- 10 hours ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:01Viewers like you make this program possible.
00:04Support your local PBS station.
00:15Even as outsiders in their own country,
00:19black and Jewish people reshaped almost every corner
00:23of American popular culture in the first half of the 20th century.
00:29A white Jewish producer and the greatest black jazz singer of all time
00:33working together to produce art.
00:36They worked together in clubs and studios.
00:40Black culture could always make you hip by association.
00:45On stage and screen and on the playing field.
00:49Marker.
00:50The Jews made the movies and made Israel in California
00:54and it's called Hollywood.
00:59By the 1930s, the rise of fascism in Europe
01:05drew black and Jewish Americans even closer
01:08as Nazi propaganda borrowed pages from the Jim Crow playbook.
01:13Nazis think, hey, somebody's already done the homework.
01:18You don't have to invent it.
01:19Here were two Jewish American athletes kept from the winning podium
01:23so as not to further embarrass Adolf Hitler.
01:27The Holocaust devolved over time.
01:31After the Holocaust, there was a heightened awareness
01:34of their shared suffering as well as a growing recognition
01:39of their differences.
01:41I said to myself, my God, who are these people?
01:43What have they done that was so terrible?
01:45American Jewish history has been a history of rapid social mobility.
01:53African American history has been a history of enslavement
01:56and institutional racism.
01:58At what point in the alliance are those historical differences
02:03going to be seen?
02:28Southern trees bear a strange fruit
02:39Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
02:46Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
02:55Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
03:04Billie Holiday's classic ballad, Strange Fruit, is a timeless protest against racial hatred and mob violence.
03:13But it's also a deeply moving collaboration between blacks and Jews.
03:19Written by Abel Mirapol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York City, Strange Fruit originated as a poem, expressing outrage at lynchings throughout the South.
03:33The poem was arranged as a song, and when pitched to Billie Holiday at the height of her career, she not only embraced it, she would make it a classic.
03:45And in 39, people did not want to know about lynching, and that was her passion to get this song recorded.
03:58Actor and comedian Billy Crystal has a surprising personal tie to Strange Fruit through his family.
04:06My grandfather, Julius, got this electronics store also where he sold all kinds of stuff, light bulbs, sneezing powder and rubber hot dogs and, you know, Chinese finger...
04:19Oh yeah, I remember those.
04:20Those things.
04:21Yeah.
04:22And then his oldest son, Milt, started working there.
04:27And Uncle Milt then turned that little hardware store into the center of jazz called the Commodore Music Show.
04:34Then he said, why are we gonna sell other people's records? Why don't we make our own?
04:39Right.
04:40And that was the beginning of the Commodore Jazz label, Classics and Swing, which became, in America, the first independent jazz label of its time.
04:49Billy's uncle, Milt Gabler, first heard Strange Fruit sung by Holiday herself, who performed it in the family store, hoping that Milt would record it.
05:01According to him, she sang it in the store a cappella.
05:06And he said to me, I just, I cried like a baby. I said, we gotta record this thing. I don't care if we make a buck.
05:12Because he was so deeply moved, Billy's uncle, Milt, took the courageous step of recording Strange Fruit on his Commodore label when no other company would.
05:25The white Jewish producer, and the greatest black jazz singer of all time, and an all black band, working together to produce art, isn't that the metaphor for what we should be?
05:42Right.
05:43And where we should be at?
05:44Yeah.
05:45Why can't the world be like this?
05:46I guess we don't roll.
05:47It's tied.
05:48Take one.
05:49Soft sticks.
05:50You think about the history of America, one could make the argument that there is no American music without black music.
06:07And Jewish people have always been some of the first, if not the first, outside of the culture itself to embrace black music.
06:29And so from that appreciation of the music, of the culture, comes an opportunity to maybe collaborate in interesting ways, creatively and subsequently financially.
06:42The factors leading to these partnerships are as complex as the art and orchestrations they created, especially in the world of jazz.
06:56If you were characterizing the relationship of blacks and Jews in the history of jazz with broad strokes, how would you characterize it?
07:12Well, the black tradition clearly is the root.
07:17Uh, but the Jewish influence is the, uh, let's call the lattice upon which the plant flourished.
07:29Jazz is a particularly American art form that captures the kind of democratic spirit, the hurly-burly of the city, the good noise, the good chaos.
07:40And African Americans invented it.
07:43But Jews are way over-represented among white people in the music business.
07:53The question of, like, why Jews are so involved in the creation of dissemination of jazz, there's so many reasons why Jews are there.
08:00A lot of these young Jews, they refer to African Americans as free, or in some cases as the most free people, uh, that they knew.
08:17And what they meant by that is they were trying very hard to win acceptance in a world that wasn't necessarily accepting them.
08:26And they felt they couldn't express themselves as Jews in that way.
08:31And by having some connection to African American culture, an expressive culture, what they considered an authentic kind of cultural expression, expressing some type of difference was what they yearned for on some level.
08:48Jewish people come into this picture as musicians themselves, as people inspired, uh, by the music, people who do want to take it up.
08:57But it was also because Jewish people were so shut out of traditional businesses that they found these newly forming cultural spaces as a place where they could actually thrive.
09:12One jazz pioneer with an especially strong connection to the Jewish community was the incomparable Louis Armstrong.
09:21Jazz is a variety of all good music.
09:30Ain't but two things in music, good and bad.
09:34Ain't the thing in the plats you put to is good music.
09:39By the early 1930s, Armstrong was an internationally renowned jazz trumpeter.
09:46But he was facing legal troubles and looking for someone who could help him better navigate the tough world of the music business.
09:55Armstrong managed to convince Jewish boxing promoter Joe Glazer to represent him.
10:01As a jazz trumpeter coming out of New Orleans, there were certain doors Louis Armstrong couldn't go through.
10:08His Jewish manager could get into those doors.
10:13He could figure out how to cut the deal.
10:16He could figure out what venues to go to.
10:19He could figure out how to think about the contract.
10:22And so it's that nature of that symbiosis where they each lean into their talents.
10:27Suddenly, Armstrong was surrounded by people who loved him and loved his music.
10:36He even made Armstrong's success by looking after his recording career, by managing him in a brutal business.
10:46But Armstrong sometimes wondered if he was getting his fair share of his earnings, even with Glazer.
10:52Well, well, he should.
10:54Do you think he was?
10:55Oh, no, certainly not.
10:56No.
10:57No, nobody is getting their fair share.
10:59Did he take more than his share?
11:00Yeah.
11:01I would be shocked if the answer was no.
11:04Glazer was a thug and he was a gangster.
11:08This is the music business.
11:09And why are there so many gangsters in the music business?
11:12Because it's a cash business.
11:14Louis Armstrong and Joe are not just in a business relationship, but Louis Armstrong feels like Joe is his brother, almost like a member of his family.
11:28And part of that, I think, has to do with his relationship with the family that helped raise him and has served as a mentor to him.
11:35Armstrong's relationship with the Jewish people began at an early age.
11:42As a rudderless boy on the streets of New Orleans, he was supported by an immigrant Jewish family who occasionally employed him and gave him housing.
11:53Tell me about the relationship between Louis Armstrong and the Karnofsky family in New Orleans.
11:59Louis Armstrong is a young boy. He's seven years old. He's on the streets of New Orleans.
12:05Uh-huh.
12:06And the Karnofskys invite Louis Armstrong on the wagon and he becomes part of the operation.
12:12He's running the coal into the brothels and he was blowing his horn and attracting customers to the business.
12:21So the relationship really affected Armstrong to the extent that he always wore a Jewish emblem around his neck.
12:33These collaborations went far beyond business relationships.
12:38They were also deeply personal and immensely creative.
12:43Rooted in African-American musical traditions and aesthetic traditions like improvisation, jazz is a kind of fascinating merger or fusion of various different styles of American music.
12:56Because of their Jewish background, Jewish composers were used to hearing dissonance and unusual intervals in music.
13:04So you think of a song like Kava Nagila, for instance, with the...
13:16All of those bends, right, the use of those kind of minor notes that are sort of unexpected,
13:23that add a certain kind of emotional or musical complexity.
13:28That's what they're going for as well in jazz.
13:31There is that connection between Jews and blacks in terms of the way that we're hearing that music.
13:41The refashioning of black musical traditions by Jewish composers gave rise to some of our best-known jazz standards and popular songs.
13:52Collectively known as the Great American Songbook,
13:55it includes classic songs that remain at the heart of America's musical heritage.
14:02It can't be a coincidence that almost all of the composers who were responsible for the Great American Songbook were Jewish, like George Gershwin.
14:13Here's someone whose music borrows from spiritual, from blues, from jazz, from ragtime.
14:21But collaboration could also lead to conflict.
14:27Interpretation by one group could sometimes be viewed as exploitation by the other.
14:33What do we make of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess?
14:39Where he went to the American South and he wrote with enthusiasm about his contacts with black Americans.
14:45And the question is whether someone like Gershwin is doing this out of respect or if it's a form of cultural appropriation.
14:52There's a general sense of suffering that pervades the entire opera.
14:59And for black audiences who are looking for more multidimensional portrayals of African American life that are not just about tragedy and suffering,
15:09Porgy and Bess didn't deliver.
15:11It still feels like it is black life seen through the eyes of non-black people, in this case, largely Jewish people.
15:20In a largely segregated society, the artistic and business connections between black and Jewish musicians, agents and publishers,
15:32rarely unfolded on an equal playing field.
15:37Jewish creatives were granted access to resources and opportunities that their black counterparts were not.
15:45And nowhere was this imbalance more evident than in a burgeoning industry largely being built and run by Jewish immigrants.
15:55Hollywood.
15:56Just take one, soft sticks, marker.
16:04I grew up in L.A. and I had such pride in my Jewishness for nothing having to do with going to Temple, which I hated,
16:14or Hebrew school, which I hated, but had to do with the fact that we made the movies.
16:20And I was very proud of that heritage.
16:29The film industry did not have the same type of cultural cachet as opera or, you know, more respected stage performance,
16:37and was thought to be disreputable.
16:39And that provided a perfect opportunity for people from marginalized groups to be able to build something without very much competition.
16:50Jews could see something that the world was unwilling to see.
16:59They could see that it was a business.
17:01They could see that it was great entertainment.
17:05The Jews made Israel in California, and it's called Hollywood.
17:10Among the early founders of Hollywood were immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer, who made up the G&M of MGM.
17:23Arguably, Hollywood's most powerful team at the time were the Warner Brothers.
17:29Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack Warner incorporated their studio during the Roaring Twenties, and a new technology was revolutionizing filmmaking.
17:42When sound came in, sound was, of course, a big deal.
17:48Many people thought it was going to be passing fancy.
17:51There were some people in the industry that began to see sound as a vehicle for the black voice.
18:01More black actors and actresses come to Hollywood.
18:04While on-screen roles for black performers expanded with the onset of sound, more often than not, those roles played into age-old and deeply offensive stereotypes.
18:21Like everything else in American society, the birth of the film industry is founded on racism and exclusion.
18:28The images of African Americans, the stereotypes that were to run through Hollywood films from the early years and on, the moguls did not create those stereotypes.
18:43Those stereotypes, the toms, the coons, the mulattoes, the mammies and bucks, these types had already been around and they were part of the fabric of American culture.
18:56But singer, actor, and activist, Paul Robeson, cleverly attempted to transcend the limits of the stereotypical characters he was relegated to play.
19:14Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Rutgers, with a law degree from Columbia,
19:19Robson rose to prominence with his haunting performance as Joe in Showboat.
19:26The film, pioneering collaboration between a Jewish author, two Jewish musicians, and a charismatic black actor, became a subtle vehicle for racial protest.
19:41Let me go away from the Mississippi, let me go away from the Mississippi, let me go away from the white man boss, show me that...
19:52Paul Robeson sings the great song, Old Man River.
19:56Let me get away from the white man boss, that the white man has controlled everything.
20:04And in a sense, his fate.
20:09These were strong comments on America.
20:12And musicals didn't generally deal with discrimination, which its Jewish creators understood and are using to speak about America.
20:24Robeson came along at a time where the roles for him in the mainstream movie industry were going to be especially limited.
20:35And so he's in a really difficult position.
20:39However hard I try, I always feel the same here, out of place.
20:44This is one of the most dignified human beings ever to walk the earth.
20:54One of the biggest stars of the 1920s.
20:57But the movies, they didn't want to do right by him.
21:03At some point, it just became clear to him that what he wanted for himself and his people was never going to happen in the movies.
21:12Robeson's enormous popularity as an artist provided a powerful platform, the international struggle against racism and economic inequality.
21:26On our best in America, the very primary world of America goes.
21:30On our best.
21:31What do we get from it today?
21:33Poverty.
21:34Insult.
21:36Inferior.
21:37Station in light.
21:38No opportunity.
21:39A passionate advocate for human rights.
21:43Robeson often aligned himself with Jewish radicals and communists who shared his vision of racial desegregation and workers rights.
21:54Paul Robeson was completely committed to this idea that there's no progress without interracial alliance.
22:01He feels particularly close to Jews.
22:04He talks often about how, you know, Jewish music just stirred something in his soul.
22:10Robeson was very critical of the United States, very critical of its problems in terms of racism.
22:19And like other black people at the time, he appreciated the fact that the Soviet Union was critical of American racism.
22:28Yet even as Robeson deepened his ties to the Soviet Union, he stunned his audience by singing a deeply moving song in Yiddish during a concert in Moscow to show support for his close friend Itzik Pfeffer, a Jewish poet imprisoned by the Soviets for his outspokenness.
22:51In honor of Pfeffer, he sang in Yiddish and subverted the desires of those in the Soviet Union and used the opportunity as a way of showing his solidarity.
23:09with the Jewish cause.
23:33While many of Robeson's allies in the fight for workers' rights were Jewish, Jewish people,
23:38like black people, never embraced one political position or occupied one economic class.
23:46But as the Great Depression deepened and the wage gap between blacks and whites grew,
23:53some Jewish housewives, as employers of black domestic workers,
23:59came under scrutiny for their participation in an exploitative system known as the Bronx Slave Market.
24:07This highly exploitative system that develops in New York City, in the Bronx in particular,
24:14where suburban housewives would drive down to the predominantly black neighborhoods in the Bronx
24:20and basically solicit day laborers, maids for the day.
24:24But the problem was there was nothing really or no one regulating this.
24:28This happened in many, many places, of course, but in the Bronx in New York City,
24:35it happened so often and was so vivid that Ella Baker and Marvell Cook reported the story.
24:44Cook and Baker are two prominent African-American female activists and journalists who go undercover and write this really explosive article
24:58that really exposes all of the inherent dangers associated with what they call the Bronx Slave Trade.
25:05That expose sort of revealed the reality of what it meant for black women to work in the big house and the kind of precarity of that situation,
25:18the cruelty not just of the master but also of the mistress,
25:23the fact that one was more accessible in terms of sexual assault once you were living in the house.
25:31They also discovered that the women would often not be paid for the labor.
25:36It's one thing to engage in, you know, honest work.
25:39It's another thing to create an agreement about what the wage will be
25:44and that at the end of the day be told that you were going to receive less than that.
25:49Ironically, although Jewish women were among the employers named in the Baker and Cook expose,
25:56it was the Jewish Anti-Defamation League that would ultimately step in to confront the injustice.
26:03The Anti-Defamation League took a look at it and said,
26:08we have to stop treating black people this way.
26:11Well, we're going to educate the Jewish women, but also we're going to set up a hiring hall
26:16so that there will be contracts that people will sign and it'll be much more regulated
26:22and there won't be exploitation.
26:25We can see the beginnings of a labor union that would understand the particular circumstance for women,
26:33in this case particularly like for black women, needing a protection and a kind of organizing
26:39that would prevent exploitation.
26:42What's interesting to me about that is other people are also exploiting black people and they're not responding.
26:47The Jews were the only ones who acted.
26:51So it's another example of how Jews are responding differently to the same problems.
26:57As blacks and Jews struggled to bridge their differences at home, a nightmare was spreading in Europe
27:06that would shed an entirely new light on racial dynamics in the United States.
27:12In the 1930s, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which systematically stripped Germany's Jewish population of their civil rights.
27:24These laws drew their inspiration from the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the American South.
27:33The Jim Crow system understood blacks as racialized inferiors and threats to the majority white American culture.
27:47And the Nazis applied the same thinking and approach to Jews.
27:52With the Nuremberg Laws, Nazis were aligning their public policy with their perception of the racial inferiority of the group
28:03to protect real Germans from the threats that this subhuman class would represent.
28:11As Berlin was preparing to host the 1936 Summer Olympics, many people didn't think the United States should participate.
28:21Very little was known about what Hitler and the Nazi Party was actually doing at that time.
28:29But enough was known in terms of speeches, in terms of rhetoric, in terms of acts of violence against Jewish people that were making the news.
28:40The Amateur Athletic Union, the NAACP, Jewish organizations across the board calling for people to not go to the 36 Olympics.
28:52At the urging of black and Jewish organizations, the United States Olympic Committee sent a delegation to Germany to investigate whether or not to boycott the Games.
29:05Avery Brundage, who is the head of the United States Olympic Committee, a notorious anti-Semite and who black athletes nicknamed Slavery Avery, goes over to Germany, gets a Nazi tour of all the greatness in Germany.
29:24And he comes back and he delivers this big report. No racism, no anti-Semitism, huge lie being perpetrated by the media.
29:35The Amateur Athletic Union did their vote to boycott and it narrowly failed.
29:42People don't even realize how close it came to the United States boycotting those Olympics.
29:53The Games would provide a very public platform for black American athletes to protest Hitler's notions of Aryan racial supremacy by proudly taking their places on the victory stand.
30:07The 36 Olympics are significant because of what it represents if African Americans get a real opportunity to compete on an equal playing field.
30:18They represent this opportunity to challenge this idea that the Nazis have been pushing about white supremacy.
30:26The Nazi party saw Jews as people who needed to be destroyed, eliminated, wiped off the earth.
30:33They saw black people a little bit differently.
30:36They were inferior, but they were also kind of a curio, an entertainment.
30:42Black athletes, specifically Jesse Owens, will not only challenge this idea of the Aryan Superman, but actually destroy it in his athletic performance.
30:53Jesse Owens' exceptional athleticism was on full display at the Games.
31:02And much to Hitler's disgust, Owens won three gold medals during the first three days of competition.
31:09As an act of sportsmanship, Owens planned to sit out the relay event to give his teammates a chance to win Olympic gold.
31:17But on the morning of the event, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, two Jewish sprinters, were told that they were being replaced by Owens and fellow black Olympian, Ralph Metcalf.
31:32Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller are taken off the team by the U.S. Olympic Committee because they did not want to offend their German hosts.
31:42Watching the final, all sorts of emotions flash through my beam.
31:49That should be me out there.
31:51Here were the great black athletes who couldn't be kept off the winning podium.
31:55They were marvelous.
31:56But here were two rather obscure Jewish American athletes who could be kept from the winning podium so as not to further embarrass Adolf Hitler.
32:05Once the Olympics were over, the Nazi campaign against Jewish people continued to escalate unchecked.
32:16Anti-Semitic rhetoric accompanied state-sanctioned terror.
32:21And those Jews who could, used any way possible to flee the Nazis.
32:26But many countries, including the United States, accepted very few, if any, Jewish refugees.
32:36Those forced to remain would come face to face with evil.
32:42The Shoah, the Holocaust, devolved over time.
32:49In its early years, Nazi soldiers would bring the Jewish residents of a town who had been collected and then forced to dig what would be their own graves.
33:01As Nazi ideology and tactics worsened by sorting Jews to those who could work and to those who would immediately go to the death chambers.
33:14And then forced Jews to be the ones to clear the bodies out of the death chambers.
33:20And to be a part of the genocide itself.
33:23During World War II, in a stubbornly segregated military, very few black units were allowed to fight on the front lines.
33:34But as one unit was helping to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, they came face to face with a horrifying example of human cruelty.
33:43That, to their surprise, had been visited on white people by other white people.
33:49My unit was given orders to go up into East Germany.
33:56We arrived in this place called Weimar and drove out to what I found out now was to be a concentration camp.
34:06My God, I'd seen nothing like this in all my life. Nothing.
34:12And I said to myself, my God, who are these people?
34:18And furthermore, what have they done that was so terrible that would cause anybody to treat them like this?
34:23I can never, I can never forget that day.
34:29The unimaginable atrocity of the Holocaust would leave an indelible stain on world history.
34:41And forever change the course of existence for the Jewish people.
34:46It remains difficult to comprehend the enormity of this crime against humanity, which claimed six million Jewish lives and left a quarter million of them in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria.
35:03It also catalyzed the creation of a long sought Jewish state in the Middle East.
35:09An event with gradual, but far reaching consequences for the black Jewish relationship.
35:16The Holocaust caused the destruction of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe, and there was a sense in the international community that the so-called Jewish problem, as it was called, should be solved through the creation of a Jewish homeland or state.
35:34The creation of the state of Israel.
35:36That is a fulfillment of a dream that many Jews had of a Jewish homeland that we call Zionism.
35:44This idea well precedes the Holocaust when Jews began to advocate for the creation of a Jewish state in the late 19th century.
35:54But Zionism gained even more momentum after the Holocaust, when the central animating Zionist vision is the aspiration to create a state that would provide protection to Jews who found themselves constantly in danger.
36:13After the tragedy that they had undergone.
36:17The UN debated whether or not they should create the state of Israel.
36:21Is it a homeland for the Jewish people and a refuge, or is it a colonial project of the West, trying to settle Europeans in a land that is not theirs?
36:32Since the late 1800s.
36:33Since the late 1800s, the Zionist movement had been committed to establishing a homeland in the territory of Palestine, which in the Jewish tradition was called Eretz Yisrael, or the Land of Israel.
36:49In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved Resolution 181, calling for a partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab.
37:05The resolution designated 55% of the land, much of a desert, to be allocated to the Jewish state, and the rest to the Arab state, whose population was twice as large.
37:19The Arab world roundly rejected the partition proposal, and by 1948, a full-scale war was raging, when neighboring Arab countries attacked the new state of Israel.
37:33It was a hard-fought war, but Israel emerged victorious.
37:39The year 1948 was understood very differently by the two main parties.
37:46For Jews who fought in that war, it was a war of liberation, or independence, that brought to an end nearly 2,000 years of exile.
37:57For Palestinians and their Arab allies, 1948 was the year of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.
38:07Estimates are that nearly 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their land over the course of that year of war.
38:18During the war, the United Nations appointed mediator, Folk Bernadotte, was assassinated by a pro-Zionist militia, leaving the unenviable task of settling this armed conflict to his deputy, the Harvard-trained African American diplomat, Dr. Ralph Bunch.
38:38Ralph Bunch had a great deal of understanding and sympathy for Jews and for Jews' efforts to create a place of safe haven and refuge for themselves in Palestine, while at the same time understanding early on that a very large population was at risk of being ignored.
38:59Although Bunch could not hammer out a peace treaty between all the parties, he was able to negotiate an armistice between the new Jewish state and its Arab neighbors.
39:12As a result, Bunch would be awarded the Nobel Prize, the first African American ever to be so honored.
39:21Bunch really evinced sympathy for both parties, which is, to this day, a very difficult balance to strike.
39:33Prominent black leaders, such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, publicly expressed strong support for the creation of the new Jewish homeland.
39:44There is a tradition of black Zionism in the black community, a sense that African Americans and others around the world had been ripped from their homeland, that they deserved a homeland of their own.
39:57It was incredibly compelling to see Israel as that kind of base.
40:02Privately, however, other black leaders confessed concerns that a partition could not be a long-term solution.
40:12Walter White, who was head of the NAACP, was worried about the settler problem, the colonial problem.
40:20He said, I don't know how long this is going to last before it's going to become a problem, but we need to think about this.
40:28And this is part of the difficulty in talking about black Jewish relations is that there's always a but.
40:35The but in black Jewish relations would loom large in post-war America.
40:41When Jewish soldiers returned home, they were afforded honors and benefits in equal measure to their white counterparts.
40:50But it was a different story for their fellow black veterans.
40:54African Americans viewed World War II as a possible watershed.
41:04There was an expectation that America should live up to its ideals and also address its problems of racial inequality and discrimination.
41:14Technically, African Americans were able to take advantage of the GI Bill also.
41:21But many were discharged with dishonorable discharges or they had nowhere to go to college.
41:27Or they couldn't move into these communities because they blocked black people from moving in through housing covenants and other kinds of discriminatory practices.
41:36In the years following the war, Jews were increasingly becoming part of the white American mainstream.
41:45And the disparities between the two groups were widening.
41:49And while key elements of the American dream, like access to higher education, continue to elude both groups, white flight and suburban sprawl meant that black and Jewish Americans were increasingly moving apart.
42:05You see anti-Semitism precipitously decline in the post-war period.
42:11And Jews are able to push beyond barriers that had existed in the pre-war period.
42:16They're starting to leave Jewish neighborhoods and they're moving to suburbs.
42:21After the war, Jews were able to take advantage of opportunities that black people couldn't.
42:26And so the inequality between Jewish success and African American success widens in this period.
42:33Which, as you can imagine, creates all sorts of tensions and resentments.
42:39If you were a white Jewish family and your soldier returned from the war, the government is going to make it possible for you to get a house, get to college and start your business.
42:55Which is an extraordinary recipe for upward social mobility.
43:00In the African American community, it didn't work out so nicely.
43:05Going back into the 1930s, if not before, the federal government had introduced prohibitions on African American homeownership.
43:17Fast forward to the end of World War II, and those rules exacerbated the conditions that African Americans particularly face, which is finding affordable homes.
43:29Racially restrictive covenants, dictating where people could and could not live, were still the law of the land.
43:38And although the American economy flourished after the war, black Americans as a group would find themselves on the outside looking in when it came to housing.
43:49But for Jewish Americans, it was different.
43:54William Levitt, a Jewish man, came up with the concept that he could buy a large tract of land outside the city, and he could build these homes in the post-war economy.
44:07With the GI Bill, he could make a whole lot of money by offering a whole lot of house for a very low price.
44:17His idea was you could make housing more affordable, and therefore accessible to everyone.
44:24But Levittowns excluded black people.
44:29The widespread knowledge about Levittowns became an emblem in the black community of the kinds of tensions that we're talking about between blacks and Jews writ large.
44:40American Jewish history has been a history of rapid social mobility.
44:51African American history has been a history of enslavement and institutional racism.
44:57At what point in the alliance are those historical differences going to be seen?
45:04Despite the political and economic pressures pulling black and Jewish Americans apart, they were building coalitions to fight injustice, including restrictive housing covenants.
45:19But their most vibrant shared experiences would continue to be in the social and cultural scene.
45:27Nestled in a tiny corner of New York City was one such spot, a nightclub called Cafe Society.
45:36Established just before the war, its proprietor was a Jewish shoe salesman from suburban New Jersey named Barney Josephson.
45:46Barney loved jazz, and he loved jazz artists, and Barney decided that he wanted to open this club.
45:58The great club before had been the Cotton Club, but blacks could not sit as patrons in the Cotton Club.
46:09Barney was going to open this club.
46:10Barney was going to open this club.
46:11Barney was going to spotlight great entertainers, many of which were black entertainers.
46:15And he was going to have an integrated audience.
46:18Now, this was really new.
46:20Barney Josephson decided he was going to have a club which he called the wrong place for the right people.
46:28So the clientele thoroughly integrated.
46:30Thoroughly integrated, across the board, on stage, off stage.
46:34At its height, Cafe Society was a gathering place for progressives with integrationist values.
46:45This made its heavily black and Jewish clientele an ideal target for anti-communist forces.
46:53Most notably, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
46:59Established in 1938, the same year as Cafe Society, the committee investigated those it considered to be a communist threat to America.
47:10For decades, artists, intellectuals, and entertainers would find themselves caught in its crosshairs.
47:18With the period of blacklisting, many of the people who had performed at Cafe Society were listed.
47:27Hazel Scott was listed.
47:30Lena Horne was listed.
47:33Among those who performed at Cafe Society was the legendary Billie Holiday,
47:39who, at the urging of Barney Josephson, debuted her haunting rendition of Strange Fruit at the club.
47:47Brother Josephson was the founder of the Cafe Society, which creates the very space so that the song can actually be heard and sung over and over again.
48:00And now a little tune written especially for me is Strange Fruit.
48:06Brother Josephson would get up and say,
48:11Brother Josephson would get up and say,
48:13No drinking on this song.
48:15It's the last song of the night.
48:17I want you to listen.
48:19Billy, do your thing.
48:22Southern trees bear strange fruit.
48:36Blood on the leaves.
48:37You got these courageous Jewish freedom fighters facilitating the genius of a Billie Holiday.
48:43And that song would take you to the depths of a sadness you didn't even know you had in your soul.
48:52And yet you end up feeling a sense of hope and empowerment.
48:58That's what great art does.
49:04Great art provokes and Strange Fruit was no exception.
49:10Anti-communist forces on Capitol Hill were watching closely.
49:15And soon, Cafe Society would pay a steep price as patrons and performers were summoned to testify before Congress for their allegedly subversive activities.
49:29For refusing to testify, Leon Josephson, Barney's brother and financier would be jailed for a year.
49:38But Cafe Society's most famous blacklisted patron and performer would be Paul Robeson.
49:45Robeson got caught up in this moment when basically people are questioning,
49:53Are you loyal to America?
49:55And is your loyalty to America such that you won't criticize America?
50:02He doesn't back down.
50:04He doesn't shy away.
50:07When questioned about why he did not stay in Russia, if he loved their system so much, Robeson answered boldly.
50:18Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country.
50:24And I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you.
50:32Robeson's career would never recover from the political repression he suffered.
50:39And perhaps out of anger or a misplaced sense of loyalty to a flawed ideology, Robeson could never bring himself to denounce Stalin's treatment of Soviet Jewry and other dissidents.
50:53When Cafe Society shut its doors in 1948, after ten years as the only truly integrated nightclub in New York City, it was the end of an era.
51:08The optimism that had followed the war was soon clouded by McCarthyism and the growing power of segregationists in the South.
51:19But the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish commitment to social justice would help to forge a remarkable coalition with black Americans.
51:29The 1960s would be our brief golden age.
51:36So what you see, what you see, the future of the Holocaust and the centuries, it was a good tradition.
51:43I think that he would never do it for white Americans.
51:45Let's see how he did.
51:49But we probably can't wait to do it for a long time and at the time where he had talked about the Holocaust.
51:52This would be the real issue, in fact, when he was a hard worker, because of his time never changed his time.
51:54He had the same time, but he could never do it for black Americans.
51:56And of course, he's the other side of the Holocaust.
Comments