- 2 weeks ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:01Viewers like you make this program possible.
00:04Support your local PBS station.
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,
00:27that 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.
00:53Blacks 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.
01:14There 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.
01:41The 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. And 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?
02:11When do we want it?
02:12Now!
02:13So, I decided, let's get into it. Let'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.
02:51If you can pass them along.
02:56Are we ready?
02:57A little more.
02:59All started, but everyone join in on the Let My People Go. Here we go.
03:03When Israel was in Egypt land.
03:08Let my people go.
03:11Oppressed so hard they could not stand.
03:15Let my people go.
03:20Go down, Moses.
03:24We'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.
03:44So I've gathered a group of friends, journalists and teachers, a novelist and a renowned chef,
03:55and even a pair of rabbis to talk about the deeply intertwined histories of black and Jewish Americans.
04:04When 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 and 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,
04:33under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams, continuously.
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.
04:47But I believe that they can be dismantled.
04:50We built racism, humans built anti-Semitism, and we can unbuild them.
04:55And if we unbuild them, doing that requires us to talk about these challenges
04:59and talk about these issues in a different way than we have.
05:02We share persecution in common, even though it is played out differently for each of our communities.
05:14To unravel those differences, as well as the ties that bind us,
05:20we have to start centuries ago and an ocean 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.
05:39Jews traced their roots back thousands of years to a people and a faith centered in the land now known as Israel.
05:49As their homeland was conquered by outside powers, Jewish communities were driven far and wide, becoming a people of the diaspora.
05:58There's probably few countries in Europe that Jews have not been kicked out of because they were Jews.
06:08They didn't want to assimilate.
06:11They worshipped 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.
06:33You 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.
07:03It's impossible to really understand anti-Semitism without that economic component.
07:08The notion that Jews control the economy is the notion of the Jew as preternaturally evil, as conspiratorial, a malicious being.
07:17One 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 Jews and Muslims in the name of Christian purity.
07:42The 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?
08:05They brought in the Inquisition to investigate.
08:08By 1492, they decided, okay, all the Jews have to get out.
08:12Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews until July 31st, 1492, to flee their kingdom.
08:23Just 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 are being expelled from 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 we think about modernity.
09:03The 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, a 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,
09:51and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade.
09:56In the centuries that followed, more than 12 million African men, women, and children were captured, sold into slavery,
10:06and shipped across the Atlantic into lives of perpetual bondage.
10:13As America took shape, a new social order would emerge.
10:18One in which race and the sharp black-white color divide set African Americans and Jews on dramatically different trajectories.
10:30The United States is a very, very distinctive moment in the history of both peoples.
10:37The 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 know of today.
10:56You start to see laws passed that now, by stature, if you are a child born to an enslaved mother, you are born as a slave for life.
11:06That was your destiny.
11:09It was a business decision to increase our slave labor through breeding.
11:15So you get the racialization of enslavement, the deep white supremacy that's going to continually and more deeply inform the enslavement of Africans.
11:25So you got the whole group brought on barbaric slave ships confronting barbaric slave auctions and put on barbaric slave plantations.
11:36Now in the Jewish case, when you arrive in the United States, they got a different experience.
11:42In the mid-17th century, the first Jews make their way to North America and begin to settle along the eastern seaboard.
11:54Initially, there were examples throughout the colonies where Jews were actually denied civil rights, the right to hold office, the right 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 and complete and active citizens of the new country in a way that for more than a thousand years in Europe, they never could.
12:23In the summer of 1790, President George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island and actually penned a letter to its historic synagogue.
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,
12:50Our Hebrew brothers are going to be welcome.
12:53May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants.
13:03While everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, there 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 a 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 the safe haven.
13:35Here, even if anti-Semitism persisted, they would be granted the full privileges of citizenship.
13:44There's a Naturalization Act in 1790, and it says that people are eligible for citizenship in the United States if they're white.
13:54And 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.
14:16They underpin a huge amount of anti-Semitism.
14:19But they aren't driving the legal system in the way that difference between 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 steep.
14:33When I think about the Seder, the Seder is an evening about telling stories.
14:44It's about telling the story of the Exodus.
14:46And 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.
14:53That's a very real divergence.
14:55Along those lines, something that I often think about during Passover is, you know,
15:00every year we commemorate our freedom as Jews.
15:05But 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.
15:15But something that happened a long time ago is something that we hold onto and sit around a table and remind ourselves of.
15:21And 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.
15:34And all of a sudden we're reading the Inferno.
15:37And it's quoting from this very story that we're reading in the Haggadah.
15:42And 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 as translated through the King James Version.
16:02I mean, the Hebrew Bible really is like sort of the grammar of black religion because it provided a window into a world in which people who had been enslaved found freedom.
16:17Enslavers wanted enslaved people to embrace Christianity, but they wanted them to embrace Christianity so that they would be more accommodating, more docile.
16:28They would emphasize verses with that particular message.
16:32Of 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 in the text.
16:44When the enslavers were telling folk, your reward is in heaven.
16:50They're like, no, we actually have real evidence which people 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 peoples in Egypt and picks out a Moses over against a Pharaoh.
17:12And we haven't got the Amos or even Esther yet.
17:16All 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.
17:28They would gather at night to have their own private, clandestine services, some real religion.
17:42And 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.
17:57That did not happen.
17:59With Negro spirituals, there are all kinds of messages within these songs that in some ways speak to the lived reality.
18:06Go Down Moses, right, is a sort of classic, sort of spiritual that is both retelling the story of Moses, but 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 enslaved, living in the U.S. South.
18:27She was a person of faith.
18:29I think she believed that ultimately God was on her side.
18:33The spirit of Moses that Harriet Tubman embodied would remain central to the black church and the black freedom struggle.
18:51But while enslaved Africans identified with the mythic Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, Jews in antebellum America didn't necessarily recognize this symbolic kinship.
19:04This is one of the ironies of people who talk about the grand alliance of blacks and Jews as if it 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 that larger sense.
19:21In fact, the highest serving Jewish person in any of American historical presidencies is Judah Benjamin of the Confederacy.
19:29Judah P. Benjamin, whose face would appear on currency in the Confederate States of America, served as its Attorney General, Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State.
19:44Called both the brains of the Confederacy and derisibly Jefferson Davis' pet Jew, Benjamin was one of the most influential Jewish 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 Uli from Florida.
20:11Both Judah Benjamin and David Uli were plantation owners, and in that capacity they were enslavers.
20:18They felt a certain investment in Southern society because they had been successful there and had been able to achieve a level of status and inclusion in the South that was really unprecedented in modern history.
20:33But 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.
20:58In fact, there were Jews of African ancestry present from the early days of the Republic, even if their numbers were small.
21:07Some 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 hint.
21:32The potato kugel is the first time doing it.
21:34Sweet 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...
22:06I grew up Chabat.
22:07My family on mother's side has been here as African American Jews since I got here in the 1780s.
22:12Since 1780s?
22:14Yep.
22:15Your family's been Jewish?
22:16Yep.
22:17It's amazing.
22:18That's my cousin.
22:19Although Jews of African descent have long embodied both identities, the fates of most
22:30blacks and Jews ran on independent tracks in the antebellum era.
22:36That 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 economic opportunity and survival.
22:57Jim Crow segregation, the kind of legal apartheid in the southern states comes to the forefront in the early 20th century.
23:04For black people in the South, you had to behave under a very strict set of social codes and standards.
23:11And if you didn't adhere to that, then your life was at risk.
23:16There were moments when black people were falsely accused of various crimes that led to mob violence in a spectacle kind of way.
23:26There would be picnics and parades and celebrations of these killings, which we call lynchings, all over the South.
23:33It became incredibly dangerous for black people.
23:36And that was in addition to economic crisis.
23:41So we have masses of African Americans moving from the South to the North in order to get more economic opportunity and also to be safer.
23:51And so that migration, which is so large that historians call it the Great Migration, happens pretty much simultaneously with the migration of Eastern European Jews.
24:03Between 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.
24:18But for Jews also, the economic problems in Eastern Europe then foster a series of attacks on Jews that are called 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.
24:36And it becomes increasingly dangerous to be Jewish.
24:41Millions of Jews came to the determination, in no uncertain terms,
24:45that they could not live, could not exist as Jews anywhere in Eastern Europe, given the repeated violence that occurred with state sanction.
24:55They understood that they had no future in Eastern Europe.
24:59And they boarded ships and sailed to America.
25:02They 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.
25:19Some commentators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, drew comparisons between the suffering of Russian Jews and the plight of African Americans in the United States who were the victims of racial massacres, were the victims of riots.
25:40Black 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.
25:57Even if nothing political necessarily came of it in the beginning, they were really made quite well aware of the plight of the others.
26:04The 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 accusation.
26:25We see this again and again.
26:28A white woman named Mabel Hollum accused a black man named George Richardson of coming 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.
26:48In hopes of preventing a crisis, the sheriff smuggled Richardson and another black prisoner out of town under cover of darkness.
26:58But it was too late.
27:00More people from other towns start coming in, and it explodes.
27:05White 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 had done this.
27:56Springfield 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, but that is actually a national problem.
28:17Among the journalists on the ground in Springfield were William English Walling and his wife, Anna Strunsky, a Russian-Jewish immigrant.
28:30An unlikely couple, William English Walling, a Kentucky-born aristocratic man who is a radical social reformer, married to a remarkable Russian-Jewish immigrant woman named Anna Strunsky.
28:45And 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 version of racial terror.
29:12Within a year, Walling and a coalition of black and white progressives, including several prominent American Jews,
29:21called for a new 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.
29:36There was a real meeting of minds, I think, between a certain kind of white liberal Christian and white Jews like the Spring-Arm brothers, Arthur and Joel,
29:47and prominent black Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells 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 in its first decades.
30:03You'll see from these early beginnings that Jews are disproportionately involved in civil rights,
30:09if you compare their population numbers with their proportion among white activists.
30:14The organization really focused on the issue of lynching for about its first decade.
30:22And not only trying to spread awareness 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 people.
30:41One of the NAACP's earliest board members, Arthur Spengarn, led an ad hoc legal team from his Manhattan Law Office.
30:50Spengarn, and his mostly Jewish volunteers, took major cases all the way to the Supreme Court,
30:58challenging housing segregation, grandfather clauses, and other assaults on civil rights.
31:04But it was W.E.B. Du Bois, the only black person on the NAACP's board, who was the heart and soul of the organization.
31:15Du Bois winds up being its chief spokesperson.
31:18So as head of the Crisis Magazine, which is the official publication of the NAACP, his 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 people who consume the crisis as well.
31:36It's also an organ that provides an opportunity and a conduit for black scholarship, for black thinkers, for black artists, visions of black excellence.
31:46One of the things that W.E.B. Du Bois also writes about in the crisis is the significance of the Jewish experience in Europe.
32:01That they're also being marginalized, they're also being shut out of different industries, of different communities.
32:09He's telling black readers that this is a moment, this is an opportunity to come together with Jewish people in order to advocate for rights on U.S. soil.
32:22Du Bois' interest in the Jewish experience was inspired in part by his friendship with Joel Spengarn, an early chairman of the board and later the president of the NAACP.
32:35Du 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.
32:47But 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, at times with Du Bois at his side, spreading the gospel of what he called the new abolitionism.
33:13You see in the language of Joel Spengarn, this recognition that the purpose of this organization is to elevate black people.
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.
33:29I 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.
33:52But 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 given the world.
34:25Alliances like that between Du Bois and Spengarn were more than symbolic.
34:32These 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.
34:50Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, I think, are just incredible figures in terms of if we think about African American 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,
35:09found 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 and would become the founding president of Tuskegee Institute.
35:37Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants, followed in the footsteps of his father, a 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.
36:03He read up from slavery and was really impressed.
36:05He invited Booker T. Washington up to Chicago.
36:08And then Booker T. Washington, as smart as he was, was like,
36:10hey, 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.
36:35At 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.
36:48But 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
37:13and 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 about broader issues.
37:25Washington presented Rosenwald with a plan to build schools for black children across the rural south,
37:33beginning in Alabama.
37:36But it would entail a novel approach.
37:39Rosenwald would contribute one-third of the cost.
37:43The school district, another third.
37:46And the local community would supply the rest.
37:49Often through land, lumber, and old-fashioned sweat equity.
37:54This is the cooperative.
37:57Cash is only one part, but building the schools, setting the schools, framing the schools,
38:03all of that requires community buy-in as well, showing that they have some skin in the game.
38:09The first six schools proved so successful that the program soon expanded to dozens, then hundreds, then thousands across the south.
38:20By 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 wanted to do incredible things.
38:36Maya Angel is a graduate of the Rosenwald school, as well as John Lewis.
38:40Rosenwald's philanthropy didn't stop at schools.
38:44He donated millions of dollars to the NAACP, historically black colleges and universities,
38:51and black health institutes.
38:54He also created a fellowship program for black writers, artists, scientists, and activists.
39:02Many very prominent German-Jewish individuals, like Julius Rosenwald,
39:08they supported African American causes because their status was somewhat assured in American society.
39:14And so it made it easier for them to access that part of Jewish identity,
39:19which suggested a connection or a similarity with African Americans.
39:25But in the early decades of the 20th century, that status was becoming more and more precarious.
39:31As destabilizing economic changes took hold, and as the number of Jewish immigrants grew dramatically,
39:40so too did anti-Semitism.
39:43One tragic episode in 1913 pulled back the curtain on this surging anti-Semitism,
39:50revealing just how easy it could be to pit the Jewish and the black communities against one another.
39:58Leo 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,
40:13and he became a very prominent member of the Atlantic community, a respected businessman.
40:19He married into a very prominent Jewish family.
40:23On Confederate Memorial Day in 1913, there was a huge parade in Atlanta.
40:33There was a young woman who worked in the factory.
40:36Her name was Mary Fagan.
40:38She was a young teenager.
40:40And she came in to get her pay and was never seen alive again,
40:44and so her dead body was found in the basement.
40:46The case immediately got a huge amount of press attention.
40:56Frank became the primary suspect and the focus of the investigation,
41:01even though there was an African-American employee, Jim Connolly,
41:05who was also for a time under suspicion.
41:08And Jim Connolly became the real key to the case.
41:11He provided the testimony that it was Frank who had done it.
41:15Connolly 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 him,
41:35while 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,
42:10what we would now call conspiracy theory stuff.
42:13It's about, you know, Jewish power, you know, exploitive Yankee Jew.
42:17You know, Frank is a boss. He's in the employer class.
42:27There's a whole kind of folk culture that develops, and there are songs.
42:32In a climate of anti-Semitic propaganda, Frank was found guilty of the murder of Mary Fagan, and he was sentenced to death.
42:54The 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 accepted in incriminating a white person in a Southern court.
43:13Now, within the case, there's this fascinating competition between the Jewish man and the African American man who essentially are the 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 man do it?
43:29Jewish press and lots of Jewish leaders and Frank's own lawyers articulated all manner of really familiar and rancid anti-black racism.
43:39The 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 is completely tied up with the idea that young white women are in danger because black men want to rape them.
44:04Frank's lawyers and the journalists and the Jewish press present Jim Connolly as that familiar caricature.
44:11Leo Frank, whom experts today believe was innocent, appealed his death sentence and ultimately it was commuted to life in prison.
44:22But that decision ignited a great deal of anger in the community.
44:29What happened next was a tragic incident all too familiar to black people in the Jim Crow South.
44:37Frank was kidnapped from jail by a group of well-off white Southerners and hanged near the town where Mary Fagan was originally from, Marietta, Georgia.
44:47It's a moment of shock and disbelief for the Jewish population.
44:56There had certainly been anti-Semitism in the United States, but this was a particularly dramatic example.
45:02The murder of Leo Frank served as a wake-up call for American Jews, a stark reminder of their own vulnerability 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.
45:32This 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, anti-Jewish, people they considered non-white.
45:48Non-white.
45:49When the KKK reinvented itself, the KKK's focus was 100% Americanism.
45:58Foreigners were particularly suspected because of their threat to something the Klansmen were fond of calling purity of the American race.
46:07The resurgence of the KKK in the early 20th century was not just in the South, but across the entire United 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.
46:27The Klan and its racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic venom surged at a time when industrialization, migration, and economic hardship were 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 Europe.
47:07The 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 fit for citizenship than others.
47:51There'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 country 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 speak 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 adequately absorbed into America.
48:38You see a rise in social discrimination against Jews being excluded from clubs, from certain neighborhoods, hotels.
48:46Quotas at universities, not letting Jews in, they don't let people into various professions.
48:53Of course, for black Americans, law and custom rigidly police the color line.
49:02By 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, that 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 racism and anti-Semitism.
49:49Fanon in 1952 said something that's haunted me for a long time, and that's that the anti-Semite invariably is a Negro-phobe.
50:05People who hate Jews also uncannily hate black people too.
50:10Oh, gosh. Yes.
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.
50:17The 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?
50:41Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
50:44The 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
51:09and draw black and Jewish people into a closer, more urgent alliance.
51:15Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers and vice versa,
51:20and we must work together.
51:22Yet, as the 20th century unfolded, that alliance would be tested,
51:28revealing just how fragile solidarity can be,
51:34even among those who depend on it most.
51:39or even among those who—
52:00ついにいのを、
Comments