Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Can You Hear Me?

Series Title: Illuminations Jewish Culture in the Light of the World
Program Title: Can You Hear Me?

Show Intro (Schoen):
Welcome to, "Illuminations: Jewish Culture in the Light of the World." This program, "Can You Hear Me," looks at the complex relationship between Blacks and Jews in America.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, in his book Gandhi's Truth used the term "pseudo-speciation" to talk about how one group of people can see another group as less than human, as not of the same species. It's easy to disregard, to denigrate, even to oppress others who are viewed as fundamentally different from us.

This has been one aspect of the story between Blacks and Jews in the United States. But, there's another side to this relationship -- one of common interest, respect, even brotherhood as Jews and Blacks linked arms during the Civil Rights era in the hopes of forging a new society.

Today, as fear and suspicion arises against new groups -- the immigrants, the terrorists -- it may be helpful to explore how two cultures have viewed the Other over time. Perhaps this can provide a lens through which we can all view our common humanity.

Music (Starts after Naomi/John begin)

Can you hear me when I talk like this?
Newman: Let's just test the mics, OK?
Newman: Can you hear me when I talk like this?
O'Neal: Can you hear me when I talk like this?
Newman: Can you hear me when I talk like this? Hey, wait a minute. Stop pushing. I'm a human being too. It's my turn. Get out of my way.
O'Neal: Can you hear me when I talk like this? Yassuh, hee, hee, hee, Yassum. Excuse me, I'm so sorry. Hee, hee, hee. Can you hear me now Suh? ... Mam?
Newman: Can you hear me when I talk like this? Hey, Baby, don't get upset. We're going to make the deal. My people will talk to your people.
O'Neal: Can you hear me when I talk like this? It's time to share your love for God. Don't bring no tinkling change! I want to hear the sweet soft flutter of greenback dollar bills.
Newman: Can you hear me when I talk like this? "The pound of flesh, which I demand of him, is dearly bought and I shall have it."
O'Neal: Can you hear me when I talk like this? You... uh... 'scuse me? You got any change, huh?
Newman: I'll just pretend I can't hear him.
Man: I only need 80? to get in the shelter.
Newman: I'm awfully sorry. I don't have any change.
O'Neal: I just need eighty cents, that's all I....
Newman: Look, I said I have any change.
O'Neal: Eighty cents! Do you hear me?
Newman: If you don't leave me alone, I'm going to have to call the police. POLICE, POLICE!
Together: CAN YOU HEAR ME?

Narration: I'm Corey Fischer, one of the founding members of A Traveling Jewish Theatre. You've been listening to an excerpt from the play, Crossing the Broken Bridge, which was created by Naomi Newman, of A Traveling Jewish Theatre, and John O'Neal, of the Junebug Theatre Project. This program, Can You Hear Me?, was inspired by that collaboration. And it explores the history of conflict and coalition between African Americans and Jews.

Music

Seidler-Feller: You had two communities that have basically been working, not at odds with one another, but, sort of passing one another, parallel lines with one another.

Davis: There is not a Black man in American, who have not had some ill treatment from the police, if he has ever walked a city street.

Jewish woman: There is anger and fear. And I avoid the situation where I could be in a Black neighborhood. Cause I don't want to park my car and run two blocks.

Christian: It seemed to me that Jews were doing very well. (Laugh) We were the ones who were having a lot of trouble, you know.

Seidler-Feller: Blacks simply do not relate to Jewish suffering as a reality.

Davis: The fact is, that, deep down in my real heart, I probably got a lot of bitterness, right now, that could be brought up real easy, if somebody rubbed me wrong.

Narration: In recent years, division and isolation between peoples seems to be the normal state of affairs. Yet Jews and Blacks were working together in the Civil Rights Movement. In those years, most African Americans defined their cause as one of integrating into the larger American society. Now this was a goal Jews could identify with. They not only provided financial and legal assistance to Civil Rights organizations like the NAACP, but also marched alongside of Blacks.

M.L.King: What began as limited expression of protest ten years ago in Montgomery Alabama to integrate a bus line, has grown into a national phenomenon. And involved in direct action nuns and priests, Rabbis, Protestant ministers and laity of every race, social class and age.

Narration: Martin Luther King Jr. actively encouraged participation of white people in the struggle. He counseled Blacks to welcome them into the Movement.

M.L.King: Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all White people. For many of our White brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. (Big applause. Runs under Carson.)

Music

Carson: I was in Los Angeles during most of that period.

Narration: African American scholar Clayborn Carson is director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.

Carson: When I arrived in Los Angeles, most of the participants in the Civil Rights Movement were either Black or Jewish. There were very few non-Jewish Whites involved in the Movement. So, I experienced personally, a lot of very close relationships with Jews who had struggled with me and had gone to jail with me. Had shown their courage, shown their dedication. And all of the people that I knew who were identified as Black militants, people like Stokeley Carmichael for example, also had very close ties, very close friendships with Jews.

Kaye/Kantrowitz: I was in my first year of college. I was seventeen years old, in 1962-63.

Narration: Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a writer and activist in New York.

Kaye/Kantrowitz: And became involved with the northern student movement, which at that point was the northern arm of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. And was doing different kinds of organizing projects in different cities in which mostly kids, Black and White kids together, you know teenagers, early 20's, were having an enormously good time (laugh) working to make a future that seemed very close at hand.

Davis: The strongest supporters of the Civil Rights Movement were the Jewish people.

Narration: Jesse Davis is the minister of Shiloh Baptist Church in Hayward California.

Davis: They poured lots of money, lots of life was on the line. They marched, they sit with us. They ate at the lunch counters. The rabbis marched on the front line as troops. And so, they too, back there saw the issue of brotherhood.

Christian: There was a lot of connections in that regard. We said, "Well, Jews and Blacks have something in common." But they seemed to respond to issues similarly.

Music (Comes in half-way through next narration)

Narration: The connection that Barbara Christian is speaking about comes, in part, from the deeply rooted memory that Jews carry of centuries of oppression in Europe. Writer and social critic Paul Berman explains how the spread of liberalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century shaped Jewish experience.

Berman: As the French Revolution spread across Europe, it encountered Jewish communities that were evermore mired in a world of superstition and prejudice arrayed against them. And each place it went, the principal of liberating the Jews was introduced. And this news, the news of liberalism came as a great revelation. And was embraced with a real revolutionary enthusiasm.

West: When Jews arrived in the United States as the degraded underdog in Europe, they found already in American history degraded under-dogs who reminded them of their position in Europe. And they were Black people.

Narration: African American scholar, Cornel West:

West: And therefore, there's a long, long history of Jewish identification, progressive Jewish identification with the Jewish-like position of Black people in America.

Narration: Jews also identified with the Black struggle out of their own sense of continuing vulnerability to anti-Semitism. The holocaust was an inescapable reminder of just where intolerance can lead.

Neumann: My first awareness of being Jewish came when I was three. I had a governess who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. And her husband was in a concentration camp.

Narration: Yeshi Sherover Neumann leads seminars in Unlearning Racism.

Neumann: What I remember from that experience of living with her is that they were killing people like me. And that was my basic imprinting on what being a Jew was about for a very long time.

Music

Narration: And yet, by the 1960's, many Jews who were involved in the struggle were quite secular and highly assimilated. Their Jewishness was often ignored or overlooked by the African Americans they worked with. African American scholar, Clayborn Carson:

Carson: There had been a very strong sense that they came into the Movement as White people. They didn't come in as Jews. They identified very much with Black culture, rather than any sense of Jewish culture. In fact I got the sense that they were running away from Jewish culture. And would have been quite happy if they were the only Jew in the Movement.

Kaye/Kantrowitz: For me it's really about culture. And that one of the very strong aspects of the culture for me is that struggle for justice.

Narration: Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz:

Music

Kaye/Kantrowitz: So that even though I got into Civil Rights work without thinking of myself as a Jew, what I realize now, looking back on it is that our Jewishness wasn't incidental to our being there. That consciously or not, the experience of anti-Semitism resides somewhere in most Jews. And that the lessons get passed on. So, when the Civil Rights Movement first began, I mean it's what I had been looking for.

Music

Neumann: It was the spring of 1964 that I heard about all of these people going south for the Mississippi summer. And it seemed, uh, you know the minute I heard about it, it was clear that I was going. So then, a friend of mine told me that they were looking for teachers at Tuskegee and I thought, perfect! So, I got hired and took off in the fall to Alabama.

Narration: Yeshi Sherover Neumann was part of a wave of young, politically engaged Jews who joined the Civil Rights Movement in large numbers.

Neumann: Everything about being in Tuskegee was interesting. It's an all Black school, an all Black community. Uh, most of them were very religious, Baptist. And you know, I had grown up in New York. I'd never met anybody like them. And they had never met anybody like me. So, I thought of teaching as political work, Civil Rights work. You know, and I had them read W.E. duBois. And I had them read, just, I had them read Black writers. I had them read Ralph Ellison who wrote "Invisible Man" about Tuskegee. You know, we all... I hadn't read "Invisible Man" either. So we were all, you know, discovering what was happening together. And that year there started to be a Civil Rights group. And I ended up being the adviser to the Civil Rights group. You know, with really no sense of it being inappropriate particularly. So, it was during the time of the Selma to Montgomery march. I was in Selma with my students. And before the actual march started there was all this planning. You know, all the planning meetings happened in the church.

Preacher: (Welcome Table sermon with response.) ....When I get through riding my chariot, I want to eat at the welcome table. Some of there days.....

Neumann: Being in the churches was so profound to me. It was community, religion, music, warmth, you know, freedom, it was all one. And it was all in this one room. And the main quality for me was just that, was just that quality of being welcomed. I think that was what was so critical to me. Because I was.... in the way that I was Jewish, in the way that I was an immigrant, in the way that I came from a family that didn't identify as Jewish, I mean, I was looking for a home. And this was a home to me. Being in those churches was a home to me.

Church Choir: Sings Welcome Table.

Neumann: You know it was just very, very powerful in terms of feeling at home in a way that I had never felt. And the Welcome Table applied to me. You know, "We're going to sit at the Welcome Table..." and I felt like, OK, I was at the Welcome Table, you know, just like everybody else.

Church Choir: Sings Welcome Table.
Music: Segue to one discordant note.

Narration: Soon after the Selma to Montgomery march however, the mood began to shift.

Carson: When the Black consciousness movement of the late 60's began to be evident, one of the elements of it was, to drive out much of the Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Because, Jews had played a leading intellectual role in shaping the strategy and the philosophy of the Black struggle. And I think there was some sense of embarrassment about that. That, why hadn't we been more able to provide intellectual leadership for our own struggle.

Music
History (O'Neal and Newman)
Dude: Every time you sit down to study our history, every time without fail, you gonna find the Jew. You got Bernal, Zinn, Meier, Herstzkowitz, Aptheker, all Jews. You got Engels the Jew; Marx the Jew...
Urbie: Freud. Freud.
Dude: The Jew! Wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm.... you've got me off my point. I'm talking about African and African American History...
Urbie: Sorry, I thought we were counting famous Jews. Go ahead.
Dude: No, no, no I was talking....... what about the great African American scholars? You got Woodson, Johnson, DuBois, Diop, Van Sertima. The Jew knows more about you than you know about yourself. You understand what I'm saying?
Urbie: Look, look, scholarship is part of the Jewish tradition. I am not ashamed of that. And I would love to know when it became a crime for Jews to take an interest in African-American History?
Dude: Alright, alright, alright. I will give you a little bit of credit for that. There're some Jews who will study, they will study till their eyes fall out; they will study and they will teach. The Jew will tell you who you are. The Jew is trying to be the author of your history.
Urbie: Now wait a minute. If we did not have those books, what would we know?
Dude: What do we know when all we think we know about African and African-American History was written by some, some European, I mean going all the way back to Herodotus.

Narration: As a new generation of African Americans took leadership of the Movement, Jews and other Whites suddenly found themselves less welcome.

Neumann: I left in 65. I wasn't planning to, but..... there were intimations, like, with people from.... not so much in the church reality, but among, you know, the political Black people in the move... in SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, who were, of course, from Washington D.C. and they weren't from the south and they had been around and they had been thinking about these things already and who had a whole analysis. And they had a lot of complex feelings towards White people.

Music

Carson: There's a syndrome of, when people have been close, like family, break up, there's a, there's a viciousness in the break-up that's hard to even understand. You know, it's remarkable how many of the people who were particularly bitter about the role of Jews in the struggle were the ones who had been closest to Jews during the early 1960's. I mean, that was the story with Stokley Carmichael.

Carmichael: It seems to me that what we're saying is that we have the right to self determination.

Narration: Stokley Carmichael was elected chairman of SNCC in 1966 and became a leading proponent of Black Power.

Carmichael: We have maintained that we don't want White people to work in the Black ghetto, because Black children have to see Black people doing something for themselves independently, without the aid of Whites. And that whenever some White person is in the ghetto helping another Black person, it only furthers White supremacy and heightens Black inferiority.

Music

Carson: His entire political life had involved close relationships with, with Jewish activists and Jewish radicals. And then all of a sudden, that made him vulnerable to attacks from Black nationalists. So, the way I would look at some of his actions during the late 1960's is he was defending his flank. He was defending himself because he understood how vulnerable he was.

Carmichael: Integration is irrelevant. And we contend that the only way that we will be able to free and to break out of those ghettos is, number one, when we have the power to do so ourselves. The power to force this country to bargain with us from a position of strength, rather than one of weakness and morality. This country does not now, nor has it ever been run on morality. It runs on power. Pure, unadulterated power. (Applause) If you don't believe me, ask Lyndon Johnson.

Music

Christian: You know, Whites were told they should go home and Blacks needed to be the ones that headed the Movements. A lot of those whites were Jewish. And I could feel in my friends a sense of feeling betrayed. That they had come to this cause and that they were being told to go back home. And, um, some Jews I actually know very well, who felt that they were not appreciated.

Narration: Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun magazine.

Lerner: And when they felt rebuffed, when they were pushed away, they were undermined in their ability to say to the rest of the Jewish world, "Hey, there is a real basis for us connecting with Blacks. They're not going to be like the other non-Jews who have always trampled on our interests."

Narration: At the same time that Jews were having to re-evaluate their role in the Civil Rights Movement, their relationship to Israel went through a major transformation. In 1967, Israel was attacked on all sides by its Arab neighbors.

Music

News Announcer: Heavy fighting broke our early this morning between Israeli and Egyptian forces along the Sinai border. Each side is accusing the other of making the first assault. According to the Israeli broadcasting service, Egyptian armored and aerial forces have attempted to penetrate Israel along the southern front, but have--so far--been repelled by Israeli planes. Cairo radio, however, is reporting that Israeli war planes have raided the Egyptian capital as well as other areas. Jerusalem has remained quiet. Traffic moves freely through the streets...

Narration: During the ensuing Six Day War, many American Jews discovered themselves identifying with Israel more deeply than ever before. This new relationship to the Jewish homeland became another source of conflict between Blacks and Jews.

Carson: For me and for most Black people at that time there was no question that our identification was with the Palestinians. What was most significant about Israel to me was that they were Europeans. That they were Europeans who had come to another place in order to deal with an issue that Europe had created, that is the extermination... the holocaust in World War II. And as often happens, when Europeans have a problem that needs to be solved, it's solved at the expense of another group, namely in this case, the Palestinians. And my own feeling is that if Jews should have had a homeland, give them Germany. You know, Germany had caused the problem, why shouldn't Germany pay the cost?

Berman: From the Jewish liberal perspective, the whole struggle in the middle East had a very different shape and contour. They did not see Israel as an imperialist state imposed on the third world. They saw Israel as a state organized by an oppressed minority, declaring it's own state, and defending itself. Now, from this perspective, when the Jewish liberals looked to those African Americans who were identifying with the Arab struggle, the sense was of total horror. Because, surely, of all people in the world who would be able to see the Jews in the Middle East as an oppressed minority, who need to defend themselves, surely, that would be the African Americans.

Christian: I do think that the Six day War is a beginning of a breaking of some of the tight alliances that Jews and Blacks had had... emotionally, I think. Because I had a very good friend, Peggy, who's Jewish and like many of the Blacks who were involved in political movements and so on, I sided with the Arabs. And we had big arguments. I mean, furious arguments! One of them where she threw me out of her apartment. (laugh) I remember this very well. I mean... and I was surprised, because she was so secular. I mean, you know, she made fun of the, you know, Jews who lived downtown with their beards and their hats and all... I mean, you know she didn't seem to me to have a kind of a strong Jewish identity. But then all of a sudden, it all came out like that (laugh). You know, it was very interesting, actually. I never quite, I never forgot that. Because it made me realize how complicated the whole issue was.

Carson: I remember my surprise during the period of the Six Day War, how suddenly some of the Jews who I knew to be activist and radical became very Jewish. Because many of the people had been very strong on third world issues and identifying with third-world nations. And then suddenly when it's Israel that's at issue, then all of that changes. And, I mean, Jews had always been, had represented the possibility of more than that. You know, that to some degree I had believed the idealism. I had believed the altruism, that Jews represented more than just defending your own group interest. And it kind of brought back maybe the possibility that that's just a bunch of idealist nonsense. That in reality it's, it's tribal warfare out there and you better find your tribe.

Berman: And at this point I think, tensions became quite severe, because each side looked at the other and saw just a terrible and grotesque betrayal. And each side saw the other as fakes and hypocrites.

Break (Schoen): (Starts at 27:06) You're listening to "Illuminations: Jewish Culture in the Light of the World." This program, "Can You Hear Me" explores the history of conflict and coalition between African Americans and Jews in the United States. We'll be back in a minute.

Music

"Can't Trust a Jew" (O'Neal and Newman)
Dude: You can't trust a Jew. They will turn White on you in a minute.
Urbie: You people! You show no appreciation at all. Come on, have you forgotten the entire Civil Rights Movement? Look, we marched with you; we died with you. What about Goodman and Schwerner?
Dude: What about James Chaney? Remember him? Forgot all about him. Hundreds of Black people were beaten and killed and all "you people" can think about is two little Jews.
Urbie: Now wait a minute. Just a touch of reality here. Jews made up two-thirds of the White Freedom Fighters, one-half of the Mississippi Volunteers, they gave three-quarters of the money, we're less than three percent of the American population. I don't think that is two little Jews.
Dude: Well I'll tell you something. Those people did not come down to Mississippi to participate in the Movement because they were Jews. They did that because they were liberals. Some were even radicals. That's what happened.
Urbie: Well, yes, for lots of Jews, being liberal and radical is our religion.
Dude: Oh! Well, it seems like your religion has lost a lot of its practitioners here lately. Were are they now?
Urbie: I love it. I really love it. First you kick us out of the Movement with all that Black Power stuff, and then you accuse us of abandoning you. That is really too much.
Dude: No, you're ducking the question, baby. I'm asking, where are they now?
Urbie: And I'm answering. Some of them went where you told them to, back to work in their own communities. And some of them joined peace, ecology and other progressive movements.
Dude: And some of them went to colleges and universities and to them big corporations where they're crawling up the corporate ladder, standing dead in the way of affirmative action.
Urbie: OK, OK, OK, OK. Some of them did. Mainly men. But what's the use, it's always the same; if it's good it's not you; but if it's bad, it's the Jew.

Narration: African Americans are frustrated by the fact that hard won political rights rarely translate into economic gain. Blacks remain at the bottom of the economic ladder, while Jews seem to be more and more successful in joining the establishment. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz:

Kaye/Kantrowitz: The whole goal is to assimilate into the American system. But what's missing from this picture is that there're people who are already here in the city for generations, African American people, who are stuck, you know without jobs or with the lowest jobs, who don't get to do that. People come into the city and cut in line, in a sense, ahead of the African American people who live here.

Lester: Certainly I think there is an economic element here.

Narration: Writer Julius Lester:

Lester: Black America has been existing in a state a economic catastrophe for two decades now. 47% of all Black seventeen-year-olds are functionally illiterate. Why are we permitting these youths to be functionally illiterate? What's going on here? And there's also a sense of despair and hopelessness in Black America unlike anything that has existed in Black American history.

Lumakanda: As the Jew moves up into the higher echelons of American society, I think he becomes less and less a friend of Black people who can not escape the vicious cycle of racism and economic deprivation.

Narration: Kokovulu Lumakanda is a book seller in Berkeley California.

Lumakanda: He tends to identify more with the dominant culture. He thinks he has more in common and it's better to maintain a relationship with them than it is to maintain a relationship with the oppressed.

Seidler-Feller: I think that in some sectors of the Black community, there is very deep hostility to Jews and to the Jewish community, that have to do with feelings of resentment, a sense that, indeed, the Jews have betrayed the Blacks and have willingly joined the ruling class.

Narration: Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller is the director of the Hillel Council at UCLA.

Seidler-Feller: Because, Jews are not viewed as being people of color. They're not viewed as being a minority. They're White. They're mainstream.

Narration: Young African Americans in our inner cities feel trapped in a social and economic dead end. Most Jews have long since fled to the suburbs. In those urban areas where African Americans and Jews do meet on a daily basis, their relationships are often shot through with fear and resentment. These attitudes are expressed by people like this Jewish woman and this Black man in Brooklyn, New York.

Music

Jewish Woman: I think what it's about here is... fear. A lot of fear. If I'm walking down the street in the middle of the night and I see a group of Black teenagers, I do get frightened. And if they don't mean to hurt me, it's terribly unfair to them. But on the other hand, how am I to know? Where it's been cause for alarm.

Black Man: I just laugh, when I see them grasping their pocketbooks. "He's probably gonna, he's probably gonna try to to rob me" or "He's probably selling drugs if he has a beeper. He has a nice car. Oh he's too young, he must be selling drugs." They think every Black person's a robber.

Jewish Woman: If you don't know, there isn't really the opportunity to go up to someone and say, "Hey, are you a good guy, or are you a bad guy? Are you my friend or are you my foe?"

Black Man: I myself, I stopped shopping in Jewish stores. I'll go to where I feel more comfortable buying. Cause I don't like, when I get my change from people, I don't like them to drop the change five feet away from my hands so they don't touch me. They feel that they're better, so they don't give us our due respect. Or their of lack a respect for us comes from their ignorance of us.

Jewish Woman: It's not Black versus White. It's not Jew versus non-Jew. It has to do with people who are fine, moral, law-abiding -- to use the old clich?, but it's true -- versus those that aren't. And the first are afraid of the second.

Black Man: They don't, they don't understand Black people. They don't understand. They're not taking time out to understand us.

Narration: Black frustration and Jewish fear find their most highly charged expression around the issue of Black anti-Semitism. Jews can never forget the historical connection between anti-Semitic rhetoric and genocide. So whenever an African American leader makes an anti-Semitic statement, Jews feel enormously threatened.

Lester: There's no question there's Black anti-Semitism, with very little condemnation coming from Black intellectuals and leaders and artists and what-have-you.

Carson: Black leaders don't want to appear to be bending over backwards to do what someone else wants them to do.

Narration: African American Scholar Clayborn Carson:

Carson: So there's a reluctance to be too quick and too definitive about a statement. And the Jewish leaders and the Jewish community as a whole never quite gets the response that they want.

Seidler-Feller: Anytime an incident of anti-Semitism occurs, and there isn't really a good response, then you're likely to have Jews say, "Ah, you see, once again. They're doing the same thing."

Narration: Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller:

Seidler-Feller: "We are here. We're being persecuted. And there' nobody to speak up for us, except for ourselves. Nobody cares. It could happen again."

Carson: Why do you get anti-Semitism in the Black community? It often comes from someone who is in a classic sense anti-Semitic. That is, using Jews in order to get something else. And the something else is notoriety as a person who is willing to say what White people don't want to hear. Because there's always a special position in the Black community for someone who is seen as, um, as the "bad nigger".

Narration: Julius Lester, a musician and a writer, has a unique perspective on these issues. He is an African American who converted to Judaism. The New Republic magazine once asked him to cover a rally led by Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan.

Lester: It was a frightening experience for me. It was one of those experiences of double consciousness. Because even though I'm sitting there and my skin is Black, I felt very threatened as a Jew. There was one moment when Farrakhan yelled, "Who killed Christ?" And the roar came back from thousands of people, "The Jews, the Jews, the Jews." And every anti-Semitic thing that he said, thousands of people were one their feet cheering. It brought to my mind images of films that I've seen of Nuremberg rallies during the Third Reich.

Music

Announcer: (Applause) Let's bring to the Microphones, Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan: Here the Jews don't like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn't great for me as a Black person, but he was a great German. Hitler took Germany from the ashes. And rose her up and made her the greatest fighting machine of the 20th century. Now, I'm not proud of Hitler's evil against Jewish people. But that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there's a similarity in that we're rising our people up from nothing. And you have to be very careful how you walk around this Black man today. Cause he's rising up, whether you like it or not. (Small applause).

Lester: Farrakhan is one person. And one person doesn't bother me that much. What disturbs me is that there're so many Blacks who listen to Farrakhan and believe him.

Narration: Black anti-Semitism is mirrored by Jewish racism. Racism is woven deeply into the fabric of American life and Jews are hardly immune to it. Derogatory terms like "schvartze," which is Yiddish for "black," have a familiar ring to many Jews.

Jewish Man: I grew up with racist jokes. Schvartze this, Schvartze that. I mean there were a lot of jokes that I can recall growing up, that my grandparents would tell. And that even my parents would tell.

Narration: For many Jews, one price of assimilation into mainstream America was adopting its racist attitudes.

Kaye-Kantrowitz: James Baldwin wrote in 1984, "No one was White before they came to America." And then he says, "It is the Jewish community, or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants, who have paid the most extraordinary price for becoming White." That's what Baldwin says. And I think, um, part of the picture of what it means to become white... it's about passing. Connecting into a system that put somebody else at the bottom instead of the Jews.

Jewish Woman: The Blacks feel imposed upon constantly, by having a job and having children, and therefore it is everybody else's responsibility to take care of them. If their mother doesn't and their grandmother doesn't then the government is supposed to. And the government is I and my taxes.

Narration: This racist opinion that says that African Americans are inherently lazy and incompetent underlies the more benign justifications used by conservative Jews to oppose Affirmative Action.

Jewish Woman: For instance, when you make some calls on the telephone and there is the person on the other end, clearly with the Black accent, she does not answer properly, she doesn't care to answer properly, she wants to get her salary and get home again. And it flashes through your mind that that person got the job because she's Black. I would not have gotten that job with the same non-qualification that person has. And then when they don't get a job, everybody screams "discrimination!" It's not discrimination. It's that they can't compete in the job market.

Music

You don't know what it's like
O'Neal: You don't understand what it feels like to look into fear blinded eyes that see you only as a servant or a threat.
Newman: You don't know what it's like to be blamed for everything: killing Jesus, the plague, drinking children's blood, Communism, Capitalism, the Gulf War, everything, anything. You're it and you're hated.
O'Neal: You can't understand four hundred years of legalized terror; having absolutely no rights that White people are obliged to respect; or what it feels like when somebody can walk into your home and walk out with your wife, your child and you can't protect them, not even with your life.
Newman: Living in middle class houses never kept Jews safe. Don't you understand that every time I hear an anti-Semitic remark my blood freezes, because history had proven it has taken just enough of those remarks to lead to where my children, my family, my whole community is shoved into cattle cars and riding the rails -- this time to Sacramento or Detroit -- where the gas chambers are.

Narration: If there is any way to get through this impasse, Jews and African Americans are going to have to start listening to each other. But even the question of how to begin a dialogue is a loaded issue.

Lester: For great number of Blacks, Black/Jewish relations are not a priority, are not even on the agenda.

Seidler-Feller: The claim is "We are fighting for survival. We don't have time to engage in dialogue." And so, Blacks turns to the Jews and say, "Hey guys, look at the ghettos. Look what's happening to us." What they're saying is, "Yes, we know Jews love to talk. And we need action."

Narration: The collaboration between John O'Neal and Naomi Newman on Crossing the Broken Bridge required talk and action..

Newman: Creating this piece was really a difficult, challenging, aggravating, heart-breaking process. (laugh).
O'Neal: As somebody says in the show, "Collaborations are trials of the soul." (laugh)
Newman: There were times where John seemed to me, literally, to be the enemy. When I feared him, when I didn't trust him, when I didn't understand him. Now the same things that he says I can understand in a very different way and they're not provocative. I really, genuinely understand them.
O'Neal: But, all that takes place within the context of a willingness to try to hear, engage... in spite of differences. But to build on the basis of the strongest agreement that we can accomplish.

Narration: A number of other notable dialogues between Blacks and Jews have emerged. One such conversation, between African American scholar Cornel West and Jewish writer and editor Michael Lerner became the basis of two books.

Lerner: Over and over again in the experience of progressive Jews that I know, I hear the story of Jews saying that they find the desire to have a dialogue and communication between Blacks and Jews is much stronger amongst the Jews than amongst the Blacks.
West: But, understandable so, you see, because Jews have, Black people have played such a fundamental role in the shaping of how Jews conceive of themselves as Americans in terms of their struggle for under dog, you see. So, no doubt there are a number of Jews who are raring to go for dialogue because, going back almost 100 years you've had this identification.
Lerner: Well, but that raring to go is also a testimony of caring and concern for the Black community that I want to have Jews given some credit for because I don't notice too many other elements of the White communities begging for access to create dialogue with Blacks.
West: You got some Quakers, though, brother.
Lerner: And I don't want Jews to have to be coming and begging for an alliance with Blacks when its in both of our interests not just in Jewish interest to have that alliance.
West: But I would want to say that in such a way that in such a way that it does not down-play the alliance between Black and Red, and Black and Brown, and Black and Asian. Because there are similar dialogues that you and I are having that's going on among Black spokespersons and these other respective communities that I think can play a very important role in this regard.

Music

Narration: It's not only Black and Jewish artists and intellectuals who need to talk to each other, but people living together in a community. Members of Shiloh Baptist Church in Hayward California, led by Reverend Jesse Davis and members of Temple Sinai in Oakland, led by Rabbi Steve Chester held a series of conversations.

Davis: Tonight, the dialogue is supposed to be centered around that subject of honesty.
Chester: Since we've now had three sessions, maybe we'll take the next step, which becomes the hardest when we're in groups together, and we said we would do this...
Davis: Yes. Have you ever been racist towards another individual. Have you ever had racial slurs thrown at you? Can we get this problem about our feelings, about how do we feel when we act racist toward other people. And how did you feel when it happened to you?
Chester: And the only way that we can really dialogue is to say, "I have certain feelings, whatever they might be." And maybe we don't. Maybe someone can sit there and say, "I have never had a prejudiced thought in my life. "(Laughter) And it doesn't necessarily have to be...
Davis: We're in the church, so we don't lie in here.
(Laughter)

Narration: After breaking into small groups, members of the two congregations started by admitting their own prejudice to one another.

Jewish Man: I like to, to run, go jogging. And I've noticed in myself, if I'm running and I hear someone running behind me... there's that, just flash, I turn around just to see who it is who's running up behind you. If it's someone who's White, it's like. "Oh, OK." If I turn around and I see a Black person running behind me, it's just an automatic... the adrenalin...

Black Woman: If I saw Hayes coming down the street towards me, I would hold my purse closer to me, just based on the way he looks. (Laughter) Not because he's a Jew, but the way he looks, you know and and...

Davis: What about if you see teenagers and they're all wearing baggy pants and the cap turned around backwards. And they could have just left from the Boys Club. Supervised. But the way they're dressed, they're stereo-typed. Right? Is fear connected to racism?

Narration: When people can begin to really hear each other, it seems that a new possibility for understanding can arise.

West: I think probably the toughest issue is trying to arrive at some understanding in the Black world, vis-?-vis the Jewish world of the history of Jewish peoples. So that Black Americans recognize this 2,000 year history of expulsions and um, leading up to the genocidal attacks. The killing of one out of three Jews in the 20th century. That usually doesn't ring that deeply in the consciousness of most Black people who associate American Jews with, not just material prosperity, but as upper middle class, some even upper class.

Kaye/Kantrowitz: You know in every community there are voices that get heard and voices that don't get heard. And it's interesting to think about why certain voices get heard and other not. I think in the Jewish community mostly the voices that get heard are the conservative voices. And similarly in the African American community I think the voices that get heard most loudly often are the voices of, you can call it separatism, of extremist nationalism, sometimes of anti-Semitism. And that it's important to recognize there are lots of, lots of Black people who are being scrupulous to disavow anti-Semitism and to come out strongly against it. And who recognize the positive potential of a continued alliance with progressive Jews.

O'Neal: I don't know if I've said this to you before, Naomi, but my biggest surprise in this process doesn't have to do with Jews or anything like that (laugh). It has to do with your capacity to change and to accommodate change. It seems to me, you've made some remarkable changes that I wouldn't have thought possible. Course I didn't know you very well in the beginning. And as I got to know you, I started worrying, "God, how we gonna get together on this stuff?" (laugh) But you've changed a lot, you know.
Newman: Thank you, John. One of the things that I don't think I've ever told you (laugh) is I don't think I've ever known anyone less susceptible to negative pressure. And probably positive pressure. (Both laugh).
O'Neal: What she's saying is that I'm stubborn. That's what she's saying.
Newman: No. I'm saying that there are places in you that are so solid and trustworthy that no matter who or what comes at you, if you feel something is right, you are unmovable. And I really respect that.

Music

Narration: So perhaps we can finally come back to thinking about coalition.

Kaye/Kantrowitz: You know, when I talk about where we're going to seek alliances, it has partly to do with, where to we see our danger? I don't feel like the primary threat to the Jewish community is located in the African American community. I feel like it's located in the Neo-Nazi movement, in the White supremacist movement. You know, you have people like Pat Robertson, Christian fundamentalists, you know people running around with a lot of money and power, who's anti-Semitic tinge is touched on very, very lightly by the established Jewish community. I mean there's something peculiar at best, about the idea that we should be, the Jewish community and the African American community should be at odds when there are very powerful forces that would like to wipe us all out. There's something about that that doesn't make sense to me.

Christian: I grew up with a sense that Jews were different from Europeans. That they were a Diaspora. And so were we. And I guess that's the beginning of the relationship for me. That we have both experienced what it means to be displaced and to make a home in a place where there is no home.

Music

First they came for the homosexuals
O'Neal: First they came for the homosexuals and I didn't speak up because I was not a homosexual.
Newman: Then they came for the communists and I didn't speak up because I was not a communist.
O'Neal: Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew.
Newman: Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist.
O'Neal: Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was Protestant.
Both: Then they came for me. And by that time, no one was left to speak.

Newman: For me, the highlight of all our performances happened in Detroit. And the Jewish community, which is way, way out in the suburbs, got a sister organization, a very large Baptist church, to co-sponsor our performances. The women from both organizations prepared the refreshments together. And people came from each neighborhood into the other. There was a bus full of school children that came out to the Jewish community center. I think there were Jews from the community who came into the Black community for the first time in decades. It was on the front page of the newspaper and on television news at 6 o'clock. Cause it really was an event. And I believe we literally started, or helped a bridge being crossed.

Lester: There is an entity within each of us called the human soul. And the soul has no race and the soul has no color and the soul has no, has no gender. And it is our responsibility to find the ways to reach out to each other from the place of our souls. And if we are able to do that then all these issues around ethnicity and race and gender do not have the importance that they appear to have when we neglect our souls.

Davis: One other announcement... one other announcement that we want to make, and this is a very important announcement to me. When we talked about this dialogue, we talked about trying to do things that we could help one-another in the community. I happen to have a young lady that I'm very concerned about, who is going to Davis, down in Sacramento. And she's studying to be a doctor. Her mother is a single parent. And she be coming home for the summer. And she needs a job to help her with her education. If you know of anybody who can hire some young people, or hire this one young lady... Shirley?... That's her mother, right here, Shirley Williams. And our group raised some interesting things about this racism problem. We had a very powerful discussion tonight. And we don't want to let this discussion stop, we want to keep on talking about these things, because we got to live together. Isn't that right?
Chester: I don't know Jesse, with those suspenders........
(Big laugh)

Music

(Group chatter)
Davis: Eat all the food you want. We'll finish it. We're going to see you at the play.

Music ends

Spinner Music: (Runs under credits)

Credits (Schoen): Can You Hear Me," is a project of A Traveling Jewish Theatre. It was written and produced by Claire Schoen and Corey Fischer. Original music by Jim Quinn. Narrated by Corey Fischer. Mixed by John Rieger. The play, Crossing the Broken Bridge was created by John O'Neal, Naomi Newman and Stephen Kent. The excerpts in this program were performed by Naomi Newman and John O'Neal.

Special thanks to the following individuals for their contributions to this program: Opal Louis Nations, Maria Hinojosa, Kaufman/Snitow Productions and Bari Scott.

This program was made possible in part by grants from the Koret Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the California Council for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Samuel Rosenthal Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding from the PRX Reversioning Project. The Public Radio Exchange is at prx.org.

In Memory of Barbara Christian, formerly a professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who has passed away since her interview was originally recorded.

I'm Claire Schoen.

Total Time: 59:00

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