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. 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 be...
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