The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

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Shahanna McKinney-Baldon

Educator and advocate Shahanna McKinney-Baldon is an African-American Jewish educator, advocate, and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the 1990s, she was an early adopter of the term “Jews of Color.” In 2022, she launched a research and performance project on the great African-American khaznte Madame Goldye Steiner, locating her then-unmarked grave and collaborating with contemporary cantorial revivalists to lift up her story.

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black and white newspaper photograph of a Black woman wearing a hat holding a fountain pen

Madame Goldye Steiner, aka Gladys Mae Sellers

Madame Goldye Steiner was the first known African-American woman singer of khazones, or Ashkenazi Jewish liturgical music. She was the only known African-American woman in the khaznte artistic movement in which non-synagogue audiences experienced khazones, sung by women in concert halls, on the radio, and on gramophone recordings.