ACC-GTM Convention Update: Join Marra B. Gad, author of "The Color of Love, a Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl" for a frank discussion about race and acceptance in our community

The Color Love, a Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl
An unforgettable story about what you inherit from your family—identity, disease, melanin, hate, and most powerful of all, love.

The ACC-GTM convention committee is pleased to announce the addition of Marra B. Gad to the June 2020 San Diego Convention program. Marra will be joining ACC and GTM members on Monday afternoon where she will be in conversation with Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro about her memoir, growing up and participating in the Reform Jewish Community.

In 1970, three-day-old Marra B. Gad was adopted by a white Jewish family in Chicago. For her parents, it was love at first sight—but they quickly realized the world wasn’t entirely ready for a family like theirs.

Ms. Gad’s biological mother was unwed, white, and Jewish, and her biological father was black. While still a child, Marra came to realize that, in her world, she was “a mixed-race, Jewish unicorn.”

In black spaces, she was not “black enough.” In Jewish spaces, she was mistaken for the help, asked to leave, or worse. Even in her own extended family, racism bubbled to the surface.

Ms. Gad’s family cut out those relatives who could not tolerate the color of her skin—including her beloved, glamorous, worldly Great-Aunt Nette. But after an estrangement of fifteen years, Ms. Gad discovers that Nette has Alzheimer’s, and that only she is in a position to get Nette back to the only family she has left. Ms. Gad watches as the disease erases her aunt’s racism, making space for a relationship that was never possible before.

At turns heart-wrenching and heartwarming, The Color of Love is a story about what you inherit from your family—and what you choose to do with that inheritance. With honesty, insight, and warmth, Ms. Gad has written an inspirational, moving memoir proving that when all else is stripped away, love is where we return, and love is our greatest inheritance.

Copies of the book will be available onsite for purchase. If you wish to read it before arriving in San Diego, it can be found on Amazon.

Marra B. Gad was born in New York and raised in Chicago. She is an independent film and television producer and now calls Los Angeles home. Ms. Gad is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds a master’s degree in modern Jewish history from Baltimore Hebrew Institute at Towson University.

Photo © Bobby Quillard