The opening scene in the first episode of the PBS series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” captures a truly wonderful event: a Passover Seder led by culinary genius Michael Twitty that also includes his fellow rock star Jews of Color Jamaica Kincaid and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, among others. Rabbi Shais Rishon regales the group with a brief accounting of his Black and Jewish ancestry going back to the 1780s — an origin story that would seem to offer a natural entry point into the history of Black and Jewish life in America.
Except we never hear from him again — or any other Jew of Color seated at that table.
What we do get in the four-hour series presented by Harvard historian and “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a reductive depiction of the histories of Blacks and Jews as two separate groups. That’s despite the incessant reminder that I, and countless other Jews of Color, including those seated at that Seder table, have made for decades: “Blacks and Jews” is a misnomer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Jews can be Black and Blacks can be Jews — and you cannot talk about the relationship between the two without acknowledging those who inhabit that intersection and have been influencing each group’s attitudes about the other for millennia.
Someone who’s lived in both of those spaces all his life is University of Connecticut philosophy professor Lewis Gordon, who describes the binary as endemic in academia.
“They’re really invested in an ongoing stereotypical discourse, in which Blacks are represented by Christians, and Jews are represented by whites,” he said. “Ultimately, they’re always talking about it as ‘Blacks and Jews,’ even when Black Jews are in the room.”
To be sure, there are other Black Jews in the program’s interview rooms, including Rabbi Capers Funnye of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. Funnye is one of many luminaries commenting on facts or incidents specific to one or both communities. But he isn’t asked to explore the rich history of his own congregation, which has served as a bridge between largely Black Israelite groups and predominantly white Jewish denominations. In fact, Israelites aren’t mentioned at all, even though they’ve interacted with mainstream Jewish congregations for more than 150 years.
The producers said they were aware of that history but didn’t have the time or space to include it.
“The Hebrew Israelite community is so complicated in and of itself that it felt almost like we could only bite off just the smallest piece of it,” co-producer Sara Wolitzky said. “We didn’t want to get that wrong, because it’s such a complicated set of experiences in its own right.”
That may be, but that’s like saying Jerusalem is claimed by both Jews and Palestinians; let’s talk about Tokyo instead.
That again takes us back to the binary Jews-and-Blacks discussion, which is competently told and offers deep dives into areas not widely covered. One is the little-known story of the other Brown v. Board of Education: Esther Brown, a Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, whose successful school desegregation efforts in partnership with Black parents helped lay the groundwork for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case — named, as it happens, for a different Brown.
Yet beyond each peak of progress and partnership is a valley of dispute and discontent. Jewish support of Black entertainers was often accompanied by economic exploitation; Jews fighting against restrictive covenants were undermined by others building whites-only Levittowns.
The alliance reached its zenith in the Civil Rights Movement, most vividly in the Mississippi murders of a Black man, James Chaney, along with Jewish partners Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner. But the series fails to mention a Black Jew of the day — perhaps the most famous ever — whose commitment to the movement was just as widely known, though for very different reasons.
“Sammy Davis was a convert, right?” Wolitzky said, seemingly tying the entertainer’s embrace of a religion to his historical newsworthiness. “When you’re talking about Black Jews or Jews of African descent, there are so many different versions of that. Highlighting only one example like a Sammy Davis Jr. can misrepresent that.”
I’m sorry. You can laugh at, laugh with, or make one-eyed– Black–Jewish–Nixon-loving jokes all you want about Sammy, but you can hardly deny he was a major force in bringing awareness to the entire world — let alone to Blacks and Jews — that a person could be both, and proud of it. His public persona shaped the attitudes of both Blacks and Jews about the other to this day.
After the movement came the inevitable breakup, with Civil Rights morphing into Black Power and white activists expelled. That was again followed by a makeup, with Israel’s airlift of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s. That story segues into a brief revelation that there are also Black Jews in America — a conversation that is quickly swallowed up by euphoria over the biracial phenomenon of President Barack Obama.
Letting go of my questions about the scarcity of Black Jews, I asked Wolitzky and co-producer Phil Bertelsen if they had documented how many times the series showed the two groups splitting and making up.
“I didn’t count them,” Bertelsen said. He didn’t have to; by now it’s clear the relationship will always cycle between closeness and conflict. What the series is missing is an analysis others have long noted: if the two communities didn’t truly care for each other, they wouldn’t be talking about each other so much.
That’s something nearly every Black Jew I’ve ever met would tell you — including the ones at the Seder table. Regrettably, they didn’t get the chance.
Robin Washington is an award-winning American journalist and editor-at-large of the Forward.
