Thinking about Juneteenth - The Jewish Standard

It’s not naïve to think that we can share interests and concerns and worries and joy across cultural and ethnic and religious lines, or even to think that we can be friends across them.

I think we can, I think it’s not naïve, and I think that Juneteenth is the perfect time to acknowledge it.

In particular, the relationship between Jews and African-Americans, which has flourished at times — particularly during the civil rights movement — and then gone dormant at other times easily could be reinvigorated. We have a lot in common.

When I worked on the story about Yigal Gross and his family donating one of the gems of Yigal’s collection of historically rich publications, the Harper’s Weekly image of a proud Black family, issued in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, I talked to Toniette Duncan, of the Teaneck African American Cultural and Historical Committee. We sat outside in her lovely green garden, the sky impossibly blue overhead, and talked about historical trauma.

She showed me a copy of a page from the 1860 census. It was from Teaneck. In New Jersey. Just three years before the Emancipation Proclamation, and five years before the end of the Civil War. It listed an 8-year-old as an apprentice. And even that was a euphemism, Toniette said. It meant slave. An 8-year-old. In 1860. In Teaneck.

The Atlantic slave trade ended in 1808, but the enslavement of human beings was legal in New Jersey until 1866.

It is almost too horrible to think about.

There is never any reason to compare historic suffering. The Holocaust was an act of extraordinary evil. So was the slave trade. Both have inflicted generational trauma on descendants; even those of us who are not the direct descendants of Shoah victims or survivors see the world through lenses tinged with the knowledge of what happened.

Most Jews and Black people inhabit the world differently because we’re seen differently. Most — certainly not all, but most — American Jews are white. Unless we dress in specifically, stereotypically Jewish ways, we can’t be picked out from a crowd. Black people do not have that luxury. On the other hand, the majority religion, which at its core sees Jews as doomed to hell because we reject their savior, sees Black people as redeemable.

And, of course, we’re all people, capable of deep joy and limitless grief and sometimes pure silliness. That’s true for all of us.

Last month, I went to the Freedom Seder at NJPAC. (Yes, it was closer to Shavuot than Pesach, but why be picky about that detail?)

As Jewish and Black guests sat around tables together, as we went through a special version of the Haggadah that included spirituals and poems by Black as well as Jewish writers, as we ate foods that symbolized both cultures, we realized how well the cultures fit together. We share many metaphors, which means that we share many truths.

Everything isn’t all kumbaya. Of course it isn’t. We all are prickly about our history, and vigilant about letting things — ideas, memories, dreams — we care about dissolve in some larger stew. But we have so much to share and so much that we can create together that maybe we should try. We’re secure enough in our culture and beliefs and worldview to be able to risk trying.

Happy Juneteenth to all of us.

—JP

Opinion

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