
Rochelle Wilner President	Frank Dimant Chief Executive Officer	Prof. Stephen Scheinberg National Chair

Blacks & Jews in Dialogue

BLACK - JEWISH CHALLENGES CAN BE OVERCOME

by Dr. Lorne Foster, Share

At one point in the Walter Mosely novel, Black Betty, the protagonist and reluctant Black LA detective, Easy Rawlins, engages in a dialectical musing: “... a man who's never been scarred doesn't have any mercy. He doesn't know what pain really feels like.”

This is a truism that bespeaks the most significant, if not only, common territory that exists between Blacks and Jews in North America. A history of oppression and slavery affords a unique perspective, and acquisition of classified knowledge through experience. Blacks and Jews know the spirit of the oppressed. They have learned from their own suffering the need to be kind to strangers.

As Rabbi Poupko of Beth Israel Beth Aaron congregation in Montreal aptly framed it: “... a people's character is determined not only by what they have done or what was done to them, but also by the lessons they decide to learn from those events.” Suffering engenders the capacity for true empathy while it raises the moral antennae of a people.

These keen senses of empathy and fairness also provide the backdrop and raison d'être for the new Blacks & Jews In Dialogue forums sponsored by League For Human Rights of B‘nai Brith - a venture designed to update the historical connection of two of Canada's most long-standing communities.

The one caveat is, while Blacks and Jews may historically share an experiential knowledge and connection, there is a contemporary gap between the two larger communities in modern times related to differences in institutional organization. Today, part of bridging the gap between Blacks and Jews is coming to terms with the vast difference in "institutional completeness". What separates the two communities fundamentally is strong, vanguard organization and leadership. They fundamentally differ in their development of the "level of potential organizational response" to problems.

This is, in large part, a consequence of continued outside attempts to dictate "acceptable" Black leadership (defining and differentiating "the palatable community spokesperson" from "the radical crank" that is conducted dogmatically, and to great affect, in the mainstream media). This, in fact, has been so divisive to the Black community that it has undermined authoritative leadership, and inhibited effective grassroots mobilization. The result is, Blacks do not have a B‘nai Brith, and for most Whites the only recognized Black leaders live in the United States and South Africa. This, of course, can often lead to a disheartening and pervasive sense of futility in the Black community-at-large.

However, the theme of the most recent and on-going Blacks & Jews In Dialogue forums is the search for a "new paradigm" - portending the dawn of an innovative and proactive age; an age of "what-kind-of-society-do-we-want" and "let's-do-it".

The event moderators - Carol Tator, renowned researcher and educator specializing in anti-racism and equity work; and, Hamlin Grange, prominent journalist and social activist - emphasized the need to development a new model of partnership, where Blacks and Jews can engage new possibilities that have not yet been explored in depth.

“Our objective is a shared agenda informed by dialogue, but based in action.” said Tator.

“Diversity is creativity,” reminded Grange. “The answers [to our problems] are not always right in from of us, sometimes we have to think about things on the periphery”.

At the forum (the second in the series) on June 5, 2000, held at B‘nai Brith Canada district 22 - 15 Hove Street, there was a palpable sense of anticipation, an air of excitement, and feeling that there is something potentially transformative about the ambitious bilateralism of the respective communities to build effective partnership practices.

Many of the older participants attested to long-standing associations and friendships developed in the integrated neighbourhoods of ’40s and ’50s Toronto. Arthur Downes and Morley Wolfe, members of the meetings steering committee, can recall their days at Harbord Collegiate, when Blacks and Jews united to protest racial slurs and ensure that Hanukkah was celebrated as well as Christmas. However, it is also acknowledged that the former level and quality of contact that existed between Blacks and Jews in the ’40s and ’50s - and in sympathetic conjunction with the American civil rights movement through the 1960s - does not existed in a 21^st-century Megacity environment.

The new demographic landscape presents special challenges in Black/Jewish relations. Blacks and Jews are now two completely separated and removed life-worlds. Today, young Black and Jewish people do not see shared circumstances; and their only exposer to each other tends to be through media.

Moreover, there is nothing special about the contemporary lifestyles of Blacks and Jews that should bring them together - apart, perhaps, from a deference for multicultural diversity. Nor is either community sufficiently monolithic to buttress the notion of a single African-Canadian community or a single Jewish community. Instead, both communities are complex and dynamic. There are old and established populations overlapped and infiltrated by newer ones. Accordingly, neither the Black nor Jewish communities speak with a single voice.

On the other hand, the fact that contemporary Jews and Blacks come together from diverse backgrounds with many different expectations, means they now share the real opportunity to begin to think positively, creatively and practically about accessing common interests at the individual and group level - be they concerns about the marginalization of youth, hate crimes, education, social security, health care, housing, poverty, or even something as mundane as a pothole in the street. As a result, political alliances are increasingly being conceived in the context of an issue-and-action-orientation. Here, "political networking", or what has been called on occasion "inter-ethnic political bridge-building", supersedes the old-style politics of "I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine".

The upshot is, for two communities that have known so much pain, the possibilities in the new century now seem endless.

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To contact the Blacks & Jews in Dialogue, League for Human Rights,
consult the B'nai Brith Staff Directory or
email us at bjd@bnaibrith.ca