June 26, 2020 “you seek to dominate us”     Korach 16:13 

Stereotypes – which ones do you believe? Suburban Black children under-perform comparable White students.   Jews only care about money. African-Americans don’t care about having children out of wedlock.   Well-heeled Jewish organizations control U.S. foreign policy and the media.  The Black community won’t share charitable resources and, thus, pull themselves up as did the Jews.  Jews are klutzy and non-mechanical.   Entitlements such as food stamps, ADC, housing vouchers, and Medicaid encourage African-Americans to curtail their aspirations for advancement.   Jewish mothers are domineering.   African-Americans always expect something for nothing.   Jews think they’re better than everybody else.

June 12, 2020 “There was a gluttonous rabble among them”     Behaaloscha 11:4. 

Many Jews, especially if influenced by the inventions of Fox News or other far-right conspiracy peddlers, believe Antifa and Black Lives Matter are anti-Semitic hierarchical organizations, sort of like radical Hadassahs. Believing young anarchists confronting Nazis in Charlottesville or attacking police at the G7 meetings have anything in common besides their personal anomie is naïve. Similarly, that some African-Americans conflate Israel’s treatment of Arabs with their own history in America should give no American Jews reason to ignore Black Lives’ message that police unaccountability, zoning regulations, school funding inequality, and corporate welfare are the real conspiracies that make us a segregated and unequal society. 

June 5, 2020 “They shall not defile their camps”    Nasso: 5:3

Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by the demonstrations nor even the looting and burning. Instead, think through the social conditions that mobilize the demonstrators.  Late 19^th and early 20^th century New York City police violence against Jews was a routine aspect of tenement and workplace life. Early 1900s NYC Police Commissioner Theo. Bingham, who referred to Jews as unfit for labor and responsible for 50% of crime, granted official sanction to anti-Jewish constabulary violence. Jewish protests and even riots were routine though inchoate responses to brutal police profiling and employer-sponsored violence. The unintended consequences of institutional racism, whether against early 20^th century Jews or 21^st century African-Americans, cut two ways.