Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

At the January 25 Friday night service, Reverend Ann Gray Byrd spoke about the African American experience in Santa Rosa. The apropos was that previous Monday was Martin Luther King day. The library has six items related to African-American Jewish relations. They are all ready to borrow. Let me say a few words about them:

Willis Barnstone: We Jews and Blacks: Memoir With Poems
According to his homepage Barnstone is a poet, translator, scholar, and anthologist. This, book is a series of parallel stories, following a double chronology. One hand the book is structured around human development from childhood, through adolescence, to the major events in adults’ lives. On the other hand it collects stories from different periods of history, both American and world. In the process he finds many connecting points in terms of experiences and feelings. At the same time almost every second page has a poem, which enriches the narrative and creates a more intimate feeling than a simple history book.

Norman H. Finkelstein: Heeding the Call: Jewish Voices in America’s Civil Rights Struggle
The book covers almost four hundred years of history (1619-1968) of how Jews worked against slavery, racism, and discrimination. Often together with African Americans, because of the shared history and challenges they both faced. Amongst others we learn the story of Rabbi David Einhorn(, a fierce abolitionist, who was forced to leave Baltimore for his outspokenness), Lilian Wald(, who helped to found the NAACP, by being one of the people who signed the original Call for it.), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel(, who marched together with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). The ten year old book is categorized as juvenile literature, because it has plenty of photographs and the font is slightly larger than most non-fiction books’.

Jonathan Kaufman: Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
Kaufman describes and analyses what went wrong in the two groups’ relationship. In the 1950′s Jews were at the forefront of civil rights struggle. By the time of the late 1980′s, when the book was written, they were mostly estranged and antagonistic. The section titles show the stages of the process as Kaufman sees it: cooperation, confrontation, competition and conflict. Some of the reasons he notices include increase in urban crime, the assassination of Martin Luther King, debates about affirmative action, disputed over Isreal….

Michael Lerner and Cornel West: Jews and Blacks
The subtitle of the edition of the book the library a has, reads, “Let the healing begin“. The version I found on Amazon.com reads, “A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America.” Either way it takes up in 1995 where Kaufman finished in 1988. Co-authored by a prominent African American and Jewish thinker this tome covers their discussion on such topics as cultural identity, civil rights movement, black and Jewish nationalism, Jewish racism and black anti-Semitism… It is the transcript of an honest discussion intended to uncover the issues and heal them through mutual understanding of the details of the others’ position.

Jack Salzman, Adina Back, and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin: Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews
The last third of this large format book, published by The Jewish Museum in New York in 1992, is a visual essay, containing about a hundred pictures from the museum archives, which were part of an exhibit to “remind those of us who are older, and teach those who are younger, what Black people had faced in the early years of this century. It will allow us to learn about those who helped and hindered us.” The topics of the 14 essays, from 15 authors, are very diverse, but they all relate to the issues and help in the same process.

We also have a VHS copy of a 1992 documentary titled “Black to the promised land” that follows a group of African-American high school students from Brooklyn who go with their teacher to work on a kibbutz in Israel for a few months.