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When Julius Lester, who had been in poor health recently, died, last week, of pulmonary disease, the tributes began immediately. Lester was 78, and was among the most prominent African American Jews in the U.S., thanks to his writing and teaching. The many lives of Julius Lester—novelist, critic, journalist, musician, civil rights activist, Zionist—have been much discussed, written about, and celebrated in the wake of his death.

Lester’s great subject was African American history. In later years, he cut a striking figure, his sunken cheeks, sad, grey eyes and wispy goatee suggesting both gentleness and a life hard lived. (Such was indeed the case; if, by 50, we all have the face we deserve, Lester had certainly earned his.) That life could be difficult to write about. Lester was protean, shedding causes and credos, and adopting new ones, as part of a lifelong spiritual and intellectual journey. And he was prolific, dashing off essays and journalism as well as four dozen books, for children and adults, over many decades.

Lester’s most fascinating lives—let’s call them his Jewish life and his pre-Jewish life—are the hardest to parse. In 1968, during his black separatist phase, and at a time of heightened racial unrest in New York City, Lester allowed an anti-Semitic poem to be read on his WBAI radio show. He was, he explained, merely trying to illuminate how some African Americans felt: angry and exasperated. The poem conveyed an authentic experience; it was worth listening to.

Much outrage followed, and the contretemps lingered in many people’s minds. Thus their surprise when, in the 1980’s, Lester converted to Judaism.

Lester became Jewish the way Hemingway said people go broke: gradually, then all at once. He explained his transformation in Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (1988) and in various interviews, where he recalled a single, epiphany when everything changed. There was a vision, he said. “In the vision, I was a Jew. There was a yarmulke on my head, and I was dancing, and I was filled with incredible joy.”

Lester made his boldest literary mark as a Jew. Lester’s writing was included in Volume 10 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. “How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have?” is a kind of testimony: to hope, to self-assertion, to the power of language. Its title is significant: keen readers will catch the allusion to The Leopards Spots, by Thomas Dixon, Jr., a notoriously racist novel published in 1902.

Lester’s story ends with a king and queen, those two archetypes of children’s fables, using their powers for good, not evil. “May we do the same,” Lester adds, addressing the reader directly. It was a hopeful message he both expressed and upheld for much of his busy, courageous, sui generis life. One is tempted to say, “Amen.”