Scholar-in-Residence Lecture: Building Coalitions

In the early 1960s, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King marched together in Selma for Civil Rights. That was more than a symbolic gesture. Two thirds of the whites who went south to integrate busses and register Black voters were Jewish. Three quarters of the money King and other Black Civil Rights leaders raised came from Jewish donors. Since that time there have been fissures and strains in the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities. What important steps can be taken to foster the healthiest relationships between our communities? Drawing on decades of research, interviews and studies of figures from Jesse Jackson to Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr to Barack Obama, Jonathan Kaufman looks at the roots of the Black-Jewish alliance, how it has changed, and the steps forward.
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