Published: 22 February 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ON SHABBAT, FRUMMERS often stop Lia Grant on the streets of the Jewish neighbourhood where she lives and ask her to ring doorbells and switch on ovens for them. They preface their requests with a quick explanation of Shabbat and the type of work they are prohibited from doing on Judaism’s day of rest.
However, what they do not know is that far from being a potential Shabbos goy, Lia is a fellow Jew. So by asking her to work, her frum interlocutors are inadvertently committing a serious transgression: they are entreating someone who is obligated to keep Shabbat, to violate it.
“When I tell them I’m Jewish, very awkward shock washes over their faces,” says the sixth former whose mother is Jewish, Israeli and Nigerian, and whose father is Nigerian and Scottish.
It was a similar story when Lia first joined the Jewish secondary. “Are you Jewish?” her classmates would ask her. And six years later, her intersectional identity often elicits a similar response from non-Jews: “Wow! There’s such a thing as a black Jew?”
While non-Jews can arguably be forgiven for not knowing that we Jews come in all colours, members of the tribe should not be let off so lightly.
FULL STORY Pride, no prejudice: we're young, Jewish and black (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Yasmin Bowen (left) and Vivien Sinclair (Benjamin Mole)
