NJDC’s blog alerted us to a recent Daily Show video that you can see here. It’s about Jewish/Black relations, only from the distinctively funny and revealing angle that Jon Stewart and co. have made so effective.
This is becoming a hot topic in election news. Just last week we posted on the relationship between blacks and Jews and how that relationship could impact the election, if at all. We concluded:
Some Jews, like some white (and other) people in this country as a whole, won’t vote for Senator Obama in part or in whole because he is black. An estimate of that number is very difficult to gauge since people habitually lie when it comes to talking about their racial attitudes. Whether there will be enough Jewish Democrat voters who stay home on Election Day and/or vote for Senator John McCain to swing the vote in a deciding state like Florida is the question.
So this topic is not without a serious side. There is at least enough enmity between Jewish Americans and African Americans to warrant a play (recently performed in the Washington D.C. Capital Fringe Festival) called The Black Jew Dialogues, whose objective it is, according to its website, to “reunite our cultures”:
The black and Jewish communities in America share a history of pain, oppression, pride, and a deep commitment to civil rights and justice. In the past several decades our communities have slowly drifted apart.
From the inception of the N.A.A.C.P to black newspapers being first in decrying the abuse of Jews in Nazi Germany to the civil rights movement here, blacks and Jews have been arm-in-arm in their fight for social justice. Through laughter, honesty, conversation (and a little nosh), The Black Jew Dialogues is our attempt to revive this all-important union.
Top photo: Bishop James Shannon, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery on February 6, 1968. Credit: CNN