Rekindle?
When we arrived in Chicago 31 years ago, friends encouraged us to attend the annual meeting of a group of progressive educators in a retreat center about an hour from the city. Other members traveled from both coasts to converse with some of the educators whose writings nourished our public and private school classrooms and our university seminar rooms. The discussions of teaching and learning energized us to return to our work, often in settings that didn’t promote the creativity of children, teachers and administrators. It was a whiff of oxygen that sustained us till our next gathering.
The founders of this admirable organization were mostly white, but over the years educators of color joined the group and, encouraged by more openness to Black voices in the larger society, began to question what they saw as the group’s “white” perspective. More of the annual meetings were given over to discussions of race and color. Tensions arose and fault lines became evident where none had seemed to exist or at least were never acknowledged. Distrust and discomfort colored our time together.
Some members of color proposed that we build into our schedule “affinity groups,” a new term for most of us. It meant opportunities to sit in homogeneous groups to discuss topics about which people didn’t feel safe expressing themselves openly in mixed groups. When signup sheets were posted for people who wanted to join the White, Black or Latino groups, some of us, including me, protested that there needed to be a Jewish group. We didn’t want to be known as White, when our primary identity was as Jews.
Two decades later, I can appreciate how naïve that protest was and how our Black and Latino colleagues must have been puzzled by it. If you asked me to complete the sentence I am…. My first response would be “Jewish” or a “Jew,” rather than “White.” However, the world at large and the Black community in particular see me first as White. When I was teaching at a Historic Black College in Mississippi, my co-teacher, who was also Jewish, asked the students how many Jews they thought there were on campus, they answered without hesitation, “None,” when in fact there were a half dozen of us on the faculty. What the students saw was White people, regardless of how we saw ourselves.
Yet, there has always been a unique dynamic between Blacks and Jews that adds a special flavor to the relationship that goes beyond Black people’s relationship with Whites in general. It’s often attributed to the groups’ common history of slavery, at least as it is described for Jews in The Old Testament itself that has linked the two groups. On the other hand, many Blacks have encountered Jews primarily as exploiters and oppressors. James Baldwin famously enumerated the ways Blacks typically encounter Jews: as their landlords, as their grocers and butchers, as the judges and lawyers they might encounter in court, often as their teachers.
All of this is on my mind because tonight I will be attending my first meeting with a group called Rekindle, committed to renewing the links between Jews and Blacks. I will approach this meeting with questions about what exactly is being rekindled. In my lifetime those relations have swung wildly between alliance and antagonism. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, Jews constituted a significant portion of volunteers during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and most major Jewish organizations supported the Movement, both politically and financially, but soon after Black support of Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization shocked Jews.
The rift widened even further during the New York City teachers’ strike in 1968, which pitted the Jewish-led teachers’ union against Black communities seeking more autonomy in the operation of their schools. The strike lasted for 36 painful days, during which destructive streaks of racism and antisemitism surfaced in their respective communities. The scars from that battle are still visible, not just in New York, but nationally. I will add that this strike took place shortly after we returned to New York after three years in Mississippi which were focused on supported efforts by the Black community to gain greater control of the institutions that had oppressed them. My support for those efforts continued in New York when my wife and I supported the Black community by crossing the union picket lines to keep the schools open. Growing up in a strong union home, that wasn’t an easy decision.
More recently, the Gaza War has resurfaced conflicts around support for the Palestinians among progressives in general and Blacks in particular on the one hand and Jews on the other, many of whom feel betrayed since their support for Black causes has not been reciprocated. (I should note that many young Jews are closer in their views about Israel/Palestine to progressives and Blacks than to the views of their parents.) So, this is the emotional and political tangle that faces the Rekindle group and its admirable goals. Four dinner meetings will hardly do the job, but it should at least lead to some healthy soul searching on both sides
PS. Since this writing, I’ve attended the first session of the group, a rather free-ranging, respectful albeit unfocused conversation. I am deeply impressed by the members I’ve now met, who bring to the group a strong and positive pride in their identities and a willingness to listen and learn. The presence of Black Jews in the group complicates the already complicated story in intriguing ways. I’ll keep you posted on how that story unfolds.
