She is a former Baptist minister who converted to Judaism and chronicled her changing beliefs in the book My Sister, the Jew, published in 2001.
Gray is African-American and was born to a Baptist working-class family in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago.
Gray worked for 23 years as a flight attendant, living in Los Angeles.
Eventually she found and studied Judaism; Gray believed that the Torah made the most sense.
In 1996, she gave up her position as a Christian minister and completed conversion to become an Orthodox Jew.