Things changed on a day he once described to Jimmy Fallon on late-night TV.
It was just stupid, annoying rich kids that were closed-minded and mean, so I dealt with that more than anything.” “Jewish kids didn’t understand how I could be black and Jewish, ’cause we’re all young. “The racism I experienced was being Jewish,” he told Vibe magazine in 2014. The rapper has been open about not fitting in at Forest Hill. Drake’s room was in the basement, and he studied at Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, surrounded by generally better-off, white Jews. His parents divorced when he was five, so he lived with his Jewish mother in the city – first on Weston Road, then in the Jewish neighbourhood of Forest Hill, renting the bottom two floors of a nice house. (Lenny Kravitz is disqualified for having tattooed his back with the phrase “My heart belongs to Jesus Christ.”)īut is Drake good for Jews in general? To figure it out, it helps to look at his distinctly Canadian Jewish upbringing.ĭrake was born Aubrey Graham on Oct. As a public figure, he may be the most famous black Jew since Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s easy to say Drake is good for black Jews. And then Drake made a whole video about it.” I was hiding who I was because I didn’t want to talk about it. “This is something that definitely made me realize I don’t need to hide anymore, because I was doing that for a really long time. “I remember seeing this video and thinking, ‘Oh my God, you can do this as an adult?” she says.
READ: DRAKE’S PROFANITY-LACED ‘RE-BAR MITZVAH’ VIDEO STIRS CONTROVERSY Watching Drake on screen, owning both his Judaism and blackness with all smiles and pride, was nothing short of a game-changer.
The mainstream Jewish reaction was mixed: Is this a mockery of Judaism? Is he using it to seem cool? Is he making Judaism cool? But for Robinson, none of that mattered. If you aren’t one of the 44 million people who have watched the video on YouTube, it casts Drake in a tallit and a kippah, bowing his head as he reads from the Torah, then cuts to him throwing a bombastically black “re-bar mitzvah,” the opening title proclaims, “as a re-commitment to the Jewish religion.” Young black women giggle on the laps of old frum men, and Drake sings “Hell yeah” while being lifted for the horah, smashing a Torah cake and hotboxing the synagogue. “I was like, ‘This is literally my life.’” “It’s one of the first things that ever spoke to me,” she says. She soon transferred to a college with a Hillel community, basking in the relief of no longer being the only Jew for miles, and – during a life-changing year, at a moment when she needed to see it most – she watched Drake debut his latest music video, HYFR. By the time she left home for university, she says, “I needed answers, and I just didn’t have any.” So she decided to explore her religion more seriously, quietly fasting for Yom Kippur and eating hamantashen on Purim. When her parents asked her whether she wanted a bat mitzvah or a sweet 16, she chose the latter.īut her life was never comfortable. Despite her early spiritual decision, her family wasn’t religious, and she didn’t really grow up Jewish. Robinson is black, and grew up in the predominantly Catholic south side of Long Island, N.Y. “That was when I was thinking, religiously, ‘Which path do I take?’ I just remember always feeling right being Jewish, feeling safe there.” “I remember thinking, ‘What’s so important about Jesus?’” she recalls. Her interfaith parents sent her to both Jewish and Christian extracurriculars – a Temple Tots program led by a staunch rabbi too old for the job, and a part-time Bible school. The standard deviation for this track is 18.1.When Jasmine Robinson was a preschooler, she had a choice to make. This track has a Bayesian average rating of 77.9/100, a mean average of 76.3/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 78.1/100. This track is rated in the top 23% of all tracks on. (*In practice, some tracks can have several thousand ratings) The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation). However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. Rating metrics: Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution.