blogs/brentspodek

I spent the beginning of last week at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Birmingham, Alabama, as a part of a delegation from T'ruah, the rabbinic human rights organization. The memorial (and attached museum) tell the story of America’s domestic racial terrorism, from slavery through Jim Crow, the KKK and right up to our current era of mass incarceration, which imprisons African Americans at five times the rate of whites.

At the same time, our weekly liturgy chanted the Exodus story, holding out the promise that even after hundreds of years of oppressive Egyptian slavery, redemption is possible. It is the story at the very core of what it means to be a Jew.

That certainty, that redemption is possible, felt very far away as I passed through hundreds of metal coffins suspended from the ceiling, each one inscribed with the name of an American county where some people lynched other people because of the color of their skin, and the names of those who were murdered. The names of these black people are recorded so that they will not be forgotten, despite the forces of white supremacy which sought to erase them.

On the grounds of the memorial are replicas of the metal coffins, again with the names of people who were lynched and the counties where the lynching happened. Those coffins are awaiting pick up from the counties named, so there might be a memorial in the place where the murders happened. Of the 800 available, only a handful have been claimed. The coffin commemorating the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis in Orange County, New York lies there with the others, unclaimed.

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I’ve had the opportunity to visit many of the Holocaust memorials around the world - Washington, Berlin, Auschwitz, Jerusalem. When I walk through them, I never have any confusion regarding who I identify with - I visit those sites as a Jew, not a German or a Pole. 

But as a white skinned Jew walking through the National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, I wasn’t sure where to place myself in my own imagination. In some ways, as a Jew, I have more in common with the persecuted of this country - hated by the Klan, vulnerable to the whims of White Christianity. But of course, as a white skinned man, I have more in common with the oppressor than the oppressed, far more than I like to admit. As long as I abide by the social norms, I can travel through the corridors of power relatively unmolested.  

I don’t fear for my safety if I am pulled over by a police officer, I do not face disparate rates of incarceration or premature death and I am not redlined into neighborhoods which lack basic services. I am not oppressed in the way that my black and brown friends are.

However, I do fear that white supremacists seek to kill me, my family and my congregants because of our Jewish values. I watch with alarm as open Jew-haters gain access to the White House. I hear from young Jews on campuses who are held responsible for the actions of all Jews, in America and Israel, in ways that white students are not. I keep cash on hand and passports up to date. I am vulnerable in ways that my white gentile friends are not. 

I spent a lot of time in Alabama thinking about the difference between being oppressed and being vulnerable. As a white skinned Jew in America, I am not oppressed, but I am vulnerable.

Like most – though definitely not all – members of this community, I am a Jew with white skin. So what is a predominantly white Jewish community to do at this moment of rising white supremacy?

I know we need to stop congratulating ourselves because Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Reverend King 50 years ago. I know that I - and all of us - at a bare minimum need to educate ourselves further about the racial dynamics of today. 

Possibly the single most important thing to read is Eric Ward’s article, Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism. Eric spoke at BHA and highlighted the ways that Blacks and Jews are conceptualized by white supremacists. 

Beyond that, books I have personally found useful are The New Jim Crow, about the ways that our criminal justice system grossly perpetuates racial inequity; White Fragility, about how those of us who are white perpetuate injustice by refusing to see how we benefit from it and The Color of Law, about how segregation drives housing policy, even to this day. 

If movies are more your speed, I have benefited greatly from Ava Duvernay’s 13th, about the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom, Just Mercy, which tells the story of Bryan Stevenson, the Alabama lawyer who has secured freedom for dozens of death row inmates with wrongful convictions and perhaps most personally difficult to watch, Beatriz at Dinner, which painfully highlights the dynamics when a Mexican holistic healer finds herself at a dinner by and for rich white people.

Those books and movies speak to experiences of oppression, which I do not know first-hand. I do know vulnerability first hand. I know that I also need to ask my non-Jewish allies to understand the vulnerability I experience in the face of contemporary Christian hegemony and the legacy of Christian violence. Living in the Shadow of the Cross, by Paul Kivel is a good place to start. 

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When it comes down to it, I’ve come to realize I know far less about these issues than I thought I did. 

I do know this though - after more than 600 years of Egyptian slavery, our Israelite ancestors began to make their way out of bondage. They made their way towards the promised land, at best taking two steps forward for every one step back. At some level, that journey took 40 years; at some level that journey is still going on today and at some level, that journey will never be complete because society, made up of flawed and beautiful humans, can never be perfected. 

Yet we Jews are called to march on in the hopes that we will, together, reach that promised land, that America that never has been yet, and yet, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, must be—the land where every person is free.

With blessings,

Rabbi Brent