the assumption that intersectionality works only when identities fit the categories already familiar to progressive institutions.

The point is not that Black Jews possess a synthesis that will resolve every disagreement. Their testimony does something more demanding: it prevents both communities from simplifying themselves. Reconciliation becomes more credible when nobody at the table has to divide himself or herself into acceptable pieces before speaking. The people the hyphen erases may therefore be among the people best positioned to show us what the hyphen was supposed to connect in the first place.

Selected Sources and Research Notes

• ARQ, interview with Yavilah McCoy — https://thisisarq.com/read/yavilah-mccoy
• JewishBoston, Yavilah McCoy on racial justice, the Women’s March and Queen Esther — https://www.jewishboston.com/read/yavilah-mccoy-on-racial-justice-the-womens-march-and-queen-esther/
• Times of Israel, Noa Fay interview, Dec. 14, 2023 — https://www.timesofisrael.com/barnard-senior-a-black-native-american-jew-has-some-words-for-pro-palestinian-peers/
• Jewish Journal, Noa Fay profile, July 25, 2024 — https://jewishjournal.org/2024/07/25/how-an-unstoppable-black-jewish-woman-from-brookline-became-a-voice-for-israel/
• United Nations, findings on conflict-related sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, March 11, 2024 — https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/press-release/briefing-by-srsg-svc-ms-pramila-patten-to-the-security-council-findings-of-visit-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-11-march-2024/
• JTA, more than 600 Jewish organizations affirm Black Lives Matter, Aug. 28, 2020 — https://www.jta.org/2020/08/28/united-states/10-page-summary-of-new-movement-for-black-lives-platform-contains-no-mention-of-israel-4-years-after-divisive-condemnation
• Jews of Color Initiative, Beyond the Count — https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BEYONDTHECOUNT.FINAL_.8.12.21.pdf
• Jews of Color Initiative, Top 5 Teachings from Beyond the Count — https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/newsletter/top-5-teachings-from-beyond-the-count/