Thank you.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

My name is Neil Barclay.

I have the great privilege.

Really, of being the president and CEO of the Charles Wright.

Welcome.

It's an honor to gather with you tonight in partnership with Detroit PBS, for a conversation that is both timely and unfortunately timeless, one rooted in history yet urgently relevant to our present and future.

We are grateful to Doctor Henry Louis Gates Jr for the scholarship and vision behind the PBS documentary series Black and Jewish America, and Interwoven History.

While Doctor Gates is not with us this evening.

His work provides a powerful foundation for the dialog we will share tonight, one that invites us to examine where the stories of our two communities intersect, where they diverge, and where they call us back to one another.

Detroit is a city that is shaped by migration, resilience, and the hard, hopeful work of building communities across difference.

The histories of Black and Jewish Detroiters are deeply woven into the fabric of the city.

We love Detroit through labor and activism, faith and culture, struggle and solidarity.

Tonight's program asks us not only to reflect on that shared past, but to consider what it demands of us now, in the present moment.

And this at a moment when Division two often defines the national conversation.

This gathering affirms a different truth that understanding is an act of courage, and unity is not sameness, but shared commitment.

Commitment to listening deeply, to honor and complexity, and to recognizing that our collective liberation has always been interconnected.

I extend my sincere thanks to our distinguished moderator, Angelique Power, who'll be joining us in a few minutes and to our remarkable panel panelists Ken Coleman, Catherine Cagney, sorry, Catherine.

Reverend Armas Heintz and Rabbi Ariana Silbermann for lending their wisdom and leadership to this conversation.

May tonight deepen our understanding.

May it strengthen our bonds and remind us that history, when honestly confronted, can be a bridge guiding us towards a more just and unified Detroit.

And now, please welcome to the stage.

Rich Humber, president and CEO of Detroit Public Television.

Hi there folks.

Good evening and welcome to the Right Museum.

I'm going to express my gratitude, to you for being here, but also to the right.

What a wonderful venue.

And what a more and more important moment we're moving through.

And to have the backbone organizations you're going to hear from tonight is spectacular.

The Charles Detroit Museum is truly one of the cultural treasures, in our community.

And in PBS's world, Henry Louis Gates is one of our treasures as well.

We have a very good.

Yeah.

Please.

I, I, I texted Skip earlier just to let him know we were in preproduction for an important event, because that's the kind of relationship we have with Doctor Gates.

We like to remind Skip gates, that Detroit is TMI, CIA.

I think you'll all agree the most important city in America.

But, yeah, it's, And if you if you ever have a chance to meet.

He's a bit of a chop buster.

Me, too.

And and so whatever he's produced.

Well, of course you're coming to Detroit, right?

And when?

When the Great Migrations, his last big, piece, premiered in the opening of the documentary, was at Michigan Central, and we did an event with Gates at Michigan Central.

And then six days of shooting and history captures.

And it was typical what we do with it, with Doctor Gates and how, you know, how do you how do you marry issues and how to how do we find the right path forward as an organization?

One thing we know for sure is a documentary around a topic like Black and Jewish America or The Great Migrations, is an opportunity for us to open new doors or to expand relationships we have.

So we always think a lot about the national to local opportunity.

And so really embracing.

We had Ken Burns here, around the American Revolution.

We have a very good relationship with PBS.

And then the people that you're going to see in the back up there doing all the work.

And then from there we build really terrific relationships in our community.

It's critical to everything we do.

So tonight, black and Jewish Detroit is another masterwork from Dutch Doctor Gates.

And the he is the closest thing to a folk hero we have, at PBS.

And, when when we put his programing on the air, it just zooms.

It's one of the highest rated programs that, that we air.

And again, very important to our organization.

We're also fortunate tonight to have a very important moderator and Angelique Powers as president and CEO of the Skillman Foundation.

Angelique is leading a community effort to harness the power and potential of Detroit's young youth to make critical transformation our education system and to improve the lives and future of students.

I've known Angelique for a number of years.

Since she moved here.

It's so impressive that the cultures that she's created inside of the foundation and the warmth and wonderful joy that she has brought to our town.

This is not her first, partnership with Detroit PBS.

She moderated a discussion.

We had around a wonderful Jewish, novel, the column of Brooklyn.

A Third Man records a few years ago.

She was magnificent.

I think you'll enjoy spending the evening with her.

I can't think of a better person than Angela to lead the conversation around black and Jewish Detroit.

She is both black and Jewish, and she represents some of the very best qualities in America.

So join me in welcoming to the stage our moderator, Angelique Paris.

Thank you Neal.

Thank you Rich.

It is my privilege to be your moderator this evening.

For, as Neil said, this timely discussion and an overdue discussion.

Rich mentioned that I am, in fact, Black and Jewish.

I'm proudly both.

And to this day, people are so surprised by that fact.

You're black and Jewish.

You know, when I was younger, there were the Sammy Davis Jr jokes that reigned supreme in college at the University of Michigan.

It was not uncommon when I said to someone about my identity to be asked to prove it.

Baraka had an idea how I would immediately jump in to do so in my 20 year old people pleasing brain.

But the reality is that the reason it created so much surprise within our community is the reason that it created a demand for proof was the perception that our communities are so disparate that we can't even believe that that deep of a connection exists.

Realistically, there are many of us.

There are over a million Jews of color in the United States.

That is 15% of the Jewish population here and there.

Quite a few of us in Detroit as well may be here this evening to in fact, there is as much overlap as there is difference in the histories of these communities.

There have been moments of great alliances toward justice and moments of great friction, questioning what is just and what constitutes an alliance.

It is a heavy time in the world.

And so this conversation feels needed.

And at the same time, honestly, it feels fraught.

Gratefully, we have a masterpiece of a documentary from, as Rich said, America's great historian and storyteller, Doctor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

That is going to give us the historic view, give us some context, blend in many perspectives so that we can root this conversation.

And if you have not seen the fascinating four part series, it is available on Detroit PBS.org.

You have to watch it.

It is.

It is incredible.

It explores not only histories, but how braided our fates are because of the duality of hate that both of these communities endure.

Doctor gates teaches that the two hideous streams that run constantly under the floorboards of Western culture are anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism.

He argues these intertwined forces of prejudice must be understood together to be defeated.

Soon we will be hearing from esteemed historians and beloved faith leaders in the Detroit community.

We will hear more about these hideous streams, as well as their work to unite and heal.

And how different Detroit is from some of the things that we see in the documentary.

Joining me for this conversation, we have, Catherine Kang Gagne, who is a scholar and historian and CEO of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan.

Please welcome Ken Coleman, well known and well respected journalist and writer who chronicles black life in Detroit.

Next, we have Pastor Aramis Haynes of Breakers Covenant Church International.

He's a member of the Detroit PBS Black Church and Detroit Advisory Committee.

Well, thank you for being.

And lastly, we have Rabbi Ariana Silverman of Isaac Agri Downtown Synagogue, the, Detroit's last free standing synagogue.

And incidentally, where I belong with my family.

So, Ken, let's let's start with you.

I want you to take us from kind of share some of the reflections of what you've seen, but also translate it to Detroit.

What is similar and what's different?

Thank you for having me, first of all.

And I have to now capitalize with Doctor Gates.

It's talked about a lot of his time.

Brilliant, brilliant four part series.

I hope that you've seen all of it.

You certainly got a good glimpse of it today.

How many people have had an opportunity to see, at least one part of this series?

It is brilliant.

Yeah.

It's great.

Great.

Great show of hands.

I would say, Angelique, for the most part, there are great similarities, in the vast, set of experiences over several decades, that you saw in the documentary.

There's some vast similarities, in Detroit's experience or Metro Detroit's experience.

But I would also say, Detroit's got flavor like nobody else.

And, there are, I believe, some, some significant differences along the path of black and white Jewish relations here in Detroit proper and to some extent, metropolitan Detroit.

And I know we'll get into more of that.

As we as we go through the panel discussion and the Q&A, I would just say I would lift up one, difference that made Detroit's experience with blacks and Jews a little different than what you saw in New York City, and what you saw in the American South.

And that's the labor movement.

Great synergy, friends, if we think about it, great synergy, between blacks and Jews.

In the, and the labor movement, after all, in Detroit we built things, and then we organized and side by side with, with gentiles of a certain, political persuasion, Jews and African Americans, partnered, created a coalition, in the labor, in the labor and labor organizations and then labor organizing, which just mentioned one, a couple of names.

And then now we want to spread the love, if you will.

The labor movement as we know it in Detroit does not happen, without blacks and Jews.

Morris, sugar, a Jew, who happened to be from the Upper Peninsula, becomes a leading lawyer with the United Auto Workers, organization, in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Sugar, as I pointed out, who happened to be Jewish, had two, two proteges, if you will, a little younger in age.

But certainly as, as game, up for the game in terms of fighting for, the rights of workers.

You have Marie Sugar, you have, George Crockett junior, who happens to be an African American, hails from Florida, but moves here to Detroit and becomes a leading lawyer alongside of, of Crockett.

Is a gentleman named Ernest Goodman, who happens to be Jewish as well as a in addition to, along with, more sugar, the three of them and others, helped to set up a bond between, blacks and Jews, if you will, that propels, from, the, labor movement and the automotive industry to, the classic civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s.

You didn't really see that.

And what Doctor Gates talked about in the New York experience and in the American South.

Thank you.

Catherine, as a as a historian, you also have created an exhibition.

And you looked at Hastings Street in particular, and told the story of Jewish immigrants that have moved to Hastings.

But you also told another story as part of that.

Will you talk to us about that?

Sure.

So this was an exhibit.

We created a Jewish Historical Society at the Detroit Historical Museum in 2024.

It was focused heavily on the Jewish experience in this neighborhood.

And this was where, Eastern European immigrants and others settled, especially in the late 19th century.

But you may know this neighborhood better as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, when they were black, majority neighborhoods, particularly after World War one.

So we wanted to highlight the full history of this neighborhood.

Talk about the Jewish chapter, which is often omitted, but also take it through its destruction.

And then the conversation today about reparative redevelopment.

And we knew those were not stories that we could tell.

So we partnered with black historians and archivists.

Alas, not Ken Coleman next time.

But but that committee really, drove, that portion of the exhibit, the themes, the emphases.

And then we were working them back through the rest of it.

And so I'll, I'll just highlight two things, because the, because the emphases were really on moments of cooperation, but also moments of tension.

So in the 19th centuries, Jews and, and, African Americans were living together in this neighborhood starting in the 1840s.

A great example of sort of living side by side in this neighborhood is that Detroit's second Jewish congregation, Shahid Zedek, which is still around today.

Founded in 1861, bought its first building in 1864, and it bought Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church at Congress in Saint Antoine, which was Detroit's third black church.

So an example of the black community outgrowing a space and the Jewish community moving in.

The other thing that will highlight is, the committee that worked on the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley portions of the exhibit felt it was very important to showcase the poetry of Robert Hayden, poet laureate, on faculty at U of M for many years.

African-American grew up in the neighborhood.

Lived next door to the Jewish Community Center on Hastings Street, had a number of Jewish friends as a child, and his poetry concerns the experiences of being in this neighborhood, the difficult experiences.

On the one hand, he's close with these Jewish children.

He knows a lot about Jewish holidays and, and traditions.

He's interested in going to synagogue and tries to go with his friends to synagogue, and he's prevented from doing that by the rabbi.

And this is a devastating moment for him.

It's a moment when he's made aware that he's not like his friends.

And he had to come to terms with, you know, that devastation, that same poem, the rabbi also focuses on a Jewish saloon keeper, in the neighborhood, who was serving a mostly black clientele.

And there are some insinuations that, the the saloon keeper is taking advantage of those customers, that the customers are enriching him at their own expense.

And so this poem, has a number of anti-Semitic tropes and, and slurs in it.

And we included in the exhibit deliberately so that the Jewish community would also read it, be shocked by it.

Right.

Hopefully then get over those personal feelings to try to understand what Hayden was experiencing at this time of place.

So it was a teaching opportunity.

And so, you know, it it is important to have those conversations as uncomfortable as they might be.

And I think that was a moment of power, to end that exhibit on.

Thank you.

I want to pull, forward from history to present.

And we have two faith leaders that actually work and for the last decade have intentionally worked together.

So first, Pastor Haynes, will you tell us very briefly about covenant Church and Rabbi Silverman, will you tell us very briefly about downtown synagogue, and then will you tell us about what you two have been getting up to for the last decade?

My name is, Pastor Miss Hines, and I'm the lead pastor breakers now, breakers church used to be breakers covenant Church International, and, I've been pastoring for 24 years.

Come April.

Yes.

I started when I was five, but, but besides that, we we've been in Detroit serving in community, for the entire time, starting on the east side of Detroit.

And, we've worked our way right to the center of Detroit, and we happen to currently be in the last home of the first known Jewish congregation in the entire state of Michigan, and that is Temple Bethel.

For those that, know about Lighthouse Cathedral, it became home for Lighthouse Cathedral, which was the first interracial, church to come into that space.

It was well known.

And, we are now here and I'll pass it on, because we'll use that as a segue to talk further about our faith work.

Sure.

So I have had the privilege of serving as the rabbi at the downtown synagogue for almost ten years.

Not quite 24 yet.

Please, God.

One day.

And one of the things that's amazing about the downtown synagogue is our commitment to the city of Detroit, that we are the only freestanding synagogue in the city of Detroit, and we're committed to being place based and to being in partnership with our neighbors.

And loving your neighbor is is not a foreign concept in the religious tradition, right?

It's very deeply integral to what we believe in, to who we are and recognizing.

When I first started that, a lot of my neighbors were strangers.

And that part of what I wanted to do was to change that was to change a relationship.

Despite the fact that in Jewish tradition and in our sacred tradition, loving the stranger is important.

There's something different about how we react about having your neighbor, your kindred, be part of your life.

And so I was committed to meeting different people and communities in in the city of Detroit.

And I had the unbelievable privilege of meeting Pastor Aramis Haynes at an event that was actually commemorating the anniversary of the march on Selma.

So bringing history and present and future together.

We decided that it was important that our communities got to know each other a little better.

So, in addition to the decision we made to hold our holiday services at at Breakers Covenant Church International now Breakers Covenant, we thank you for your church.

Thank you.

Sorry.

We decided to have a lip sync battle, and I tell this story not just because I hope that it elicits amusing images of the two of us because they were very funny, but because we did it so that when downtown synagogue members walked into the building, they would say, hello, Travis, and they would say hello to Erica, and they would say hello to Pastor Hines and not just see these people as people who are there.

And we are there as renters, that this was a moment of our communities coming together and in our shared love of Motown music, showing off how much we can make fools of ourselves in the face of one another.

Of course, we want to have to talk about one.

Okay.

So, I really appreciated that the documentary dealt with the fraught ness also between these communities and that they named.

Some of the difference is in how each community has experienced oppression in the black community.

It is an obvious fist.

It is lynching.

It is systemic racism.

It's mass incarceration, it's redlining.

It's all of those things in the Jewish community.

It is more of a malignant cancer that is always dwelling beneath the surface.

If you look at YouTube or Twitter, you're always at most two clicks away, two scrolls away from the most anti-Semitic content and the most racist, anti-black, racist, and other racist content.

And yet, it seems because the experiences are so different, it feels hard to find alliance or to see the similarity.

And so what's the solution?

I have the solution, I think.

Thank you.

No, I don't have a solution.

But I know what has been working.

And, it was my privilege to meet, kin today, but I'm happy to say I've already met Catherine.

And I already have a really good relationship with Rabbi Silverman.

Because we're actively doing the work.

Building relationships and building bridges.

And so I talk about, the term intentional proximity.

And part of the challenge, even in a faith community, is often.

And it was mentioned we live in silos, right?

We're taught to stay and don't go past this boundary or the boogeyman.

So it's going to get you right.

We're told to love, but then we're told not to go.

So far where you might need to love.

And so part of the challenge for me as a pastor was when I realized that I, I treat my coworkers better than I treat people of a different culture, a different faith.

And, how can I be living out my faith if that be the case?

You know, and that was, and that was an moment for me when I realized that to care for others, to cool and, to help heal the world, what was necessary was that we had to challenge, we had to put some muscle to our faith.

Or as Rabbi Heschel said, that he felt like his feet were praying.

And it's when we begin to take these concepts and ideologies that we have about life, which in many cases in proximity, like today.

What happens is you realize that there's a far more amount of, similarities and differences.

You look at individuals in their eyes, you listen to that, their heart with your heart, and then all of a sudden you can never look at them the same again because you cannot allow what's been out in social media, what's been played, in your ears to people who are hate mongering, to, to basically bill your concept for how you see the other.

It is when you sit together.

It is when you listen in a safe and respectful environment that allows for you to hear another's experience without having to feel like it's your responsibility to fix it.

I. I didn't expect to get a clap there, but I will say that there are many people that talk about what needs to be done, but what it turns out to be is that not many people are.

Have they haven't shown enough bravery or courage to take that first step, to just have a conversation with someone outside of your comment or comfortable community?

What you do when you do that, I say from a faith perspective, is you begin to see humanity through the eyes of God in a greater way that you will not be able to see when you're locked up in one perspective and one experience.

Thank you.

When I was asked to moderate this, I thought immediately that we will have to talk about Israel, and I was so grateful that episode four of the documentary really does an incredible job discussing this.

And so if you haven't seen it, it feels like this fraught conversation that you can't have anywhere is finally getting some some light, some daylight.

So in terms of waking up this weekend and seeing the headlines and knowing that this is not, a historic conversation, but an active conversation.

I want to preface it by saying there's no monolithic community, as they said, you know, the black community, we're not monolithic.

The Jewish community.

We're not monolithic.

And so I'm not asking for a comment on an indictment of, a country or a people or a belief system.

But I am noting that this is a tremendously fraught friction point, and that if we do, Pastor Hinds, what you ask us to do, if we have those difficult conversations, how do we bridge across the conversation that feels very personal to so many, and there's so much ache.

One of the things that I've learned, is that when you have those conversations, you discover that you share a lot of the same values, but perhaps prioritize them a little differently.

That we all, we all, we all value justice, and we all value safety, and we all value our history and the history of our people.

And we all value a notion of homeland.

And all of these are values that we share.

And the question is not, is do I agree with you on these things?

Because I do.

The question is, how do we prioritize them as we're discussing them, and how do we enact them in real time?

And that's a different kind of conversation than whether we share the same values, because I think often we very much share the same values.

It's a question of how we, how we would prioritize, prioritize them and live them out.

Does anyone else want to I would say, as someone who was asked to in part, a lot of the history of blacks and Jews, here in Detroit proper and to to some extent metropolitan Detroit, look, coalitions.

Building coalitions, maintaining coalitions, over decades.

It's tough stuff.

It causes, causes members of the coalition to have a lot of dialog.

You agree?

And as I make the argument that blacks and Jews in this particular space in the nation have agreed and been co worked together, in a collaborative fashion more often than not.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't lift up that there has been friction and friction that goes way before Gaza.

In 1915.

Most people don't know this because when we think about riots or rebellions, civil insurrection, we think about 1943, in Detroit, we think about 1967, the Detroit looking at a free press headline, just the other day, my 70 year old jokes, me, a, 70 year old son jokes on me all the time.

Says, dad, you spend more time reading old newspapers than current newspapers.

And so it's part of the job of a researcher and a story.

How many people realized in 1915 there was a, riot, to some degree, to some proportion between blacks and Jews in that old Black Bottom neighborhood.

How many people knew that?

1915 a couple of hands, but not many.

We haven't always agreed.

Now, what Professor Gates talks about is, you know, coalitions and marriages are kind of like the same thing.

Lord knows I don't always agree with my spouse, Kemp.

She said, you should know, I should.

And I should.

I'm getting closer to that.

29 years, almost 29 years of marriage.

The point is, there have been point there have been forks in the road where blacks and Jews in Detroit haven't always agreed.

We agreed largely, on labor issues.

I talked about marriage, sugar and and, George Crockett, and others, Ernest Goodman and others.

But we are also the home Detroit, the Nation of Islam formed in 1930.

We're also the city that birth the Republic of New Africa in 1968.

Both movements that at one time had a significant black following.

Both of those movements were nationalist movements.

They weren't necessarily interested in coalition building with Jews.

And Gentiles.

And so there had been, hiccups in the road.

I'm reminded what, Rabbi, Richard Hertz of Temple Bethel in 1964 said, about this Black and Jewish coalition, particularly in the space where we live, we have a common set of histories, and we should not allow ourselves to be, picked off, picked apart by what he called at the time in 1964, white southern segregationists.

We haven't always agreed.

For the most part, we I think in my mind, I think our best hand is collaboration.

I love the work that the Jewish Federation of Detroit is doing, bringing high school students, those of whom happened, who happened to be Jewish, those of whom happened to be African American, and sharing with those teenage high school students.

Some of the history that we've talked about, tonight, some of the history that Professor Gates laid out, in his four part, documentary.

I believe that dialog is, is the key, and we're not going to always agree.

I am 58 now, grew up in the 70s and 80s.

Way before Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

Way before the old West Side along 12th Street.

Although my parents grew up there.

I'm going to be candid at 16, 17 and 18.

I did not know a distinction between, Gentile and Jew.

They were all white to me, and for the most part, we felt like they had their foot on our neck when they had that conversation.

And until we can do that, you know, we're just kind of whistling, you know?

I agree with everyone here.

Assalamualaikum.

Question I want to ask directly is, what can we as a people be able to, and the differences which we see, I have to go into political club.

We live in an advanced stage now.

And our children, if someone young and not knowledgeable on that, what is happening?

What can we do as parents to teach our children to learn, to not grow into a hatred system, to learn what really happened when the brothers spoke about, you know, Palestine and different thing.

How can we teach our children to let them know what caused this problem and what can we do as people about this problem?

Thank you.

So in this algorithmic world where we're sort of surrounded by folks that agree and encouraged to actually other, what is the solution?

And Pastor Hines, I know you talked about this in some ways, but is there anyone who would add, especially the question about, as parents, what would we do?

Here?

I'm sure, one of the things that I try to teach my children is that people can be both powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and that often we see them as one or the other.

And that one of the things that we're listening for when we listen to one another is to hear about where people are vulnerable, even when we think that they're powerful.

The kind of history that we're trying to do, it just, is the yes and model of history where your experience over here, your truth is true and your experience over here is also true.

These things may be in tension.

They may be in direct conflict with one another.

But they're both valid.

And so that's not a, popular position to, to kind of, you know, type of history to do at the moment.

But it's super important.

So, yeah, very Jewish, very Jewish, completely.

Can I know we have another question, but did you want to jump in really quickly?

Really quickly?

One of the things that, was has been striking, to me, in my adult life, as I learn more about the city's history, is that most of the stuff.

And I think if I had a quick raising, rate, a raise of a hand, most of the stuff that I, we've learned about history, we didn't necessarily learn in the K-12 experience, at least not at Detroit Public Schools.

And let me be clear, I'm a Detroit Public Schools graduate.

I'm a booster.

There are several of us that worked with Doctor Vitti, the current general superintendent, to infuse more local history into the curriculum.

But if you don't learn it, through the K-5 experience or the, the high school experience, you come with, you go into a boxing match with one arm tied behind your back.

I think the best thing that we can do, particularly in this cultural center area, cultural center area, is visit great institutions like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Burton Historical Collection that the Detroit Public Library and the Walter Ruther collection at Wayne State University.

Lord knows anybody that knows me.

I spent hours and hours and years and years in those institutions.

But it shouldn't have happened.

When I was 30 and 40 and 50 years old.

Five year old should be able to learn that history.

Yeah.

I'm going to talk to you later, because don't mess with Detroit Public Schools.

I'm a I'm a graduate.

I, I'm a fan I mean I yeah, but but but but but this was an institution I know you want to move, but I would I I'm just a witness.

I think we had a black superintendent when I was five years old.

Arthur Jefferson became the first black superintendent of Detroit public schools, did a great job, majority black school boards, my whole K-12 experience.

Yet most of this stuff that we're talking about was not infused in the local curriculum.

Just got to tell the truth.

All right, let's go next.

And then we have some more questions I see popping up okay.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

All of you.

All great panel discussion.

Really enjoying, the dialog, but I wanted to ask the question, once we have taken the steps into having these conversations, these courageous conversations that we, we like to have and our dialog, when do we begin to move forward with true allyship?

Or.

I like to use the word accomplice, because accomplice is if I go down, you go down, we go down.

So how do we get beyond dialog and start really creating some actionable outcomes that really create equity and access and opportunity for all?

Can I can I speak to that?

Yes.

All right.

So, that is a very good question.

Thanks for asking it.

It is also complex because often we're anxious for action, but our trust level is below the ground.

So we go out and we have a, we have an image of what having my back looks like without talking about what it means to have my back.

Right.

So then we're like, yeah, we got you, we got you.

And then, hey, this something anti-Semitic went out, and I ain't seen none of my black people get out on social media and say nothing big.

Oh, I didn't know you wanted me to.

Why didn't I know?

Because we were Russian allyship without even building trust relationship.

And so you have to have both sides of the coin.

You cannot afford to be so anxious, to do the work, that you don't do the work of building relationships.

And the reason why I can say that is because I've been doing this for years, and I've tried both approaches.

And when you go to school that you learn how to put plans together and bullet points and outlines, the first thing you want to do is go in the room and do a bullet point and outline.

I'm sorry I did not build.

Relationships are for bullet points and outlines.

I built them by saying, what's your favorite color and where did you go to school and how was your life experience and and what do you think about this and what do you think about that?

And yes, beyond that, you do the work.

But I want to I want us to please be careful not to understate the importance of building those foundations that are strong when it comes to trust.

Trust is built not by avoiding the heart thing.

In fact, you don't know how much you can trust someone until you have your first disagreement.

I remember when I got on the phone with Rabbi Silverman when George Floyd was murdered, and I was speechless.

I was angry, and I was that type of angry where you can't say nothing.

You should start crying.

Are you going to punch something?

That's how angry I was.

And she sat there and she let me vent to the point that I told her.

I said, listen, I get it.

I feel it.

I understand that other people, you know, they have their position, we have ours.

Well guess what?

We're still in our Egypt experience.

We're trying to live peaceably in the land of our affliction.

And his heart is hard with our faith to to to trust that people who see us for no reason, because of the color of our skin.

It's hard to to trust that they'll have our backs when they've already determined that we're nobody, just off of what we look like.

We had those conversations.

We made it through those conversations.

We became better because of those conversations.

And now she'll tell you, I'll kill a brick if it tries to mess with her.

And it's not about, Israel and Palestine.

It's not about, it's not about one issue or another.

This is not just, my fellow colleague in the in clergy work.

No, she's my friend.

I mean, our daughter took care of her daughter, and our other daughter took care and takes care of her son.

We've eaten together, we fellowship together.

We've marched together.

We've done all of those things.

But they were the result of trust that was built from relationships.

We had to value a better life as a as the beloved community.

Instead of valuing getting just more for ourselves, we had to determine that our value system would include others outside of our own experience in order to ensure that we had a better world and we could heal it.

Amen.

Okay, we have someone at the mic here.

Andy, do you want to.

And then we're going to come to you next.

Thank you so much for your, wonderful comments.

You know, I'm Jewish and I've been in Detroit, my, my Detroit metro area my whole life.

And if you were to ask any person my age or younger or older where their parents went to high school, they would say one of two words Mumford or Central.

And the fact is that, you know, starting in the 60s, there was a great Jewish migration northwest, to Huntington Woods, to, Southfield to West Bloomfield.

And so, thinking of your words, trust and relationships with that type of history, I won't call it abandonment, but it is a history of moving away from the African-American population.

How do you restore trust and relationships that may have existed when the Alliance and the comrade, and that camaraderie was maybe more intense than it is now?

It's a great question.

Coalitions, as I pointed out, are difficult to build.

They're difficult to maintain.

I actually started out with a question about or asked all of what we saw.

Are there some differences in the Detroit experience, as you know, as you just pointed out, for the large part, migration patterns, the, African-American migration patterns followed the Jewish migration patterns before Black Bottom had the moniker that it does.

It was largely, a section of downtown east of downtown Detroit of of European, immigrants, many of them Jewish, but not all of them, African Americans began to move to Detroit, during two major stages of what we call the Great Migration, 19 1919 20, the 1940s and the 1940s.

The black population in Detroit doubles from about 150,000 to 300,000.

What that means is, is that black bottom becomes too big, or isn't that big enough for the sizable African American community?

And I've spent time, at least in my conversation with you tonight talking about ways in which we've worked together, but ways in which there have been challenges.

There are African Americans who will tell you that the, rental rates and black bottom in 1920 and 30 were two and three times what the market rate would call for.

Some of those renters were Jewish, immigrants.

They were Jews, there's no doubt about it.

At the same time, flash forward from 1920 to the 1950s, African Americans who oftentimes would not qualify for conventional, conventional loans, conventional mortgages, bought their first home because Jews were moving off of 12th Street and, and going a term that we all call, land contract here.

Oftentimes Jews would rent, for a period of time, and African Americans became homeowners for the first time.

Now, that's the most people would believe.

That's a good thing.

I think it is.

There are also people who will tell you that Jewish merchants in the Black Bottom area and along to Wall Street and on the further as you go further west side were where were merchants, who who sometimes price gouged African Americans coalitions are complicated.

And coalitions built over time have challenges.

Oh, can I make a plug for a really great book, Lila Corwin Berman, Metropolitan Jews, which argues that even after white flight, the Jewish community remained engaged with the city.

Hi.

This question is from Miss Bowers.

What does, what has been your experience as a black person in a synagogue?

And what does genuine belonging look like for you as a member of a synagogue?

Thank you.

I don't know if you also want to answer.

This is a black Jewish person and an artist in Detroit.

Do you want to do that before you ask your own question?

Oh, okay.

So I describe being black and Jewish as being a part of communities and apart from communities at the same time that growing up, I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and Hyde Park, which is where Obama came from.

And actually our temple is across the street from Obama's house.

And, Rabbi Silverman also grew up in Hyde Park and went to the same temple.

We were the brown skinned kids in a temple of white Jewish people.

And the the comments of prove it, prove your Judaism.

They live in my head.

When I go to temples that are not my own, I find myself trying to still prove so that is that liminal space in between.

We were also the light skinned kids and backyard barbecues where people are like, you talk funny and you know, so I think what I have come to realize, though, is that it is my superpower, that it is this passport into different communities.

We are much more alike than we are different.

We love food.

We love real talk.

We ask really hard questions.

We love music.

We are soulful.

Philanthropy is a part of exactly who we are.

We take care of each other.

We take care of our neighbors and so, the cultures are actually intertwined.

But thank you for asking me that question.

I feel like this is kind of a good segway from that one.

I'm curious for you specifically to me, where it's like we live in the intersection of black and Jewish and a myriad of other things, and I don't want to speak for your experience, but do you think there is a bigger role for us in this time, that we live in this messy middle, or even this missing middle, and, that those of us that hold what kind of feels like an impossibility need to, like, stand and be in the center and kind of usher in these harder conversations because we are impossible.

But we we're here.

We are impossible, but we are here.

I think that's our assignment, I really do.

I find myself in rooms with, white Jewish people, and I find myself as someone who has to speak up about fully understanding the black experience and also understanding, the alignment with oppression, seeing Palestinians as oppressed.

I think that there is a need for acknowledgment of the ache.

You know, the woman, the Latino woman at the end, I think said it so beautifully, like there is tremendous ache on all sides.

Why can't we say what happened on October 7th was horrible.

And what has happened in Gaza is horrific.

Why can't we say those things?

And so if we have been, blessed to hold this dual identity, we have a responsibility.

And it is not just in the Jewish community.

I am a huge part of racial justice movements, and I have sat in so many rooms where there was, you know, Jewish people were invisible ized in so much of that movement.

And there was antisemitism inside of those same rooms where we were fighting against oppression.

And so I feel responsible for speaking up and saying those things.

But I think we have a passport, and I think we have an obligation.

Okay.

So we are closing.

Obviously, we're just beginning.

There's so many people who had their hands up.

I'm so sorry that we didn't get to your questions.

I hope this is the beginning of a conversation.

I found this series is so helpful to ground the experiences that may be personal, the questions that we might have, the conversations that aren't happening.

This liminal other idea is something that Skip gates also talks about in the documentary.

So thank you for coming.

Thank you for engaging.

Thank you to Detroit PBS for hosting us.

Thank you to the Charles Wright Museum for hosting this.

You take care of yourselves and please take care of each other.