Why I'm proud to be black and Jewish

Why I'm proud to be black and Jewish

After years of having her Jewishness questioned because of her blackness, Nadine Batchelor-Hunt travelled to Israel to meet the Ethiopian Jewish minority, for whom being both black and Jewish is the norm.

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Being a black Jew in the UK can be hard. British Jewry is overwhelmingly white - so when someone like me walks into a Jewish space here they stand out. And when you tell fellow black people you're Jewish, you're in a tiny minority that most people don't even know exists. It creates a feeling of being both hyper-visible, but also constantly erased, almost as though being both black and Jewish isn't allowed.

I am of Jamaican and English heritage. While I have Jewish ancestry on my father's Jamaican side, I was not born Jewish, but chose the faith.

I grew up in a secular household in Birmingham, and it was only when I went to Cambridge University and met Jewish people that I started to connect with my roots. Eventually I went through a conversion process and have been a practising Jew. There are struggles that accompany someone with my identity - such as racism, rejection and anti-Semitism (something which led to a Twitter row with British black rapper Wiley over his anti-Jewish posts) - but I also have a deep sense of pride in the path I have chosen.

A need to explore my unusual position in society was given impetus by the Black Lives Matter movement, which triggered widespread conversations about racism, including within the British Jewish community. It set me on a journey which took me to Israel, home to Jews of every origin, including the largest group of black Jews in the world, those from Ethiopia.

For them blackness and Jewishness have never been in opposition, and I hoped they could help me understand what it means to straddle both worlds.

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