What’s Faith Got to Do With It?
Exploring multiracial and interfaith America
Taking that class, and connecting with Religious Studies faculty — including Professor of Religion and James Hormel Professor Social Justice Mark Wallace, Professor of Religion and Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies Yvonne Chireau, Howard M. and Charles F. Jenkins Professor of Quakerism and Peace Studies Ellen Ross, and former Professor of Religion Nathaniel Deutsch — changed her life’s trajectory.
“The Hinduism professor, Steve Hopkins, was on leave,” Mehta says. “Don [Swearer] called Steve and got permission to break into his office and research, in Steve’s books, the part of India that my family is from and my caste to give me a guess as to what was going to happen at the funeral.”
The experience started her on a career devoted to understanding the role of religion in society. “Religion is this absolutely fascinating thing where we think we know what religious people think, and we never do,” says Mehta. She converted to Judaism 15 years ago.
“Being Jewish offered space for all of the questions and intellectual inquiry that I thought was really important and valuable in my Unitarian upbringing,” she says. “It also had a more robust ritual life, which was important to me.”
Today, Mehta directs the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she is also an associate professor of women and gender studies. Her first book is titled Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States.
While writing her dissertation, much of the literature Mehta read on raising children in multi-faith households posited that celebrating multiple holidays would confuse them. “[That] did not make any sense to me because I had grown up celebrating both [Diwali and Christmas] and had never been confused about it at all,” she says. Her research turned into Beyond Chrismukkah, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2018.
Her more recent book, The Racism of People Who Love You, is composed of personal essays on growing up mixed-race and the challenges of finding belonging as a person of color raised in mostly white environments.
The title is a reference to the ways, she argues, the racism that hurts most is not that of strangers, but of close friends and family. In the book, Mehta skillfully holds compassion for both her white mother, who never felt fully accepted by her in-laws or the local Indian American community, and her Indian father, whose experiences of racism in the U.S. included personal threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
The book landed on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023” list, prompting a 5 a.m. call from an excited aunt. “She must have forgotten that I was in Mountain time, and woke me up,” says Mehta.
She is currently working on God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America and two projects exploring the experiences of Jewish people of color in the U.S. A Mixed Multitude: A History of Jews of Color in the United States is an academic text, while Jews of Color: Histories and Futures is an oral history project. If you are a Jewish person of color interested in sharing your story, you can reach her at Samira.Mehta@Colorado.edu.