“If the Jewish community ever wanted to have a relationship with the Black community, I am the bridge that they would want to cross to get there,” Rabbi Tamar Manasseh says in the new documentary “Rabbi on the Block.”
The African Hebrew Israelites are a small community with little political power, yet their story is important because it reveals some of the challenges faced by non-Jewish minority groups in the Jewish state.
The 26-year-old All-Star is in the process of converting to Judaism, according to his Jewish wife, Shashana Sabonis (née Rosen).
“We don’t believe in Jewish religion,” Henry Bens, 52, said during a Bible class he gave on Nov. 8. “There’s no such thing in the Bible as Jewish religion.”
“Black and Jewish relations have been written about ad nauseam, discussed ad nauseam,” the Berkeley writer Adam Mansbach said at a public forum in San Francisco. “The ups and downs of this relationship have been incredibly well chronicled.” And yet, he added, “there is still so much to say about them.”