“Every day I see a new hate crime against Black people, a new hate crime against Jews, and here I am saying, ‘Hey guys, I’m a Black Jew. I’m a target – come at me!’”
Ashley Jackson, daughter of American politician and civil rights activist, the late Reverend Jesse Jackson, is discussing her fears at announcing her conversion to Judaism in a Washington Post op-ed in July, at a time of rampant global antisemitism.
“Was I going to lose friends and allies? I was nervous because I knew people supported this version of me and I didn’t know if they were going to come along for the ride for Ashley 2.0.”
Ashley Jackson (Photo: Mark Williams)[Missing Credit]
She need not have worried. Bar some less favourable people on the internet “being people on the internet”, she was pleasantly surprised to find that the vast majority embraced Ashley 2.0. “I was showered mostly in love. It’s a relief,” she says, her face lit up.
She is also delighted to have been embraced by quite so many Jews around the world. “It seems I’ve gained a whole new global family.”
We are talking on Zoom following Jackson’s first visit to the UK, which took her on speaking engagements to JW3, Canterbury and Leicester, and to Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivor Centre in Golders Green. On this whirlwind trip, she was unable to fully explore the Jewish neighbourhoods of north London, so she is planning a return.
With Holocaust survivor Miriam at the Holocaust survivors' centre (Photo: Jessica Donatella Jackson)[Missing Credit]
“It was extraordinary,” she says. “I can’t wait to come back and have more time in London.” And when she does, she intends to meet Holocaust survivors.
Jackson grew up in Los Angeles with “a sense of world religion”, attending different types of services with her father and being exposed to Sikh temples, synagogues and churches. She attended Catholic schools, where she “had more Jewish friends than not” and went to many a bar and batmitzvah. Even in childhood she was always seeking spiritual connection.
“I was always the one pulling everybody along to church,” she says. “I liked the structure, and I felt a connection to a higher power. So, when I started to feel like my beliefs were going beyond the confines of Christianity, I got scared because I thought, ‘I like having this structure, and yet this one is not resonating with me any more. What am I going to do?’”
She embarked on what she thought would be a long search for a new structure. But the quest ended up very short. While watching the comedy series Big Bang Theory, her work as a television writer and producer led her to research the cast playing her favourite characters, who included Mayim Bialik’s Dr Amy Farrah Fowler. She stumbled upon Bialik’s YouTube channel, on which the actress talked about her Jewish life – and something clicked. “Everything she described made me go: ‘There’s something here for me.’”
She asked herself: What type of Judaism would I be into? And: Can I even think this? By November 2023, a month after the Hamas attacks of October 7, she was looking at going to a shul for the first time.
“It was a very scary time to be so deeply drawn to Jewish life,” she says, quietly. She searched for a shul in LA that felt the right fit, and found it in the progressive, unaffiliated Ikar. “And then I started watching my rabbi [Sharon Brous]’s sermons and was like, ‘Who is this lady? She’s incredible. I’m going.’”
Jesse Jackson with Sharon Brous and Ashley L Jackson (Photo: Sharon Brous)[Missing Credit]
In 2024, she first stepped into her shul and never left. She had watched a full live service online beforehand so the Hebrew would not be too alienating, and for her first service was paired with a couple in the community who sat with her and ensured she felt comfortable.
“I knew I wanted to come back; everybody was so welcoming. It was two years from discovering [Bialik’s] channel to going on my own deep journey, and then deciding I needed to be around the Jewish community to see if it was real for me. And it very much was.”
It helped that the values with which she had been brought up aligned with Judaism, particularly tikkun olam, and tzedakah – new words for her, but familiar concepts.
“The tenet that every human being is a whole world, that every soul is worthy of belonging and care, and how to make the world more just. What we are supposed to be doing as Jews in the world are things that my parents taught me growing up. I walked in and it was a very familiar language.”
Learning history was a key part of growing up in the Jackson family home and, particularly when studying the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, “using this history as a tool to encourage me to be the Miep of the Anne Frank story – to be the person who is going to look out for the stranger. That has shaped how I operate now: do unto others as you do unto you.”
Her Baptist minister father Jesse ran into conflict with the Jewish community, when in his 1984 presidential run he referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown” in a private conversation with a Washington Post reporter – a matter for which he later apologised in a synagogue. But all that was history when he joined his daughter at shul for a Shacharit service, two years before his death in February this year, and they sat in the front row of the congregation holding hands. Her parents gave their blessing for her conversion, which she completed in June.
“Immediately, my dad was like, ‘Oh, we’re on the same kind of trajectory here together as people who want to use our connection to a higher power as a calling to do good in the world.’”
It’s funny, she says, as she looks suddenly up at the wall beside her. “I grew up with this picture of Moses I’m looking at right now, in our kitchen, and when I became a Jew, I was like, ‘He was there all along.’”
Illness was also a part of Jackson’s spiritual journey. Struck by an early strain of Covid, Jackson was almost bedridden for three years. During that time she turned to TV, and to prayer.
“I was really sick, struggling to breathe every night before it became all types of chronic conditions. I would go to bed and pray that I would wake up the next day.”
The illness, she says, gave her the chance to connect deeply with God without the constraints of any religion. “But then I wanted community and structure, and I found that in Judaism.”
It also prompted a shift in perspective. While she has an impressive 41,000 followers on Instagram, suddenly she could not care less about the likes and views.
“While I don’t wish long Covid on anybody, I’m grateful for the lessons it taught me about what really matters: my friends, family, spiritual wellbeing, and trying to do good in the world while I’m still here.”
As she gradually fully recovers, she is busy as a writer on Netflix’s upcoming A Different World series, about young Black people at a historically Black college, and as the founder of Push the Next Generation, a non-profit organisation empowering young people to tackle social and economic challenges.
Ashley L Jackson and Leah Donnell (Photo: Re Pair)[Missing Credit]
As a Jew and a Black woman, Jackson sees herself and others who hold multiple identities as “bridge builders” with the responsibility to enable dialogue between the two communities. At a time of algorithm-fuelled binaries, it is work she is passionate about.
“We’re not even seeing each other’s realities any more. And countering that comes from us being able to dialogue or see one another.”
She also feels out of her depth in new territory, having, as she puts it, lived as a Black woman for 27 years and now finding herself exposed not just to racism but antisemitism too.
“I spoke to my rabbi about this the other day,” she says. “I know how to navigate being a Black woman and the tensions that come with that and when to respond to racism and when it’s not safe to… and as a Jewish woman I am new to navigating the intricacies of encountering antisemitism. It’s definitely a learning process.”
Jackson is in the process of becoming fully Shabbat-observant and does not use her phone or any electronic devices on the day of rest. With shul not close to home, she is still working out how she can walk to services instead of drive. “But the goal is to be completely shomer Shabbos for the next year.”
As for Hebrew, she is deliberating whether to wait until she has children and can learn along with them.
With the High Holy Days already upon us, we turn to her favourite Jewish food (challah; she’s vegan) and festival. Yom Kippur is the unexpected answer.
“I am so excited that I can’t even contain myself,” she says. “To be able to do that level of connection with myself and with a higher power. When the High Holy Days come I’m high on life for weeks. I find it deeply meaningful. Even the fasting; I’m into all of it.” Although she does need a better strategy for breaking the fast, she says, citing last year’s when she hoovered up a stomach-curdling concoction of bread, potatoes and cereal. “I was like, I’ll have all of it. Bad idea when you haven’t eaten in 25 hours. I’m now trying to figure out what will be my one dish...” She ponders aloud. “I think fruit is good.”
Her second favourite festival, Rosh Hashanah, holds special resonance for her because her first one was at the time that she knew she “really really wanted to convert”.
“All of a sudden, the shofar pierced through, and I was crying. I told my rabbi I felt that what I had been searching for as a kid in every space, trying to find God, that’s where it was. Every time I’ve heard it since, it feels my soul was supposed to be here, and now it’s my home.”
Today Jackson proudly wears a chai necklace and a Magen David, both of which she bought for herself before she had converted. She was unsure about whether to wait to wear the Star of David until she was officially Jewish, but started wearing it sooner, on her 27th birthday, and said, “This feels right.”
Has she felt nervous to wear it when out and about? “I didn’t wear it as much in Europe,” she says, slowly. “I had a lot of American Jewish friends tell me not to. I did wear it one day though, when I was walking to shul in Paris. Some days I have these moments where I’m like, yeah, the world is awful, but I still have a right to exist how I want to.”
And while she still feels that going public with her Judaism has been the hardest part of the extensive conversion process, after doing so she felt: “I’m free now.”
“Knowing you’re not always going to be liked and coming to terms with that – I already experienced that as a Black person, but I had never experienced it as: people may not like you because you’re Black, because you’re Jewish, or a woman, and they may not like you because you’re all of it.”
After the Washington Post op-ed came out, her rabbi observed that as well as being a gift of freedom to herself, it is a reminder to fellow Jews of what there is to love about Judaism.
“There’s so much beauty in being Jewish: the culture, even the way we pray, that you can’t say Mourner’s Kaddish unless you form a minyan – you have to do grief together.
“People take for granted being able to live as their full self. I spent three years not doing that, and it was really hard.
“It’s been the best thing to be able to say, ‘Here I am. This is me. If you like it, great. If you don’t, OK.’ That’s a gift for the rest of my life.” t
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