Title: Blacks, Jews, and Black Jews
Year: 2011
Issue: 105
Cover image: Rap artist Shyne, or Moses Levi, who legally changed his name from Jamal Barrow, visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. ©2010 Ricki Rosen/The New York Times/Redux
Issue 105 is teeming with thorny questions about being black in a global context. Even the “Black-Jewish Question,” traditionally an American obsession, gains complexity when it involves a half-Kenyan president, Israel, or Igbo Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Abuja. Three writers explore three different intersections of the tribe and the people. And the issue follows several more journeys through the Diaspora in search of black meaning. A review of the new biography of Marcus Garvey, transatlantic hero, celebrates ties between Africa and the Americas, just as Bayo Holsey questions Wole Soyinka’s reading of Africa’s role in the slave trade. And amid these abstract tides of history, pushing back and forth, individuals are caught in small eddies: an African American anthropologist visits Brazil and has trouble getting back home; an American daughter of South African parents floats like a ghost between different cultures of death; a black writer can’t quite find home in Harlem. With the idea of home in transition, at least all these ideas find a home in Transition.
Featured Article: The Memory of Gold: Happy Slaves and the Problem of Security #OpenAccess
by Laurence Ralph
On his way back from a trip to Brazil, anthropologist Laurence Ralph unexpectedly becomes the object of scrutiny, calling into question the meanings of “homeland” and “security” in the long wake of the Atlantic slave trade.
Contributors: Olu Amoda, Alexandre Arrechea, Tracy Brown, Javier Cambre, Zinzi Clemmons, Loring Cornish, Adam Ewing, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Bayo Holsey, Daniel Itzkovitz, Remy Jungerman, Florence Ladd, Clarence Major, William F. S. Miles, Beatrice Wanjiku Njoroge, Fausto Ortiz, Laurence Ralph, Ronald Kent Richardson, Petra R. Rivera, Peter Thompson, Stephen Vider.