The Hebrew Israelite Community introduces the African-Americans who are members of the Hebrew Israelite Community in Israel from a sociological and anthropological perspective. This community has passed through several phases since its beginning in Chicago in 1963 as the followers of a charismatic leader, to the "Black Africa" movement in Liberia, a millennial cult, to a utopian community. The spiritual leader of this community, Ben Ammi provides a foreword to the book. The author begins with an introduction to the Black Americans and their children who are members of the Hebrew Israelite Community in Israel that provides a description of the social structure and activities of the community. He moves into a discussion of the holistic lifestyle of the community that includes high moral standards, communal sharing, and the production of clothing from natural fibers, as well as the unique system of preventive health care. The well defined structures of both the society and the family, including the place of priests and women are presented. Most of all the author emphasizes the importance of the community and its place within the larger world.

The New Ship of Zion explores the dynamic Diaspora dimensions of the African Hebrew Israelites, a spiritual movement of African Americans who have traced their roots to Zion. With the successful establishment of thriving model communities in Israel and Ghana they have built up a framework for repatriation to the motherland. The resulting constructions of ethnic and cultural identity are the subjects of this book. It also sheds light on the ideological concepts of other communities that travel the same waters as the New Ship of Zion, such as the Rastafarians.

This text introduces Ben Ammi, the leader and theologian of the African Hebrew Israelite community, as a systematic thinker and theologian. It examines his many books and speeches in order to provide a comprehensive introduction to his thought in the context of both African American and Jewish contemporaries and precursors. Divided into three thematic sections, History, Law, and Language, the text introduces Ben Ammi's understanding of the nature of God, the responsibilities of the human, and the narrative of history. Ben Ammi was a deeply spiritual but also remarkably modern thinker who blended scientific thought into his evolving socio-theology, while seeking to remove religion from the realm of mythology. The book evaluates how Ben Ammi's theology is one bound to concepts of humility and learning how to go with the grain of the natural world in order to find humanity's true center as a part of nature.

This is an exploration of the interaction between African American religions and Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. The collection's argument is that religion is the missing piece of the cultural jigsaw, and black-Jewish relations need the religious roots of their problem illuminated.

The true worship of God is an entire way of life, a continuous action, from the meal you eat in the morning to the job you work on. It encompasses your every deed and thought. In The Power to Define, Ben Ammi challenges and succeeds in redefining concepts and ideologies that we traditionally accepted and built our entire worldview upon.

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what “fringe” means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century. Moving far beyond the “modest witness” of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the “thick descriptions” of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist’s subject is a self-aware subject—one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer’s offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas—African, American, Jewish—and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.