Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s

Abstract

This special issue of African and Black Diaspora derives from an intense, on-going conversation among an international cadre of interdisciplinary scholars whose combined theoretical interests and fieldwork experiences are making important contributions to Diaspora Studies. It began early in 2015 as Nir Avieli, Gabriella Djerrahian, Steven Kaplan, Hilla Paz, and I submitted abstracts for a session entitled, ‘Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s’ to the program committee for the 8th Biennial ASWAD [Association for the Study of the African Diaspora] Conference. Our session earned a place on the program, and we presented our papers at the conference in Charleston, South Carolina in November of that year. Immediately thereafter we asked Uri Dorchin, Sarah Hankins, John L. Jackson, Jr., Magdel LeRoux, and Hagar Salamon to join in our discussion. Heeding Paul Gilroy’s call to assert the importance of ‘exchanges between blacks and Jews for the future of black Atlantic cultural politics as well as for its history’ (1993, xi), this collection of essays grapples with those historical conjunctures and overlapping diasporic streams regarding people(s) of African heritage who also avow and enact connections to Israel and to Judaism. With a specific focus on food and music, the issue’s eight articles explore and explicate the dynamic cultural practices of Black groups ranging from the Lemba of South Africa to Ethiopian Jewish Israelis, and from Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to the Chicago-born African Hebrew Israelite Community, that articulate claims for Jewish recognition and inclusion, if not rights of residence and refuge in Israel. Despite the transgressive inroads made by diasporic thought and postmodern theories by cutting across disciplinary boundaries and challenging long-standing cultural categories, more than 15 years have passed since Katya Gibel Azoulay, (2001) observed that in the United States only scant attention is paid to ‘the multiply inscribed subject produced by the diasporic condition shared by those of Jewish and African descent’ (211). In contrast, Black–Jewish relations have captured considerable popular and scholarly interest, including heady and heartfelt discussions by public intellectuals about conflicts between Blacks and Jews and strategies for mending those rifts (Lerner and West 1995, 1996), as well as more standard academic research into, for example, Blacks’ and Jews’ literary images of each other (Budick 1998; Goffman 2000; Rottenberg 2014), analyses of everyday intergroup encounters in American cities (Goldschmidt 2006; Lee 2002; Shapiro 2006), and comparative (political) histories of Blacks’ and Jews’ respective experiences (Adams and Bracey 1999; Berman 1994; Diner 1995; Salzman and West 1997; Schorsch 2004; Sundquist 2005). Several of these studies highlight borrowings, unequal exchanges, or appropriations between the two groups, especially regarding religion (Baer and Singer 1992;