L ifestyle /C ulture
Video Project Explores Asian Jewish Identities
CULTURE GABE FRIEDMAN | JTA.ORG
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
specifi- cally saying, ‘Mom, no, that’s
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Indian. That’s not Jewish,’” said
Katz-Ali, who now works for the
Shabbat programming organi-
zation 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 candi-
date 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. “[It’s] really fun to break
the stereotype of ‘You want
Jewish food? Ok, it’s a bagel,’”
Katz-Ali says in the video,
after describing how she blends
Indian cuisine with Jewish
tradition. The series is the brain-
child of two recent college
students who found themselves
craving a way to get to know
other people whose identities
overlapped with their own.

One of them is founder
Gen Slosberg, who was raised
without religion in China and
moved with her Ashkenazi
father and Chinese mother to
the U.S. as a teenager. As an
undergraduate at the University
of California, Berkeley, she
joined multiple groups for
students of color — where to
her surprise she discovered Jews
of color like herself.

“Everybody I knew who
was Jewish was white,” said
Slosberg. But even after
learning from those student
groups, she had never been in
or heard of a space for Asian
American Jews in particular.

“I would for example hear
one of the people at one of my
JOC [Jews of color] Shabbats go
‘Oh yeah, my Chinese grand-
mother, this, this and this,’”
Slosberg said. “And I’m like,
what if we were in a space and
we could all understand what it’s
like to have an Asian grandma.

Wouldn’t that be cool?”
So last spring Slosberg
reached out to a few other
Chinese Jews through connec-
tions and social media, hoping
to create that space for herself.

She found Jenni Rudolph, a
Berklee College of Music
graduate who was featured in
a widely viewed YouTube video
about interracial identity.

Rudolph had grown up in
Huntington Beach, a predom-
inantly white city in southern
California’s Orange County,
where she struggled to feel at
home in white, Asian or Jewish
spaces. She had attended a
Jewish preschool, but after it
closed, her two younger sisters
didn’t get the same Jewish
foundation, and her family
wasn’t very religious.

“That was just a really
exciting moment for me,”
Rudolph said of her initial
virtual meet-up with Slosberg’s
group, “of meeting others and
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