When Joshua Nelson sings the gospel music of his black ancestors, he commands attention.
It's not just because of his fire-and-brimstone voice, the comparisons with the late Mahalia Jackson, or even his discovery by Oprah Winfrey, whom he counts as a friend. It's the places he sometimes performs (synagogues), the word he avoids (Jesus), and his own faith (Jewish).
'Jews for centuries'
"We've been Jews for centuries, as long as anyone can remember," Nelson says. "Why is it that when people of color are Jews, questions are raised?"
In fact, Nelson is one of about 100,000 nonwhite Americans who were born Jewish. Another 300,000 people of color are followers of Judaism through marriage, adoption, conversion or the recent surge of Jewish immigrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, according to Yavilah McCoy, director of Ayecha, a New York-based group she founded five years ago to reach out to Jewish minorities.
Nelson's voice rocked a pre-Passover "Liberation Seder" last week that was organized by McCoy and co-hosted by The Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. The evening, accompanied by a seder meal of Middle Eastern, African and East European dishes, accented the Jewish community's diversity in New York.
Among black Jews, "you see the flavor of Jewish culture in a way you might not have seen before, when it was just black and white, so to speak _ as in, Christians and non-Christians," says McCoy, 33, who is black and raised in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, where she studied in a yeshiva with other Orthodox Jews.
Collard greens for Passover
At home now with her husband in St. Louis, a physician and Jewish convert, she plans to serve collard greens at the family Passover meal, replacing the pork with beef fried like bacon.
The feast honors her Southern great-grandmother, who followed black traditions while embracing Judaism and renaming herself and her children after Old Testament figures.
The harmonious mix also raises the dilemma of black-Jewish relations today.
The civil rights era made Jews and blacks close allies, but incidents like the Crown Heights riots of 1991 have put a heavy strain on the ties between the groups _ a paradox to McCoy.
"Jews have been oppressed. And African-Americans have been oppressed," she says. "When a soul endures, there's something very beautiful in its music. It's not just oppression, but the spirit of joy that overcomes oppression _ something so powerful that it's explosive."
At the "Liberation Seder," that spirit came in a variety of tones.
Five non-Jewish young men from Sudan, orphaned when their parents were killed in that African nation's civil war, performed the music of their "exodus" for an audience celebrating the flight of the Jews that is at the heart of Passover.
Then Nelson took a turn, singing "Mi Chamocha" _ meaning in Hebrew, "Who is like you, God?"
Motown, Jewish lyrics
He inspired people to clap and dance to his ecstatic fusion of spiritual tunes, Motown and Jewish lyrics, his rich voice equally at ease in a cantorial wail and in hard-driving gospel. "I let people know it's all right to enjoy, to put their whole bodies into it," he says.
Winfrey's mother, Vernita Lee, met Nelson four years ago, through a mutual friend, and was so dazzled by his high-octane delivery that she introduced him to her daughter _ after serving him the Southern collard green recipe Nelson is making for Passover (with red hot peppers, minus the ham hocks).
Last fall, Nelson appeared on "Oprah," with the show's host joking that he doesn't sing "Oh Happy Day" _ but "Oy Happy Day." He's been on programs with Wynton Marsalis, Aretha Franklin and the late jazz greats Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie.
He's sung at the Globe Arena in Stockholm to a crowd of 30,000, New York's Lincoln Center Jazz Festival and in Selma, Ala., for President Clinton, Coretta King and an audience of 10,000 marking the Voters Rights Act of 1965.
It was the sound of Jackson's recorded voice that first seduced Nelson when he was 8, living in Brooklyn with five siblings; their father worked as a truck driver, and their mother was a nurse. The fascination with Jackson's voice lasted after he graduated from Newark's Performing Arts High School and went on to sing at the funeral of another graduate, Sarah Vaughan.
"Hebrew Soul"
While attending Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he started blending Hebrew texts with gospel melodies _ or arranging Jewish hymns in gospel style, resulting in solo CDs like "Hebrew Soul."
He occasionally sings a real Christian gospel hymn _ "for historical purposes" _ but his "kosher gospel" avoids any mention of Jesus.
For Passover, Nelson planned to worship at Ahawas Achim B'nai Jacob and David in West Orange, N.J., where the Orthodox rituals and music are closer to the Sephardic traditions of American Jews with roots in Africa, as well as Iran, Iraq and Syria. Nelson teaches Hebrew at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, N.J., a Reform synagogue his family had attended while living nearby.
"Being Jewish is not a race _ it's a culture and a religion," says Nelson, who believes the earliest Jews were "dark-skinned Semites, speaking a language indigenous to Africa."
Nelson says he resents the suggestion "that we need to come back to our faith," as one black minister put it.
"I told him, 'It's weird the way black Christians look at us as sort of strange. We came off the boat Jews. You didn't come off the boat Christians. Your faith was given to you by a slavemaster.'"
