Jaja

Black-Jewish Relations in the American South
BLACK ZION: AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS WITH JUDAISM (E184.36.A34 B53 2000)
* The analogy of experiences of blacks and Jewish people: common histories of dispersion, bondage, persecution, and emancipation. (p16)
* The concept of diaspora, for ex., which has traditionally referred to the global dispersion of the Jews among the gentilenations, also describes the voluntary and involuntary migrations of blacks from Africa to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas for over four centuries in the modern era. (p16)
The Lonely Days Were Sundays- Reflections of a Jewish Southerner (F220.J5 E8 1993)
* What do we really know about the relationship between blacks and Jews? The interviewing he did in the black communityrevealed that Jewish attitudes and psychology are shaped by the ETHOS we grow up in. (p7)
* When black people saw the peddler, they said to themselves, “Here is a man with an accent (not southern), who doesn’t own slaves, who will smile at me, serve me”. (p7)
* Since the ex-slaves were customers, they were both linked economically. (p8)
* Other ways blacks and Jews were linked: Listen tothe spirituals—“Go Down, Moses, Let my people go,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”—blacks in the South were moved by the story of the Israelites struggling out of the land of bondage into the land of freedom. Moses and the children of Israel were very much a part of the black psyche, and the Old Testament connected blacks and Jews to each other. (p8)
SouthernJewish History (F220.J5 S68 vol. 9 2006)
* Trying to fit into America’s black-white racial division presented Jews with contradictory feelings. Jewish navigation of this fissure became the most significant aspect of adjusting to U.S. culture. (p. 206)
* At times blacks and Jews needed each other. At other times, this was an alliance of convenience—Jews maintained their minority connectionand blacks their ties to an influential voice. The so-called “Golden Age” of black-Jewish relations was necessity, convenience, and other factors converging at that moment in time. The alliance existed but the individual aspirations of each as well as the societal structure limited it. In that sense, tensions would always be just beneath the surface ready to appear. (p207)
* Furthermore, racismand not anti-Semitism was a basic element in America. Jews were accepted into the white majority, were upwardly mobile, and did not face the debilitation discrimination of being black in a society that valued whiteness. Essentially Jews made it in America and blacks were held back. (p207)
Jews in Early Mississippi (F350.J5 T87 1983)
* It is understandable that the Northern Jew fought forfreedom and the abolition of slavery. After all, one of the most important of Jewish holy days is Passover, the festival of freedom, which commemorates the emancipation of the Hebrews from slavery under the Egyptian pharaoh. Furthermore, the preamble to the Ten Commandments state explicitly [Exodus 20:2]: “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”Here God’s principal role is that of Emancipator. Then, too, the Jew knew well from his history what oppression meant. In fact, the reason for his coming to America was the lack of civil rights in the Old World. (Introduction xvii)
* What sociological phenomena would lead the Southern Jew to fight so fervently for the principle of slavery? Why was he willing to sacrifice his life so readilyfor a cause that he knew was contrary to religious principle? In their former European lands of oppression Jews actually sought to avoid conscription by any means; yet here in the South they fought willingly and with zest. (Intro xvii)
* Did Jew’s support for the Confed. stem from gratitude to that part of his newly-adopted country that supplied him with such valuable rights and privileges and...