Recent Entries

Shmuel was raised Catholic, a faith no more indigenous to the region than is the Pentecostal Church, which was brought in by American missionaries in the 1980s. For that matter, "Nigeria" itself is an artificial country, patched together in the early 20th century by the British, who imposed Christianity and ruled with blind indifference to the nation's many ethnic divisions.

Most of Nigeria's Jews are from the Igbo ("EE-boh") people, and it's not hard to see why they identify with the Jewish history of oppression. In 1967, they tried to set up a separate nation-state (the short-lived Biafra) and suffered their own holocaust in the bloody three-year civil war that followed, in which hundreds of thousands of Igbo were killed or died of starvation.

Small wonder, then, that the Jews of Nigeria express a powerful affinity with Israel, whose government has not welcomed their efforts to travel or study there. Lieberman raises thorny questions about whether some Nigerian Jews may be using their religion to get exit visas, and whether a tiny country like Israel, which has already absorbed thousands of Ethiopian Jews, could accommodate another large influx of potential citizens.

Lieberman's disappointment with Israel's selective exclusion is clear. But he's a little squeamish about pursuing these complicated issues. Instead he shifts to an interesting but tangential discussion of Nigerian heritage among African-Americans.

It's a fun fact that actor Forest Whitaker traces his roots to the Igbo tribe, but that belongs in another film. Re-emerging speaks for itself as an uplifting portrait of an exuberant subculture that doesn't just practice its faith — it revels in it.