This presentation focuses on early twentieth-century congregations in Harlem in which members claimed Ethiopian Hebrew and navigated race and religion among Black Christians and Jews of European descent. 

Judith Weisenfeld

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, as well as associated faculty in the Departments of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997), Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and New World A Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the best book in Africana Religions. Her current research explores the intersections of psychiatry, race, and African American religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

More from the lecturer

• Podcast with Dr. Weisenfeld, “On Black Religion and Racial Identity,” The Classical Ideas Podcast, 2019.
• Interview with Dr. Weisenfeld, Indianapolis Recorder/Religion Dispatches, 2018.
• Dr. Weisenfeld, “Religion in African American History,” American History, 2015.
• Dr. Weisenfeld, “Religious Cultures Under the Radar: Jews of African Descent,” Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture, 2015.

More on the topic

• Renee Ghert-Zand, “Yiddisher Black Cantors from 100 Years Ago Rediscovered Thanks to Rare Recording,” Times of Israel, 2020.