When I was 8, I wanted to be Sammy Davis Junior. So what if he only had one eye. He was a great dancer, a singer, an actor. He was always laughing and joking. Everybody loved him. And he was Jewish.

At the time, in the 70s, no one had heard of Ethiopean Jews. For me, there was only one Black Jew and that was Sammy. The idea of a Black man being Jewish seemed so miraculous, that I looked for all the information I could find about him. I discovered that he converted to Judaism, because he identified the Jewish struggle against oppression with Black people’s struggles against racism. I knew all about racism from my nursery school days, when children in the playground would routinely call me the usual 70s racist epithets: nignog, coon, wog etc.

So, I decided that I wanted to be Jewish, just…