Bruce Feiler

The AJC says the number is at 150,000 in the U.S. alone — and rising. The paper profiles a former evangelical couple who are making the conversion. “For a black male to put on a kipah and go wandering around in a predominately black community, you get the strangest looks,” said Pamela Harris.

Highland, where Pamela Harris works as the senior nonclerical staff member, at least eight of the roughly 20 people learning about Judaism with Rabbi Hillel Norry are black.

At the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody, roughly 20 percent of the nearly two dozen people enrolled in Steven Chervin’s introduction to Judaism classes are black.

Although there are no sound statistics on the subject, anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the past 15 years, increasing numbers of black Americans are exploring Judaism, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.

“Ten years ago, it was almost unheard of that a black person would come in and want to convert,” said Rabbi Ilan Feldman, who is working with the Harrises and two other black people pursuing conversion.

The numbers here seem a little large. I’ve been to dozens of synaogues in the last few years and I can count the number of black Jews I’ve seen on one hand. Am I missing something?

Jesse Jackson on Barack Obama: “I cried all night. I’m going to be crying for the next four years,” he said. “What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation’s political history. … The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.”

John Lewis, the only living person to have spoken at the lectern the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, on what King would have thought: “He would have been very, very pleased. He probably would have said, ‘Hallelujah!’”

Jim Clyburn: “I thought this day would come, but I didn’t think I’d live to see it. I got home, and I was so emotional I couldn’t feel myself. I was numb.” He poured himself a Jack Daniels and Diet Coke and watched Obama speak.

And my favorite line, from a reader of Andrew Sullivan: “Tomorrow I will go to the African American cemetery outside of Chicago where my great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, and my mother and father are buried. And I will tell them that they were right — that if we studied hard, worked hard, kept the faith, fought for justice, prayed, that this day would come.

And it has.”