The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl is a beautiful memoir by Marra B. Gad, a Black Jewish woman from Chicago who was adopted by a white-passing Ashkenazi family in the 1970’s. Although it’s the kind of book that might be spotlighted as wholesome and educational for Black History Month–and beyond–reading it in no way feels like eating your brussels sprouts.
Instead, The Color of Love reads like a delicious confessional between your close Jewish women friends, while spotlighting problematic racial attitudes in the American Jewish community. The writer’s perspective, reflecting youthful innocence and “good Jewish girl” (she’s also the oldest sister) sensibilities provide a microscope slide on which to view intra-Jewish racism; we recognize so much of what she experiences–and are even more appalled when those experiences include discrimination. With all the pain they reveal, Gad’s carefully chosen words are soothing and delightful to read, especially during this over-stimulating time of political upheaval.
Gad is the first child to her adoring adoptive parents; her Jewish birth mother held the secret that her birth father was Black. Gad writes that, a tiny bundle of joy, her blackness was a benign physical reality, inconsequential compared to the love she was swaddled in. But it’s 1970’s Chicago and readers know the attitudes of the wider environment are waiting for their opportunity to break in.
Those attitudes comprise what Gad has coined “the cult of sameness.” For instance, she writes that was told on several occasions that she, both Black and Jewish, could not exist. This cult takes the form of a rabbi who suggested she identify as “just Jewish” in a counterfeit offer of inclusion. It’s an ardent Jewish suitor who ultimately won’t take her home to meet his parents. It’s a Jewish professional community full of “good liberals” who intentionally ice her out of opportunities after earning her master’s in Jewish Studies. The cult of sameness provides a false sense of comfort at the steep price of someone else’s pain.
Her Bubbe’s father ran a grocery store that backed-up to a Black church in a diverse neighborhood but growing up, Gad never saw people of color in Jewish spaces. “There was nobody like me anywhere around,” she tells me in an interview over Zoom. There were no other Black Jews in her Hebrew School nor at summer camp nor at synagogue. And there were certainly no transracially adopted families. Instead of a symbol of forward-thinking open-mindedness, her transracial family was a threat.
“My parents raised me as if I were born to them,” Gad says of her upbringing. In the 1970’s there wasn’t the communal support around transracial adoption that there is today. While her school and apartment building were culturally diverse, her trailblazing family didn’t have the benefit of today’s family therapists who specialize in the enculturation of the adopted child. Describing today’s transracial parents, Gad says “now it’s encouraged and taught and there are support groups for it, back then it wasn’t spoken about…”.
Breaking the cult of sameness requires confronting a primal, troubling, aspect of human nature, she writes. Gad says, “The notion that different can be dangerous is very real. We need to acknowledge that bias is something that every human being holds. We can’t break it until we admit that.” But on the other hand, personal connections break down biases: “It’s hard to look someone in the eye when they are telling you what is true and say ‘I hate you anyway’,” she says.
Another Black woman memoirist from Chicago, Margo Jefferson, once noted the artistic risks of writing a difficult memoir. Jefferson wrote, “You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.” It’s in describing her own anger that Gad does a deft outside-inside job. A chapter that recounts an outrageous racially-motivated verbal slight is somehow “resolved” with her merely keeping a wordless distance from the offender. She admitted that she keeps the (well-deserved) rants for her internal monologue. Gad suffers gracefully at the intersection of the social maxims that “women must always be well-behaved” and “Black women must always be strong”.
There is another intersection at which Gad sits. She says, “I am one hundred percent an ambassador of each to the other tribe. I play that role every day that I get up.” In 2020 when George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was brutally murdered by a police officer, Gad was outspoken on the significance of the tragedy. When Kanye West made antisemitic statements, she denounced him unequivocally and questioned those who were silent. “The more that we talk to each other instead of at each other, the more we can understand each other. Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean you’re the devil,” she says.
While many socially aware Jewish institutions are looking for opportunities to connect to the larger Black community, Gad has some advice for them: first, address their own Black Jewish community members. “It all starts with being willing to have the conversations. Asking Jewish families of color how they want to be supported is the first step,” she says. Even on evenings when she was the guest speaker, Gad has been given the third degree upon arrival at a new synagogue. She will not enter a new synagogue unaccompanied and has even called synagogues to tell them that she, a Black woman, was coming. “Even in an era of increasing hate crime, synagogue security must not involve racial profiling,” she says.
A book that delves into the sore subject of racism within the Jewish community shouldn’t be this enjoyable. What makes The Color of Love such a good read is love. Love is Gad’s natural default factory setting. After the wounds of painful events have left their scars, she’s ready to re-connect, take on her duty to her family and offer her love. Being committed to love means time, money, energy and patience for loved ones who were also loving and more nobly, for those who weren’t. Like a steady beating heart, the pulse of love is there throughout the book; a quiet strength, constant and loyal.
Gad writes also of the more personal side of social oppression, describing a self-image renaissance in her middle age. The bold determination to tell her story and make good on a book deal required making peace with being seen. Her decades-long journey to embrace Black American beauty standards was a journey towards self-acceptance and self-care. There’s a vignette in the book where her curly, young head was needlessly slathered in burning molten lye, something that she wouldn’t tolerate today. Growing up, Gad and the women in her family would delight in fashion, make-up, shoes, salon visits and jewelry. But having fun with the commercial objects of feminine beauty is very different from finally honoring who you are.
Celebrating her light brown skin, thick hair and womanly figure, Gad now owns her natural right to beauty. Her movie-star eyelashes flutter and her painted nails gleam. She says, “It was hard to see myself as beautiful. It took 30 years of therapy for me to be ready to acknowledge my own beauty and to treat myself as beautiful. Every woman has to find her footing in her own beauty.” Like Queen Esther before her, Marra B. Gad is speaking out— with a voice that feels made for such a time as this.
Shoshana McKinney Kirya-Ziraba is a writer and the executive director of Tikvah Chadasha Uganda, a non-profit organization serving disabled women and girls in the Jewish community of Uganda.
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