I’m going to do my best to take it slow and tell a story I haven’t told before in honor of my sister, Melanie. My name is Yavilah McCoy and Melanie was my friend, she was my colleague and comrade in arms.

I met Melanie when she was writing The Colors of Jews and at that time I was a young activist. I was new in my body. I didn’t yet know what it meant to be unapologetic as a black, Jewish woman. But I was discovering what that meant. She called me up and said, “Hey, you don’t know me but I’d like to go out with you for coffee.” And I looked her up. I said, okay, and we went out for coffee. She said, “I’m writing this thing, The Colors of Jews, and I’d love for you to partner and collaborate with me on this.” And what I said to her was, “Before we go any further I’d been interviewed a number of times and I just want to be clear with you that I am not going to help anyone objectify my people. I do not want people to objectify black Jews as if they dropped off from Mars yesterday. We have been and have always been a part of the Jewish community and if whatever you are going to do does not make it clear that we are part of the present and the past and part of the Jewish future, I am probably not the person you want to interview.” And she goes, “Wow. Say more.”

Now, I’m telling you this because that was the beginning of our relationship. Not just the beginning of our collaboration, our relationship. For all of the time I knew Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz she always emphasized to me what Adrienne Rich taught, which was that lying is done with words, but also with silence. She wasn’t willing to be silent about the empty spaces in our common Jewish legacy, heritage and presence. That what not yet naming, that Jews are black people. And that it was up to me and her together to create space to name that thing and she was not planning on going anywhere until we both felt that we were doing that job splendidly together.

She also said to me that when a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. At the time when I met Melanie, those words that she spoke in The Colors of Jews had not yet been spoken. That intersectionality was not yet a Jewish concept. She was the one who said that as Jews we are called by our history and heritage to be more. It was Melanie who said that Jewish identity is both simultaneously a rock forged under centuries of pressure and water that is infinitely flexible. Flexible enough to hold her as a white Ashkenazi woman and flexible enough to hold me as black, Jewish woman.

She was the one who said that Jews are intersectional by her body. She did it by the way she walked through the world. When we were working on The Colors of Jews she didn’t stay in New York. At the time I was living in St. Louis. She said, “I’ll come to you.” She fly out to St. Louis, Missouri to be a part of my first conference on Jewish diversity and she spoke aggressively about the ways Jews must not just face racism outside of our community but also racism within our community – the notions within our community that taught us that all we are is white, that all we are is Europe, that all of the world that is not Europe and Poland and Germany, that is not our history as Jews. She helped me to welcome Djerba and Africa and Ethiopia and Yemen and Iraq and Iran and all of the places that my people have always lived, into my voice and into my body and into the splendid nature of what we mean when we say Jew.

Now she didn’t just welcome us into African and the Middle East. She welcomed us into Europe too…..Yiddish phrase. I grew up in a Hassidic community in Brooklyn. I went to a school where me and my sister were the only people with this much melanin in our skin running around those halls. And, in those spaces they spoke Yiddish and I was taught that Yiddish was the legacy of those white Jews, not my legacy. Yet Melanie sat with my at a table at the JCC and made me sing her the Negro spirituals of my family and together we sang ….Yiddish song… And I could hear my grandmother in that song. And she could hear me and my spirit. That is intersectionality. To do it with your body, and she did it by placing her body proximate to my own.

And what I have to say about this woman is that I found peace in her laugh, I found piece in her wit, in her wry sense of humor, in the ways in which she welcomed by our history and our future with love. She was the first one to apologize to me for the fact that during the Civil Rights movement we were very eager to go out and show up in the name of justice, but were we eager to go out and show up in the name of justice as Jews, to the point where racism and white supremacy would no longer have a place? From those days we marched forward amongst us. She apologized for every place I found where there was not enough oxygen for me and mine to breath. And she didn’t say it was the work outside of us…she said it was the work in here, inside ourselves. And I could see it in her eyes, I could see it in her moral courage. I could see it in the sensitivity with which she sat with me and offer me a cup of her warm, simmering fire.

Melanie insisted on contending with contradictions. She was a woman who did not run from conflict. She was a woman who opened the world of her heart. She was a woman who spoke wisdom. She was a woman who personified for me that as a Jew when we enter these days of awe that we are in right now and when we say …..Yiddish. Those words in our tradition that say open for me an opening that is only the size of an eye of a needle and I will open for you an arch the size of the opening of palaces. She opened those openings every single day with her heart, with her words, with her smile. It didn’t matter if there was a grand parade…with one word, with one smile she sewed a stitch of space for us to be.

I want to say today that my friend Melanie was fierce. I want to say that she was a light before me and that she helped me to hold myself and to hold my own. I want to say to Melanie that I hope we remain worthy. Melanie, I hope that we honor your life. Melanie, I hope that we all have the same gishkes and guts that you so brilliant placed before us. I hope that we are inspired to walk like you. I hope we are inspired by your humility. I hope that we take this path that you have shown us and decide to follow. I want to say that I take seriously what you said at the end of your essay: “I am talking ultimately about our need for a massive transformation of society. The old activists of my childhood who were my models, now I become them.” May I become you, Melanie. May I be granted the strength and the fortitude to never run but to always move forward. May you rest in power, my sister and may you always know that love made love.

Thank you.