Magazine Transition 105 - Blacks, Jews, and Black Jews

The American magazine Transition 105, of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, is teeming with thorny questions about being black in a global context.

Even the “Black-Jewish Question,” traditionally an American obsession, gains complexity when it involves a half-Kenyan president, Israel, or Igbo Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Abuja. Three writers explore three different intersections of the tribe and the people.

And the issue follows several more journeys through the Diaspora in search of black meaning. A review of the new biography of Marcus Garvey, transatlantic hero, celebrates ties between Africa and the Americas, just as Bayo Holsey questions Wole Soyinka’s reading of Africa’s role in the slave trade.

And amid these abstract tides of history, pushing back and forth, individuals are caught in small eddies: an African American anthropologist visits Brazil and has trouble getting back home; an American daughter of South African parents floats like a ghost between different cultures of death; a black writer can’t quite find home in Harlem. With the idea of home in transition, at least all these ideas find a home in Transition.

Born in Africa and bred in the Diaspora, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling, most curious ideas about race. Since its founding in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the black world and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Now, in an age that demands ceaseless improvisation, we aim to be both an anchor of deep reflection on black life and a map charting new routes through the globalized world.

For more information go http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-105