Assistant Professor of Religion Amanda Mbuvi of High Point University presents “Seeing Ourselves in Books: What a Jewish Transracial Adoption Story Illustrates about Family and Identity.”
In the children’s book “Rebecca’s Journey Home,” an American family’s experience adopting a baby from Vietnam and navigating issues of race, religion and nationality illuminates each of those modes of identity, as well as Jewish identity’s distinctive relationship to them. Although the book’s portrayal of Jewish identity remains within the confines of American racial logic, it also points to the potential of Jewish tradition as a basis for reimagining belonging that goes beyond the limitations of that approach to communal identity, so that any body can be seen, without qualification, as a Jewish body.
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