The Jewish Exponent has a great feature from a couple weeks ago about a blind, 47-year-old black guy who has been a fixture at UPenn Hillel for twenty years. Ben just included it in The Reading List, but I wanted to put up a larger thing about it.
Here’s a bit of it:
At 47 years of age, Williams has a distinct seniority in this crowd — as long as university administrators or clergy aren’t around.
Oh, and he’s black. And blind.
“It’s not every day that you see an African-American with a yarmulke and a blind walking stick walking through the Penn campus,” said Jeremy Goldman, 35, a healthcare attorney in Baltimore who befriended Williams after starting law school at Penn in 1998. “You couldn’t help but notice him.”
To the Orthodox students, Williams has been a fixture in their community for as long as they can remember. He’s been coming here for more than 20 years — longer than most of the current undergraduates have been alive.
It’s just another interesting entry in the long annals of the “Who Gets to go to Hillel?” saga. Our latest post on the topic is here.
