I wanted to begin this essay with a story about my major coming of age experience as a young black Jew. The political moment is such that Jewish histories, narratives, feelings, reactions, experiences, ideas, identities and more are at the centre of most media reporting about what some are calling a war and many of us are calling a genocide. So I tell the story in the hope that I am planting seeds for the end of a discourse and politics that centres Jewish voices and Zionist ideology at the expense of Palestinians.
When the Second Intifada started in the West Bank and Gaza in September 2000, I was an 18-year-old second year university student who was still new to regular participation in Jewish religious life. I grew up in a family where there weren’t a lot of Jewish traditions, especially after my grandfather died and any Passover traditions we did observe died with him. But as a black child, I was steeped in the narratives of Exodus, and I was named Chanda Rosalyn Sojourner after the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth. I took the lesson of honouring the sojourner in a strange land quite seriously.
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