“Before she could speak, the congregation was already on its feet. My father – one of the most recognisable Baptist ministers in America – wept as the congregation offered him a spontaneous ovation.”
She came to Judaism “almost by accident” through an online conversation about Jewish life, having begun to explore questions of faith and justice in college and through the pandemic.
“I was raised to believe that faith must lead to action,” she wrote. “In Judaism, I found an enduring expression of this belief. Ancient ritual and the rigours of textual study were accompanied by the calling to ‘repair the world’.
On her first Rosh Hashanah, “the shofar’s cry touched a depth of my soul I had not yet reached, and tears poured down my face.”
During his synagogue visit, Reverend Jackson sat in the front row, “holding my hand, dancing to prayers in a language he did not speak, eating the Sunkist candies the congregation had tossed to celebrate a bar mitzvah.
“Beside him, I banged on my siddur like it was a tambourine, weaving into those ancient prayers the rhythm of the Black church I was born into.”
She also reflected “on the identity I would claim as a Black and Jewish woman, a twin inheritance filled with sorrow and wonder.
"Sorrow because, for Black Jews, racism and antisemitism can surface in even the most intimate and familiar spaces.
“But wonder, too, in the meeting of two diasporas: kosher soul food, Black oral tradition finding its cousin in Jewish debate, twin memories of an exodus from slavery.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson in 2016[Missing Credit]
While the shared history of the struggle for civil rights in the USA was now under attack, she believed her own experience as one of the one per cent of Jews who identify as Black showed that “the alienation between these two communities can be overcome”.
She chose the Hebrew name Miriam Yiskah (Yiskah being Abraham’s niece), “the latter a feminine echo of Jesse, carrying my father’s memory into the covenant. I feel as though I have been entrusted with a sacred charge: to do for others what my father and my rabbi had done for me.
“Amid widespread concerns about antisemitism and anti-Blackness, it is necessary to recall that our differences do not preclude unity.”
Reverend Jackson was one of the leading Democrats of his generation, running for the presidential nomination.
In the 1980s he ran into conflict with the Jewish community after casually referring to New York as “Hymietown” but subsequently worked to build bridges.
Mourning his death, the Religious Action Centre of the American Jewish Reform movement said he became “an ally in the fight against antisemitism.
“Over many years, leaders of our movement joined Rev. Jackson at rallies and events lifting up social causes that were near to all our hearts.”
