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Watch the 2018 High Holy Day sermons!

Marra B. Gad

We are thrilled to welcome award winning author Marra B. Gad as this year's High Holy Days guest speaker. Marra will be speaking on Yom Kippur (Monday, September 28th) at 4:30pm. To RSVP and receive the link, please complete the brief RSVP form below.

About Marra

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.

About The Color of Love

Winner of the 2020 Midwest Book Award for Autobiography, Marra's memoir, The Color of Love, is an unforgettable story about what you inherit from your family—identity, disease, melanin, hate, and most powerful of all, love.

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.

Marra’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.

Marra’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, Marra 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. Marra 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, Marra B. 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.

Presented by

Fri, March 29 2024 19 Adar II 5784