JTA — When Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor was a young girl, her Jewish mother, during an argument, once called her the N-word.

“She never used the word with me again,” Pryor, whose father is Black, recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of her mother, who belonged to the Jewish socialist group then called the Workman’s Circle. “But she never apologized.”

The incident stuck with Pryor, today a history professor at Smith College, for many years — and not just because of the source of the remark. Pryor is the daughter of Richard Pryor, the beloved comedian and actor whose life’s work interrogated the various forms of American racism, including the N-word. Richard had deployed the word frequently in his act (as well as in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles,” which he co-wrote) before swearing off the word entirely.

At the same time, Pryor’s mixed-race and Jewish identity meant she was never far from one prejudice or another. Her parents never married, and she was not her father’s only Jewish daughter. As she grew up, each side of her family and social circle would make bigoted remarks about the other. In the Los Angeles bat mitzvah scene in the 1970s, her Jewish classmates would make ceaseless remarks about her race. Haunted by her mother’s leveraging of the N-word against her, Pryor at one point preemptively told her classmates to call her the word.

Now Pryor has blended these personal histories with her research in a new memoir, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor: A Notorious Word, And Me,” which takes its inspiration from her Smith classes and a viral TED talk she gave in 2020. While recounting a history of the N-word itself, Pryor also recounts her own split upbringing, including how she came into both her Black and Jewish identities.

She spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her time in Jewish spaces; the N-word’s Yiddish equivalent; and her reaction to “Blazing Saddles,” which she avoided seeing until adulthood.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

JTA: You talk in the book about how you struggled with the mixed aspects of your parents, and you end at a place where you’re embracing both. How did you get there, and how do you understand your Jewish identity today?

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor: I’ve had so many different iterations of my Jewish identity. Certainly, as a little kid, I didn’t know there was such a thing as observant Judaism. My grandmother always lit the candles, and my grandfather had all of his grandchildren named in the local synagogue, but not until I got to LA [after an early childhood in Boston] did I realize people observed this more broadly.

At the same time, I was just always Jewish. You didn’t have to not be all Jewish because you were Black, in the way we spoke about it in my house. I remember my mom, when we got to LA, she had me join a temple, like the beginnings of Hebrew school, and none of the kids there were interracial or biracial. They were all white kids, and nobody could understand [me]. They were like, “Are you adopted? Wait, how does a Black person become Jewish?” And I do think that’s something that I’ve run across a lot of my life.

I’ve always loved being Jewish. When I had kids, I had the same experience with them. I was like, “Your mother’s Jewish, so you’re Jewish, that’s it.” And they went to Jewish day schools, and one of my kids actually had a real coming-of-age in her Judaism. When she did her junior year abroad in Jerusalem, people would still ask her the same kind of questions: “Oh, your mother’s Black, was she........

© The Times of Israel