Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi

Ariel Samson is just your run of the mill anomaly: a 20-something black Orthodox Jewish rabbi looking for love, figuring out life, and floating between at least two worlds.

Luckily, it gets worse.

Finding himself the spiritual leader of a dying synagogue, and accidentally falling into viral internet fame, Ariel is suddenly catapulted into a series of increasingly ridiculous conflicts with belligerent college students, estranged families, corrupt politicians, hippophilic coworkers, vindictive clergymen, and even attempted murder. (And also Christian hegemony, racism, anti-Semitism, toxic Hotepism, and white Jewish privilege. Because today ends in “y.”)

But all that’s the easy part.

Because whether Ariel knows it or not, he’s due for a breakthrough. Several, in fact. And he’s about to find out whether or not he’s strong enough to re-evaluate everything he thought he knew about himself, and own up to the things he didn’t.

Thought leader and provocateur MaNishtana turns his eye to fiction in this imaginative, semi-autobiographical novel, making Ariel Samson, Freelance Rabbi the most dazzling debut of an Orthodox black Jew born on a Sunday at 2:24AM in a Brooklyn hospital in 1982 that you will ever have the privilege of reading.

2018 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award's Goldberg Award for Debut Fiction.

MaNishtana, an African-American Orthodox Jew--born from two African-American Orthodox Jewish parents--is a writer and speaker on racial and religious identity and their manifestation in America. Currently earning his second Orthodox rabbinical ordination, MaNishtana was born and grew up Chabad-Lubavitch, and hails from a legacy of African-American Judaism stretching into the 1780's. MaNishtana has appeared in both national and international press--including the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Jewish Week, the Jerusalem Post, Tachles, D La Reppublica, Unleash the Fanboy, and others--and has appeared on film in the documentaries Punk Jews (2012) and Doing Jewish: A Story From Ghana (2016). He has contributed to the Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet Magazine, and Hevria, and was selected as a presenter to both the BBYO International Convention and for ELI Talks in 2017. A recipient of the Jewish Week's "36 Under 36" award in 2014 and a cohort of the 2016 ROI Summit, MaNishtana is a sought-after educational speaker, and the author of three books on Jewish and African-American identity, his first being Thoughts From A Unicorn: 100% Black. 100% Jewish. 0% Safe. A graduate of Brooklyn College, his newest book (and debut novel) is titled "Ariel Samson, Freelance Rabbi" (Feb 2018). MaNishtana lives in New York with his wife--a biracial American Jew and fourteenth-generation descendant of the Tosafot Yom Tov, the 17th-century chief rabbi of Prague--and their daughter, the African-American fifteenth-generation descendant of the Tosafot Yom Tov, the 17th-century chief rabbi of Prague.