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00:15When I was growing up, I only thought of race in terms of black and white.
00:21It wasn't until much later, when I learned about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,
00:26that I realized how endlessly flexible the idea of difference can be.
00:33Across history, Jews have been mocked and feared, blamed and banished, envied and imitated.
00:41And so have black people.
00:43We share that experience.
00:45And we share something else as well.
00:48A duty to keep fighting hatred wherever it shows up.
00:56Blacks and Jews were able to come together for what, in retrospect, was a pretty brief period,
01:00and create enormous change in the country.
01:03Why did the NAACP support the creation of the State of Israel?
01:07Why did Jews support the Civil Rights Movement?
01:09Black and Jewish people recognize only when everyone is safe are we safe.
01:17There is a history that we need to regard and respect.
01:21We would not have got certain things done without those alliances.
01:25But I don't want to be accused of romanticizing the golden age of racial relationship between Jews and blacks.
01:31It wasn't an untroubled relationship.
01:33It's been a death and no one is in jail.
01:36There are moments of real tension, moments of betrayal.
01:40The old alliance between blacks and Jews, is that in jeopardy now?
01:44Very much so.
01:45It's dangerous to make it all the same. We're not the same. We come from different histories.
01:50Jewish people get to be white with all the privileges that that implies.
01:54And when the relationship disintegrates, the argument that's made by the African American community is,
02:00that you had access to things that we never had.
02:03I don't consider myself white.
02:04And when I once told our class that, they laughed in my face.
02:08You laughed in my face.
02:09I did.
02:10What do we want?
02:11That's this.
02:12When do we want it?
02:12Now.
02:13So, I decided, let's get into it.
02:16Let's just put it on the table and figure out what's left.
02:19Where is the area of overlap?
02:21Because anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-black racism.
02:26But both are ever-present, and they're not going to go away.
02:31It's dangerous, because it's a really hard time to talk about either black people or Jewish people.
02:37It's just become fraught in so many ways.
02:40But anything that's dangerous is worthwhile.
02:54If you can pass them along.
02:55Are we ready?
02:56A little more.
02:59I'll start, but everyone join in on the Let My People Go.
03:02Here we go.
03:02All right.
03:03When Israel was in Egypt land.
03:07Let my people go.
03:10Oppressed so hard they could not stand.
03:15Let my people go.
03:19Go down, Moses.
03:23We've come together tonight for the Passover Seder.
03:27A moving holiday tradition that commemorates the story of the Jewish people's exodus from slavery in Egypt.
03:35Though I'm not Jewish, I love this ritual.
03:38Because it celebrates a narrative at the heart of both the black and the Jewish traditions.
03:47So I've gathered a group of friends, journalists and teachers, a novelist and a renowned chef, and even a pair
03:56of rabbis, to talk about the deeply intertwined histories of black and Jewish Americans.
04:03When we talk about the power of this exodus narrative, which is so foundational for black people, for Jewish people,
04:11and the fact that it has not just united us, but oriented us.
04:15Our identity is very much based on this story.
04:18Why do you think it's so foundational?
04:20And why do you think it's endured?
04:22So blacks and Jews, discursively, have been united without thinking about it for a very long time.
04:28And I start off a lecture course at Harvard by saying, under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams,
04:36continuously.
04:37One is anti-Semitism, and one is anti-black racism.
04:40They're absolutely connected, and we can't defeat either without defeating both.
04:44They are intertwined, they have been, like you said, they're part of the floorboards.
04:48But I believe that they can be dismantled.
04:51We built racism, humans built anti-Semitism, and we can un-build them.
04:55And if we un-build them, doing that requires us to talk about these challenges and talk about these issues
05:00in a different way than we have.
05:06We share persecution in common, even though it is played out differently for each of our communities.
05:13To unravel those differences, as well as the ties that bind us, we have to start centuries ago, and an
05:23ocean away.
05:27Jews have lived throughout most of the history of Jewish civilization as a scattered people.
05:33The ancient Hebrews were concentrated in the land of Israel, but the Jews were scattered even in antiquity.
05:40Jews traced their roots back thousands of years to a people and a faith centered in the land now known
05:48as Israel.
05:49As their homeland was conquered by outside powers, Jewish communities were driven far and wide, becoming a people of the
05:57diaspora.
06:00There's probably few countries in Europe that Jews have not been kicked out of because they were Jews.
06:09They didn't want to assimilate.
06:11They worshiped their own god and didn't want to worship local gods.
06:15And on top of that then was grafted the most important source of anti-Semitism, which was Christianity.
06:21Because Jews were accused of having killed Christ and of having rejected him.
06:26So you can't understand anti-Semitism without understanding this deep-seated religious hatred.
06:34And you have the non-Christians, the Jews.
06:38Jews are terrorized, traumatized, hated.
06:42They are the despised and degraded other in so much of European history.
06:50That was the target.
06:52For one thing, Jews couldn't own land.
06:54Also, you had to be a Christian to join a guild to be a craftsperson.
06:58So what could you do?
06:59Well, some Jews were moneylenders or merchants.
07:02It's impossible to really understand anti-Semitism without that economic component.
07:08The notion that Jews control the economy.
07:11It's the notion of the Jew as preternaturally evil, as conspiratorial, a malicious being.
07:20One of the most infamous episodes of Jewish persecution came during the Spanish Inquisition.
07:27In 1478, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, eager to consolidate their power under the banner of religious unity, began targeting
07:39Jews and Muslims in the name of Christian purity.
07:43The Spanish Inquisition had a horrendous impact on Jews who faced extraordinary discrimination.
07:53There were riots demanding the Jews convert.
07:56And masses of Jews did convert.
07:59Well, the suspicion arose, are they really sincere converts?
08:04They brought in the Inquisition to investigate.
08:08By 1492, they decided, okay, all the Jews have to get out.
08:13Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews until July 31st, 1492, to flee their kingdom.
08:22Just three days later, Christopher Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage.
08:30So when you think in terms of 1492, you know, we're taught it's Columbus sailing the ocean blue.
08:37But even Christopher Columbus, when he's leaving, there are vessels of all sizes filled with Jews who would be expelled
08:44from now Catholic, Christian Spain.
08:48Many went to the Ottoman Empire, they went to the east, some went to Western Europe, to Amsterdam in particular.
08:55The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was a very crucial moment in Jewish history and a crucial moment when
09:01we think about modernity.
09:05In 1492 was the Inquisition and the beginning of an incredible horror.
09:15The erasure of the native people in the western part of the world.
09:21Then the introduction of slavery to replace them.
09:26That a kind of dehumanization, you might call it.
09:31A brutality had been released in the world.
09:38Columbus's arrival in the Americas marked the beginning of a new era.
09:43It set the stage for European exploration and colonization, the tragedy of native dispossession, and the rise of the transatlantic
09:54slave trade.
09:56In the centuries that followed, more than 12 million African men, women, and children were captured, sold into slavery, and
10:07shipped across the Atlantic into lives of perpetual bondage.
10:13As America took shape, a new social order would emerge, one in which race and the sharp black-white color
10:22divide set African Americans and Jews on dramatically different trajectories.
10:30The United States is a very distinctive moment in the history of both peoples.
10:38The first people of African descent who came to what became the United States, British America, arrived circa 1619.
10:48But slavery would still take another 30 or 40 years to evolve into the system of chattel slavery that we
10:55know of today.
10:57You start to see laws passed that now, by stature, if you were a child born to an enslaved mother,
11:05you were born as a slave for life.
11:06That was your destiny.
11:08It was a business decision to increase our slave labor through breeding.
11:14So you get the racialization of enslavement, the deep white supremacy that's going to continually and more deeply inform the
11:23enslavement of Africans.
11:25So you got the whole group brought on barbaric slave ships confronting barbaric slave auctions and put on barbaric slave
11:35plantations.
11:36Now, in the Jewish case, when you arrive in the United States, they got a different experience.
11:45In the mid-17th century, the first Jews make their way to North America and begin to settle along the
11:51eastern seaboard.
11:54Initially, there were examples throughout the colonies where Jews were actually denied civil rights, the right to hold office, the
12:01right to vote.
12:02But when the U.S. Constitution is drafted, it has in two different parts protections of religious freedom.
12:09There was a notion that on the first day of the United States, Jews would be able to be full
12:16and complete and active citizens of the new country in a way that for more than a thousand years in
12:22Europe, they never could.
12:26In the summer of 1790, President George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island, and actually penned a letter to its historic
12:36synagogue.
12:37His words underscored a commitment to religious liberty in the fledgling nation.
12:44George Washington, when he wrote his letter to the Toro Synagogue in Rhode Island, he said,
12:51Our Hebrew brothers are going to be welcome.
12:52May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill
13:00of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree.
13:08There shall be none to make him afraid.
13:13It was extraordinary.
13:15Very rarely in the history of Jews in the diaspora have you ever had the leader of a country address
13:22a Jewish place of worship and make those kinds of affirmations.
13:26After centuries of discrimination as religious and racial pariahs, Jewish people seem to have found a safe haven.
13:35Here, even if anti-Semitism persisted, they would be granted the full privileges of citizenship.
13:43There's a Naturalization Act in 1790, and it says that people are eligible for citizenship in the United States if
13:53they're white.
13:53And more or less from the get-go, Jews in that formulation are counted as white.
14:01But white is a nuanced category that gets defined differently in different eras.
14:10And ideas of lesser degrees of whiteness exist.
14:15They underpin a huge amount of anti-Semitism, but they aren't driving the legal system in the way that difference
14:23between black and white is driving the American legal system.
14:27Because in an American racial system, the penalties to not being on the white side of the line are really
14:32steep.
14:40When I think about the Seder, the Seder is an evening about telling stories. It's about telling the story of
14:45the Exodus.
14:45And for many American Jews, the American dream is a true story.
14:49American Jews came to the Promised Land, but many black Americans never left Egypt. That's a very real divergence.
14:56Along those lines, something that I often think about during Passover is, you know, every year we commemorate our freedom
15:03as Jews.
15:04But as black Americans, we're often told to get over slavery and forget about it.
15:10Being told, oh, that's in the past, get over it, of something that was of modern time.
15:14But something that happened a long time ago is something that we hold on to and sit around a table
15:19and remind ourselves of and remind ourselves about what it means to come into freedom.
15:24Right.
15:25I think the miracle is this story that we're reading is not of one hermetic community.
15:31I got to college and I took a course on Dante, and all of a sudden we're reading the Inferno,
15:36and it's quoting from this very story that we're reading in the Haggadah.
15:41And then hearing it constantly referred to in the music that I was listening to, which was inevitably black music.
15:49It's a story for everybody who chooses to adopt it and make it an inspiration.
15:53Right.
15:54I think for a lot of African Americans, they found their language and posited their identity through the Hebrew Bible
16:00as translated to the King James Version.
16:05I mean, the Hebrew Bible really is like sort of the grammar of black religion because it provided a window
16:14into a world in which people who had been enslaved found freedom.
16:18Enslavers wanted enslaved people to embrace Christianity, but they wanted them to embrace Christianity so that they would be more
16:26accommodating, more docile.
16:28They would emphasize verses with that particular message. Of course, it didn't work.
16:34People of African descent drew inspiration from the Hebrew Bible, the Exodus story in particular, because they could see themselves
16:44in the text.
16:45When the enslavers were telling folk, your reward is in heaven. They're like, no, we actually have real evidence which
16:52people have been enslaved before and found their freedom.
16:56There's just so much power there that the God of the universe makes a covenant with a hated, despised, enslaved
17:05peoples in Egypt and picks out a Moses over against a Pharaoh.
17:12And we haven't got the Amos or even Esther yet.
17:15All of those different stories meant much to a people who were told they're less moral, less intelligent, less human.
17:26Turn to Hebrew scripture.
17:29They would gather at night to have their own private clandestine services, some real religion.
17:40And the oral tradition, the music tradition, helps to carry the importance of the stories.
17:50Slave owners did not teach any slaves how to sing Go Down Moses. That did not happen.
18:00With Negro spirituals. There are all kinds of messages within these songs that in some ways speak to the lived
18:05reality.
18:06Go Down Moses, right, is a sort of classic sort of spiritual that is both retelling the story of Moses,
18:12but also preparing people for resistance.
18:15We see someone like Harriet Tubman, who was nicknamed Moses, significantly because of her efforts to free those who were
18:24enslaved, living in the U.S. South.
18:26She was a person of faith. I think she believed that ultimately God was on her side.
18:41The spirit of Moses that Harriet Tubman embodied would remain central to the black church and the black freedom struggle.
18:50But while enslaved Africans identified with the mythic Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, Jews in antebellum America didn't necessarily recognize
19:01this symbolic kinship.
19:04This is one of the ironies of people who talk about the grand alliance of blacks and Jews as if
19:10it were timeless and inevitable.
19:12Jews were not disproportionately slave owners or disproportionately slave traders, but they were certainly part of the white community in
19:19that larger sense.
19:21In fact, the highest serving Jewish person in any of American historical presidencies is Judah Benjamin of the Confederacy.
19:30Judah P. Benjamin, whose face would appear on currency in the Confederate States of America, served as its attorney general,
19:40secretary of war, and finally, secretary of state.
19:45Called both the brains of the Confederacy and derisively Jefferson Davis's pet Jew, Benjamin was one of the most influential
19:55Jewish Americans of his day.
19:57Judah Benjamin was a politician from Louisiana.
20:02He was one of the first two Jews to be elected to the United States Senate.
20:08The other was David Uly from Florida.
20:11Both Judah Benjamin and David Uly were plantation owners, and in that capacity they were enslavers.
20:20They felt a certain investment in Southern society because they had been successful there and had been able to achieve
20:27a level of status and inclusion in the South that was really unprecedented in modern history.
20:34But even as Benjamin scaled the heights of Southern society, he was never free from prejudice and suspicion.
20:42Though American Jews enjoyed the rights and privileges of whiteness, they remained a liminal other.
20:49The concept of race is complicated and contested when it comes to Jewish identity.
20:57In fact, there were Jews of African ancestry present from the early days of the Republic, even if their numbers
21:05were small.
21:06Some were converts, some were of mixed ancestry, and others were possibly from Jewish communities in Africa or the Caribbean.
21:16Our Passover meal, designed by chef and historian Michael Twitty, honors these layered histories and identities.
21:26We have the West African brisket, then we have the kosher sole collards, which are always a big hit.
21:32The potato kugel is the first time doing it.
21:35Sweet potato and white potato with creole spice mixed together.
21:38The food will reflect the fact that we have all these different parts to us.
21:43Just like there's Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sfadi.
21:46There's also the chocolate chosen.
21:51So the whole purpose of this meal is to let you know, we are Jews too.
21:56We've been in this country since the era of enslavement.
21:59And I worry sometimes that these ancestors are forgotten.
22:04If I may, I just want to, I grew up Chabat.
22:07My family on mother's side has been here as African American Jews since I got here in the 1780s.
22:13Since 1780s?
22:14Yep.
22:15You've been, your family's been Jewish?
22:16Yep.
22:17It's amazing.
22:17That's my cousin.
22:24Although Jews of African descent have long embodied both identities,
22:28the fates of most blacks and Jews ran on independent tracks in the antebellum era.
22:35That would change at the turn of the century, with two significant waves of migration.
22:42One occurred within the United States, as black people began to leave the South en masse as a matter of
22:51economic opportunity and survival.
22:56Jim Crow segregation, the kind of legal apartheid in the southern states comes to the forefront in the early 20th
23:03century.
23:04For black people in the South, you had to behave under a very strict set of social codes and standards,
23:10and if you didn't adhere to that, then your life was at risk.
23:15There were moments when black people were falsely accused of various crimes that led to mob violence in a spectacle
23:24kind of way.
23:25There would be picnics and parades and celebrations of these killings, which we call lynchings, all over the South.
23:32It became incredibly dangerous for black people, and that was in addition to economic crisis.
23:40So we have masses of African Americans moving from the South to the North in order to get more economic
23:48opportunity and also to be safer.
23:50And so that migration, which is so large that historians call it the Great Migration,
23:56happens pretty much simultaneously with the migration of Eastern European Jews.
24:02Between 1880 and 1924, about two and a half million Jews come to the United States from Eastern Europe.
24:12Most of the push from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe is economic because people cannot survive.
24:17But for Jews also, the economic problems in Eastern Europe then foster a series of attacks on Jews that are
24:25called pogroms.
24:27The nobility are eager to blame all the problems on the Jews so that they're not blamed.
24:33And so all over the place there are these pogroms, and it becomes increasingly dangerous to be Jewish.
24:41Millions of Jews came to the determination, in no uncertain terms, that they could not live, could not exist as
24:49Jews anywhere in Eastern Europe,
24:51given the repeated violence that occurred with state sanction.
24:54They understood that they had no future in Eastern Europe.
24:59And they boarded ships and sailed to America.
25:03They come primarily to cities, primarily to northern cities.
25:08And so blacks and Jews meet in these cities.
25:11And that's where they start recognizing that their plight is not exactly the same, but it's often remarkably similar.
25:22Some commentators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, drew comparisons between the suffering of Russian Jews and the plight of African
25:32Americans in the United States who were the victims of racial massacres, were the victims of riots.
25:39Black newspapers will cover some of the violence in Europe against Jews and Yiddish newspapers.
25:47They'll cover riots against black people or lynchings, and they will call them pogroms.
25:53And so, yeah, they were quite explicit about making those links.
25:58Even if nothing political necessarily came of it in the beginning, they were really made quite well aware of the
26:03plight of the others.
26:05The burgeoning kinship between black and Jewish Americans would deepen dramatically in 1908.
26:13That summer, a devastating race riot occurred in Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, sparked by an all too familiar
26:24accusation.
26:26We see this again and again, a white woman named Mabel Hollum accused a black man named George Richardson of
26:36coming into her house in the middle of the night and assaulting her and beating her up.
26:41George Richardson is arrested, and before long, a mob gathers in front of the courthouse.
26:49In hopes of preventing a crisis, the sheriff smuggled Richardson and another black prisoner out of town under cover of
26:57darkness.
26:58But it was too late.
27:00More people from other towns start coming in, and it explodes.
27:06White people felt like they needed to take matters into their own hands.
27:11It is very much part of this twisted notion of vigilante kind of justice.
27:21Black people's homes were terrorized, vandalized. Black people were beaten.
27:26Two men were lynched.
27:30The police did not do anything about what was going on and allowed the systematic violence to continue.
27:39Those who were involved would simply face no repercussion for their actions.
27:45And it turned out, I mean, this is kind of the cherry on top.
27:49Mabel Hollum, the woman who was raped, she admitted to a grand jury that it was not George Richardson who
27:55had done this.
27:57Springfield is a real turning point because it's picked up by the national papers.
28:02It makes people recognize that lynching, violence against black people, is not just something that is specific to the South,
28:10but that is actually a national problem.
28:19Among the journalists on the ground in Springfield were William English Walling and his wife, Anna Strunsky, a Russian-Jewish
28:28immigrant.
28:30An unlikely couple, William English Walling, a Kentucky-born aristocratic man who is a radical social reformer, married to a
28:41remarkable Russian-Jewish immigrant woman named Anna Strunsky.
28:46And Strunsky was a bohemian, an intellectual, a radical, and they were aghast at the 1908 riot and massacre.
28:55Having just returned from reporting on pogroms in Russia, what they saw in Springfield was a painful echo, America's homegrown
29:08version of racial terror.
29:11Within a year, Walling and a coalition of black and white progressives, including several prominent American Jews, called for a
29:21new organization dedicated to ending racial violence and securing true equality.
29:28They called it the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.
29:37There was a real meeting of minds, I think, between a certain kind of white liberal Christian and white Jews,
29:44like the Spring-Arm brothers, Arthur and Joel, and prominent black Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida
29:51Wells, in the founding of the NAACP.
29:53Not only were Jewish people part of its founders, but Jewish people were central to the development of the NAACP
30:02in its first decades.
30:03You'll see from these early beginnings that Jews are disproportionately involved in civil rights, if you compare their population numbers
30:11with their proportion among white activists.
30:16The organization really focused on the issue of lynching for about its first decade and not only trying to spread
30:25awareness about lynchings, but also trying to hold southern governments accountable.
30:31And by the 1920s, this looked like a pretty robust legal arm trying to provide justice and safety for black
30:40people.
30:40One of the NAACP's earliest board members, Arthur Spengarn, led an ad hoc legal team from his Manhattan Law Office.
30:51Spengarn, and his mostly Jewish volunteers, took major cases all the way to the Supreme Court, challenging housing segregation, grandfather
31:01clauses, and other assaults on civil rights.
31:05But it was W.E.B. Du Bois, the only black person on the NAACP's board, who was the heart
31:12and soul of the organization.
31:15Du Bois winds up being its chief spokesperson, so as head of the Crisis Magazine, which is the official publication
31:23of the NAACP.
31:24His writings and his influence loom large.
31:27He is the most celebrated black intellectual of his day, but he also has the ability to communicate to common
31:33people who consume the crisis as well.
31:35It's also an organ that provides an opportunity and a conduit for black scholarship, for black thinkers, for black artists,
31:43visions of black excellence.
31:50One of the things that W.E.B. Du Bois also writes about in the crisis is the significance of
31:58the Jewish experience in Europe.
32:01That they're also being marginalized, they're also being shut out of different industries, of different communities.
32:08He's telling black readers that this is a moment, this is an opportunity to come together with Jewish people in
32:17order to advocate for rights on U.S. soil.
32:21Du Bois' interest in the Jewish experience was inspired in part by his friendship with Joel Spengarn, an early chairman
32:30of the board and later the president of the NAACP.
32:34Du Bois finds a kindred spirit in Joel Spengarn.
32:38They become friends because they're both men of letters, academics and thinkers.
32:43And that friendship is one of the things that helps to sustain Du Bois in the work.
32:46But also, Du Bois is quick to point out that Spengarn is not an American.
32:52In that sense, as a child of Jewish immigrants, he knows what it feels like to be an outsider.
32:58From 1913 to 1915, Spengarn visited more than 20 American cities.
33:05At times, with Du Bois at his side, spreading the gospel of what he called the new abolitionism.
33:14You see in the language of Joel Spengarn, this recognition that the purpose of this organization is to elevate black
33:20people.
33:21He says in 1914, I believe that you should be the generals and that we should be fighting alongside you.
33:28It was about true allyship.
33:30I did not enter this movement because of any mere sentimental pity as a philanthropist.
33:35I did it because I realized that no human being in America was free until every black man was free.
33:44Spengarn and Du Bois disagreed, sometimes passionately, about strategy and tactics.
33:51But their friendship endured until Spengarn's death in 1939.
33:58When Du Bois published his seminal work, Dusk of Dawn, the following year, he dedicated it to Spengarn.
34:07I do not think that any other white man has ever touched me emotionally so closely as Joel Spengarn.
34:14He was one of those vivid, enthusiastic, but clear-thinking idealists, which from age to age, the Jewish race has
34:23given the world.
34:26Alliances like that between Du Bois and Spengarn were more than symbolic.
34:31These partnerships led to real transformative change in the lives of countless black Americans.
34:39Among the most consequential was the collaboration between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington.
34:49Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, I think, are just incredible figures in terms of if we think about African
34:55American education,
34:57Jewish philanthropy, and also this idea of really being co-partners.
35:02Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, two men from very different backgrounds,
35:08found common cause in a bold idea, education as a pathway to freedom.
35:16Washington, born enslaved in Virginia, grew up watching white children go off to school while he labored.
35:26After the Civil War, he worked his way through college as a janitor
35:31and would become the founding president of Tuskegee Institute.
35:37Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants, followed in the footsteps of his father,
35:43a peddler turned storekeeper in Springfield, Illinois.
35:49Julius went into the clothing trade and eventually became the president and part owner of Sears Roebuck and Company.
35:58Rosenwald was told about Booker T. Washington in 1911.
36:02He read up from slavery and was really impressed.
36:04He invited Booker T. Washington up to Chicago and then Booker T. Washington, as smart as he was,
36:10was like, hey, I think you should come down to Tuskegee and look at my operation as well.
36:14And apparently the word goes that Rosenwald took a number of his colleagues and friends from Chicago,
36:20they went down to Tuskegee and spent three days, you know, in the middle of Alabama, on Tuskegee's campus,
36:28and there grew a kind of friendship and partnership.
36:31And from that, Rosenwald schools really emerged.
36:36At the time, there were fewer schools for black kids than for white kids.
36:41More pronounced in the rural south, some black children therefore forego education altogether.
36:47But Washington believed that an educated public was key to a certain kind of civic democracy.
36:55And that being able to provide the basic education also meant that you could fight some elements of discrimination.
37:04And Rosenwald understood that argument.
37:08For Rosenwald, his idea, he was aware of ongoing Jewish persecution in Europe
37:12and also understanding what's happening to African Americans and the U.S.
37:17I think what's so powerful about the relationship is that they both used individual success as a way to think
37:23about broader issues.
37:25Washington presented Rosenwald with a plan to build schools for black children across the rural south, beginning in Alabama.
37:36But it would entail a novel approach.
37:40Rosenwald would contribute one-third of the cost, the school district another third,
37:46and the local community would supply the rest, often through land, lumber, and old-fashioned sweat equity.
37:54This is the cooperative.
37:56Cash is only one part, but building the schools, setting the schools, framing the schools,
38:02all of that requires community buy-in as well, showing that they have some skin in the game.
38:08The first six schools proved so successful that the program soon expanded to dozens, then hundreds, then thousands across the
38:19south.
38:19By the time Brown v. Board of Education declared separate but equal unconstitutional,
38:26one in three black children in the south had been educated in a Rosenwald school.
38:33Many of the graduates want to do incredible things.
38:37Maya Angel is a graduate of the Rosenwald School as well as John Lewis.
38:41Rosenwald's philanthropy didn't stop at schools.
38:43He donated millions of dollars to the NAACP, historically black colleges and universities, and black health institutes.
38:53He also created a fellowship program for black writers, artists, scientists, and activists.
39:01Many very prominent German-Jewish individuals, like Julius Rosenwald, they supported African American causes because their status was somewhat assured
39:12in American society.
39:14And so it made it easier for them to access that part of Jewish identity which suggested a connection or
39:21a similarity with African Americans.
39:25But in the early decades of the 20th century, that status was becoming more and more precarious.
39:32As destabilizing economic changes took hold, and as the number of Jewish immigrants grew dramatically, so too did anti-Semitism.
39:43One tragic episode in 1913 pulled back the curtain on this surging anti-Semitism, revealing just how easy it could
39:52be to pit the Jewish and the black communities against one another.
40:00Leo Frank was a Jewish man from Texas, raised in New York City with a Cornell education.
40:07He came to Atlanta to manage a pencil factory that was owned by his uncle.
40:12And he became a very prominent member of the Atlanta community, a respected businessman.
40:19He married into a very prominent Jewish family.
40:27On Confederate Memorial Day in 1913, there was a huge parade in Atlanta.
40:33There was a young woman who worked in the factory.
40:37Her name was Mary Fagan.
40:39She was a young teenager.
40:41And she came in to get her pay and was never seen alive again.
40:45And so her dead body was found in the basement.
40:50The case immediately got a huge amount of press attention.
40:56Frank became the primary suspect and the focus of the investigation, even though there was an African American employee, Jim
41:04Connolly, who was also for a time under suspicion.
41:08And Jim Connolly became the real key to the case.
41:10He provided the testimony that it was Frank who had done it.
41:14Connolly testified that he had helped Frank move the body from Frank's office to the basement.
41:22And his vivid accusations against Frank went even further.
41:27Part of Connolly's testimony is that he had been kind of coerced by Frank to operate as a lookout for
41:34him while Frank had inappropriate dalliances in his office with the young women who worked in the factory.
41:41And so there's a whole narrative that develops that Frank, as this Jewish interloper, is a sexual predator.
41:49So there are some really good reasons to worry about anti-Semitism in the case.
41:54There are, you know, mobs of, you know, of white Southerners outside the courthouse.
41:58There's, you know, some testimony that people were yelling, you know, hang the Jew.
42:03There's incredible purple journalism created primarily by this Southern populist leader, Tom Watson, what we would now call conspiracy theory
42:12stuff.
42:12It's about, you know, Jewish power, you know, exploitive Yankee Jew.
42:21You know, Frank is a boss.
42:23He's in the employer class.
42:27There's a whole kind of folk culture that develops.
42:30And there are songs.
42:45In a climate of anti-Semitic propaganda, Frank was found guilty of the murder of Mary Fagan and he was
42:53sentenced to death.
42:56The conviction of Leo Frank was in part based on some of the testimony of Jim Connolly.
43:02And in the South at that time, it was very unusual for the testimony of an African American to be
43:08accepted in incriminating a white person in a Southern court.
43:14Now, within the case, there's this fascinating competition between the Jewish man and the African American man who essentially are
43:21the only two who could have done it.
43:23So it's this kind of bizarre zero sum game of did the Jewish guy do it or did the black
43:28man do it?
43:28The Jewish press and lots of Jewish leaders and Frank's own lawyers articulated all manner of really familiar and rancid
43:38anti-black racism.
43:45The mythology of the black beast rapist is very familiar in the culture at the moment.
43:52I mean, literally, that's the same year that the movie Birth of a Nation comes out, the plot of which
43:58is completely tied up with the idea that young white women are in danger because black men want to rape
44:04them.
44:04Frank's lawyers and the journalists and the Jewish press present Jim Connolly as that familiar caricature.
44:13Leo Frank, whom experts today believe was innocent, appealed his death sentence and ultimately it was commuted to life in
44:21prison.
44:22But that decision ignited a great deal of anger in the community.
44:28What happened next was a tragic incident all too familiar to black people in the Jim Crow South.
44:36Frank was kidnapped from jail by a group of well-off white Southerners and hanged near the town where Mary
44:44Fagan was originally from, Marietta, Georgia.
44:51It's a moment of shock and disbelief for the Jewish population.
44:55There had certainly been anti-Semitism in the United States, but this was a particularly dramatic example.
45:05The murder of Leo Frank served as a wake-up call for American Jews, a stark reminder of their own
45:13vulnerability in the face of rising white supremacy.
45:17William Joseph Simmons leads his followers up Stone Mountain in Georgia for the first initiation ceremony of the reincarnated Klan.
45:25After Frank's lynched in 1915, you know, the Klan is reborn on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.
45:33This is a new iteration of the Klan.
45:37We usually think of the Klan as being anti-black, which it was, but the Klan was also anti-Catholic,
45:45anti-Jewish, people they considered non-white.
45:48When the KKK reinvented itself, the KKK's focus was 100% Americanism.
45:59Coroners were particularly suspected because of their threat to something the Klansmen were fond of calling purity of the American
46:06race.
46:08The resurgence of the KKK in the early 20th century was not just in the South, but across the entire
46:15United States.
46:16In Ohio, Klan-supported candidates became mayors of Toledo, Akron, Columbus, and other cities.
46:22By 1925, almost six million Americans now belonged to the Klan.
46:28The Klan and its racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic venom surged at a time when industrialization, migration, and economic hardship
46:41were rattling the country.
46:44It's during this period that the dominant white society doubles down on the importance of a clear racial hierarchy.
46:54In 1924, Congress passed a draconian bill cutting off immigration from Asia and sharply limiting arrivals from Southern and Eastern
47:06Europe.
47:06The bill reflected theories of eugenics and scientific racism that had gained widespread popularity at the time.
47:16There were all these different races of whiteness.
47:20You have the superior white races like the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxons, and the inferior people like the Irish.
47:29It's the Italians, it's the Slavs, it's the East European, Hebrews, and so forth.
47:35The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924 enshrines a lot of these scientific principles into law, making certain groups more
47:48fit for citizenship than others.
47:50There's a tendency today to think of Jews who'd come from Europe as simply assimilated white people.
47:59But in fact, Jews also navigated the color line, because there's this concern that the gene pool, essentially, of the
48:08country would be impacted by these inferior immigrants.
48:12They're very poor, they're not necessarily well educated, they, you know, have old world ways, they have beards and they
48:21speak Yiddish.
48:22And honestly, the more acculturated and assimilated Jewish community is not thrilled about them either.
48:29So there's real fear about who these people are and how they act and whether or not they can be
48:35adequately absorbed into America.
48:37You see a rise in social discrimination against Jews being excluded from clubs, from certain neighborhoods, hotels.
48:47Quotas at universities, not letting Jews in, they don't let people into various professions.
48:54Of course, for black Americans, law and custom rigidly policed the color line.
49:01By the 20s and 30s, southern black people, they are walled off from public life.
49:11That's when it really gets solidified.
49:15The laws, but also the customs of humiliation.
49:20It may not have been written into law that you can't go to the public library.
49:26That you have to go to the back door or take your hat off or move off the sidewalk.
49:33But it was humiliating custom.
49:36At this low moment in American history, black and Jewish Americans found themselves swimming against parallel currents of anti-black
49:47racism and anti-Semitism.
49:54Fanon in 1952 said something that's haunted me for a long time.
50:00And that's that the anti-Semite, invariably, is a Negro-phobe.
50:06People who hate Jews also uncannily hate black people too.
50:10Oh, gosh.
50:11Because when the stuff hits the fan, they're coming after both of us.
50:15The two rivers under the floorboards.
50:16The two rivers under the floorboards.
50:18And if I may, guess who saves the world in all of our modern myth-telling?
50:22Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith?
50:25Is, you know, is it Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder?
50:30Or is it RuPaul and Michelle Visage?
50:32It always takes the two of us to save the world.
50:36The world may hate us any other time, but it's like, hey, the world needs saving.
50:40Can you guys step up?
50:42Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
50:48The black and Jewish communities may have begun their journeys on very different footing.
50:55But by the 1920s, it was clear they faced a common threat.
51:01The world war that followed would lay bare the devastating power of unchecked hatred and draw black and Jewish people
51:11into a closer, more urgent alliance.
51:14Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers and vice versa, and we must work together.
51:22Yet as the 20th century unfolded, that alliance would be tested, revealing just how fragile solidarity can be, even among
51:34those who depend on it most.
51:37The first place.
51:39The last place.
51:53The last place.
51:57The last place.
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