In The Soul of Judaism (NYU Press, August 2018), Bruce D. Haynes, professor of sociology, explores the full diversity of Jews of African descent in America, putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction.

As a scholar of racial and ethnic relations and urban communities, his work seeks to understand the processes of Racialization and the consequences of racial classification for creating communities boundaries, particularly within an urban context. His most recent book, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (New York University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions. The work offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa. The work challenges the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. According to Michael Alexander, Maimonides Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Riverside, "The caliber of thought and conceptualization that has gone into this book is staggering. Haynes hasn’t just located a color line that’s segregated Jewish communities from one another and limited Jewish Studies scholarship, he’s crashed clear through it. His careful language regarding the trickiest matters of race, ethnicity, and religious identity will be tools we all utilize in the next several waves of scholarship as Jewish Studies grapples with its color issue, as it now must. After hearing the voices represented in this book there is no going back. Welcome to 21st century Judaism."

View the book at New York University Press