Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

by Rebecca Walker

When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, his mother declared him dead and sat shiva for him. By the time her parents divorced, when Rebecca was eight, the excitement of the milieu that had brought her parents together and produced a “Movement baby” had died down and the foundation that gave her life meaning dropped out from under her. After their divorce, Rebecca alternated homes every two years, living in Mississippi, Brooklyn, San Francisco, the Bronx, and suburban New York. With each new place came a new identity and desperate attempts to fit in: as white or black, as Puerto Rican or Jewish, as a party girl, a fighter, or a lover. Confused, and mostly alone, Rebecca Walker turned to sex, drugs, books, and complicated alliances. Black, White, and Jewish, her much-anticipated memoir, is the story of a child’s unique struggle for identity and home when nothing in her world tells her who she is or where she belongs.

INCLUSION CRITERIA

Author Rebecca Walker identifies as bisexual.