Many Americans heard of a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites for the first time last week, when a member of their ranks shot up a kosher grocery in Jersey City, killing four. Having spent ten years in prison, I’ve frequently interacted with members of the Black Israelites, and I hardly need the Southern Poverty Law Center to tell me that they’re a hate group.
I served my decade in upstate New York, guilty of amateur heroin-fueled armed robberies, living as a Jew in several congregations behind the walls of Maximum Security prisons. In four of them I was also the Rabbi’s clerk, and I was surprised to learn that, inside the New York State prison system, Jews make up seven percent of the inmate population, or more than three times their share of the population at large.
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