The below piece was pro­duced as a part of a Passover sup­ple­ment for Dwelling in a Time of Plagues in response to the idea of lib­er­a­tion from the plague of racism.

To down­load the full Passover sup­ple­ment, which includes ten authors and ten artists respond­ing to ten mod­ern plagues, please click here

Dwelling in a Time of Plagues is a Jew­ish cre­ative response to real-world plagues of our time. Col­lec­tive­ly, the com­mis­sions in this con­stel­la­tion of art projects around North Amer­i­ca grap­ple with con­tem­po­rary crises: the glob­al pan­dem­ic, insti­tu­tion­al racism, xeno­pho­bia, ageism, forced iso­la­tion, and the cli­mate cri­sis. Dwelling is gen­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed by CANVAS.

Mar­ra B. Gad is an award-win­ning author, speak­er and inde­pen­dent writer/​producer. As pres­i­dent of Egad! Pro­duc­tions, she over­sees the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of script­ed tele­vi­sion series and films. A grate­ful child of adop­tion, Mar­ra speaks inter­na­tion­al­ly about her own tran­sra­cial adop­tion in 1970, and her expe­ri­ences being Black/​White bira­cial and Jew­ish through the lens of her debut mem­oir, THE COL­OR OF LOVE: A Sto­ry of a Mixed-Race Jew­ish Girl, win­ner of the 2020 Mid­west Book Award for Autobiography/​Memoir. Mar­ra proud­ly holds a BA from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­paign and an MA in Jew­ish His­to­ry from Bal­ti­more Hebrew Insti­tute at Tow­son University.