OSRUI Director Jerry Kaye was interviewed for this article in the Chicago Tribune by Bonnie Miller Rubin.  The article also features OSRUI campers Meira and Tyler Burnett.

Meira and Tyler Burnett look forward to their family’s annual Hanukkah party, when they will light the menorah and enjoy traditional potato pancakes, called latkes.

The siblings, ages 11 and 14, respectively, also will sing in the children’s choir at B’nai Yehuda Beth Shalom, where four of the eight participants are African-American — just like them.

“When I tell friends at school that I’m Jewish, they don’t believe me,” said Meira, at the Homewood synagogue. “But that’s what I am.”

The American Jewish population has always been overwhelmingly white, with Central or Eastern European roots — synonymous with matzo ball soup, bagels, Maxwell Street pushcarts and “Seinfeld” — and it’s common to hear Jewish people refer to themselves as members of “the tribe.”

But today, as Jews prepare to celebrate Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday that begins Tuesday, the tribe looks different, because of interracial marriages, adoptions and conversions. And while the white majority still holds true, experts say more racial and ethnic diversity can be found across the spectrum of Judaism.

“There’s more variety of narratives than ever before,” said Chava Shervington, president of The Jewish Multicultural Network. The Philadelphia-based organization started in 1997 with 20 families and has grown to more than 950 members and almost 3,000 Facebook followers, she said. Its tag line: “Because Jews come in all colors.”

The increase in diversity is difficult to quantify. The Chicago Jewish Population Study, conducted every decade by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago first asked about race in 2010. It found that 4 percent (or 5,600 Jewish households) are multiracial, including black, Hispanic, Asian and biracial members.

“People used to look at being Jewish only through a (European) lens, but that’s changing,” said Marsha Raynes, director of Project Esther, the Chicago Jewish Adoption Network of Jewish Children and Family Services.

Jerry Kaye is seeing the diversity too. As executive director of Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute, a Jewish camp in Oconomowoc, Wis., participation by nonwhites is at its highest in his 40 years at the helm, he said.

While the camp does not track youth by race, “it’s a rainbow,” Kaye said. “One of the things going on in the reform movement right now is audacious hospitality. … Our doors are open, no matter how you got here.”

Read the rest of the article in the Chicago Tribune.  Please note that the article may only be available to subscribers.