Black-Jewish dialogue in American needs a reset
Black-Jewish dialogue in American needs a reset
If we want our communities to truly partner again, we have to remember what made us partners in the first place—not guilt, not resentment, not the color of our skin and not even oppression.
(January 20, 2021 / JNS) The Jewish community in America once had a proud history of alliance and partnership with the African-American community. Jews disproportionately engaged in and helped found significant parts of the civil-rights movement and counted African-American leaders among our proudest and most important allies in support of the State of Israel in its infancy. Increasingly over the last decades, the relationship between our communities has clearly fractured, and Jewish communal institutions have either focused somewhat obsessively on its repair or self-flagellated for the many ways in which it declared it hadn’t done enough to repair it. Either way, this broken bond has been a Jewish concern for some time, yet the divide seems to be widening.