(Jewish Group) "Who are we?" Asian American Jews explore their identities in a new video project
When Maya Katz-Ali saw the ad on Facebook recruiting Asian Jews to participate in a new video project about identity, she scrolled through her list of friends to figure out who might be a good fit.
The daughter of a Jewish mother from New York and a Muslim father from India, it didn’t occur to Katz-Ali that she fit the bill herself. Though she grew up connected to both parents’ cultures — especially the food — she always saw them as distinct. When her mother wanted to hire Indian dancers for her bat mitzvah, she shot the idea down.
“I remember specifically saying, ‘Mom, no, that’s Indian. That’s not Jewish,’” said Katz-Ali, who now works for the Shabbat programming organization OneTable. “So obviously, in my head, I had this big kind of divorce of these two identities.”
After her epiphany that she would be a good candidate for the video initiative she saw advertised on Facebook, Katz-Ali reached out to its founders. That’s how she ended up in “Taste of Connection,” the food-focused first episode of Lunar: The Jewish-Asian Film Project, a series of videos of young Asian American Jews in conversation with each other that launched this week, to coincide with the lunar new year, a holiday celebrated in multiple Asian cultures. The series — which is on YouTube and also lives on the website of Be’chol Lashon, a group promoting Jews of color that helped support the project — will tackle a new theme in each episode.
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