[IsraelTimes] Growing up in New Orleans, Chloe Valdary kept kosher, studied the Jewish Bible and celebrated Jewish holidays with festive meals. In recent years she has become an outspoken pro-Israel campus activist, contributing regularly to the Jewish press, and speaking and posting widely about the merits of the Jewish state on social media.
But the senior at the University of New Orleans is not Jewish. She is Christian -- a member of the Intercontinental Church of God, whose adherents revere the Hebrew Bible and follow the Jewish calendar -- and she is black.
In July, Valdary, 21, garnered widespread attention for a Tablet piece in which she accused pro-Palestinian activists of misappropriating the rhetoric of the black civil rights movement. In the piece, titled "To the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman," Valdary addressed the campus group.
"You do not have the right to invoke my people's struggle for your shoddy purposes, and you do not get to feign victimhood in our name," she wrote.
Valdary, who has blogged for The Times of Israel for the past two years, also listed prominent black civil rights-era Zionists, telling Israel's college-age critics, "You do not get to pretend as though you and Rosa Parks would have been great buddies in the 1960s. Rosa Parks was a real Freedom Fighter. Rosa Parks was a Zionist." (Parks signed a 1975 letter by the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, backing Israel's right to exist.) |