When Maryam Chishti was growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City, she spent the school year in a mostly Jewish setting and her summers in India. Her Muslim and Jewish identities, from her father and mother, respectively, coexisted but rarely intersected. “I have a wonderful Jewish family and a wonderful Indian family,” she said, “and I understood that I was both—but they were not fused together.”

Years later, she helped create the kind of space where those worlds could meet.

The LUNAR Collective is a nationwide network created by and for Asian American Jews, most of whom, like Chishti, are members of Gen Z. Founded during the isolation of the Covid pandemic, LUNAR started as a video storytelling project about Asian Jewish life, funded by a grant from the Jews of Color Initiative, and quickly grew into a community that today is supported by a number of prominent Jewish organizations.

“People weren’t just watching our videos, they were finding each other, building relationships,” said the New York-based Chishti, one of LUNAR’s co-executive directors along with Jenni Rudolph, who lives in Los Angeles.

As anti-Asian hate crimes and antisemitic conspiracy theories surged in 2020, driven by Covid and a rise in online hate speech, LUNAR became both refuge and connector. By late 2021, participants were gathering in person in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, with smaller “hubs” forming around the country.

About 3 percent of Jewish Americans—more than 225,000 people—identify as Asian or Pacific Islander, according to Pew Research Center data, and nearly 10 percent of Jewish households are multiracial.

Rabbi Mira Rivera, the first Filipina American woman ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, serves as rabbi-in-residence at LUNAR, where she offers one-on-one conversations. The collective embraces diversity across age, ethnicity, heritage, denomination and identity, and has a strong LGBTQ presence.

An online events calendar highlights programs such as “From Kimchi to Sauerkraut: A Jewish-Asian Pickling Exchange.” LUNAR members have contributed to Jewish ritual by creating, in 2023, Dancing in Between, a haggadah with an original niggun. Other initiatives include the Leading Light Fellowship to train up-and-coming Asian Jewish leaders and subsidized mental health care.

For Terry Wunder, who was born in South Korea and adopted by Ashkenazi American parents, LUNAR represents something new that still honors the past. “Experiences like celebrating Jewish rituals alongside other Asian families didn’t exist when I was growing up,” he said. “Now they do for our kids.”

Kyle Desrosiers-Levine is a New York-based freelance journalist covering religion and arts and culture. His writing has appeared in Religion News Service, the Associated Press Morocco Bureau, the Times of Israel, the Forward, the Texas Tribune, America Magazine and others.