Through her work at Keshet, in partnership with the Jewish Multiracial Network, Kat Macias (Jewish Organizing Fellowship Alum Class of 2015) created a Queer Jews of Color Resource List.
This clip is from a blog piece by Kat Macias about the project, originally published on the Keshet Blog hosted on My Jewish Learning.
(Pictured: Kat Macias)
It is powerful to see yourself reflected in history, in a story, or even in a room. That power is a profound sense of comfort, knowing that you are not alone, there are others like you. It is a feeling of belonging.
Too often as a queer Jew of color I have felt alone: my people absent from Hebrew school lessons, traditions, and communal practice. I have grown to expect that I will be the only queer Jew of color at services or at any other Jewish social gathering. And, despite being welcomed in word time and time again, I have struggled to feel like I belong. What I needed was to know that I was not the only one. I longed to feel at home in a Jewish community I so desperately wanted to call mine.
I turned to the Internet, Googling to find pieces of myself reflected in others. I found it easy to find LGBT Jews or to find Jews of color, there were even whole organizations working to support these identities.
But, finding people at the cross-section, both queer and of color proved to be a challenging task. Eventually, I found a few. My search led me to Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, Michael Twitty, Y-Love and more. It took hours of Googling to feel like maybe just maybe Judaism could hold me. I had finally found my nugget of hope… (continued here)
