Overcoming an interracial Tower of Babel
journal |March 13, 1992
A photograph three decades old became an unexpected source of inspiration for a group of teenage participants in an interracial education program.
A dozen African–American students from The Frederick Douglass Academy, a year–old public school in Harlem, visited The Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last week.
As part of an ongoing collaborative project sponsored by The Jewish Museum, they studied the biblical story of the Tower of Babel with students from the Jewish day school.
After viewing a Torah scroll, the students analyzed the account from Genesis, which was picked to represent the value of communication and cooperation. The black and Jewish teens also shared a pizza lunch, cleared their tables together, and sang some Jewish songs in the school’s chapel.
But, said one visiting seventh–grader, the activity that made the most vivid impression was the welcoming speech by Peter Geffen, the school’s founding director.
Standing in a wood–paneled social hall, Geffen held up a black–and–white enlargement of a photo showing Heschel, the late rabbi–philosopher for whom the school is named, in the front row, with Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders during a 1964 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.
Geffen briefly described Heschel’s life, including the rabbi’s interest in such social issues as equal rights for African Americans.
Few young blacks know of the Jewish role in the civil rights movement, symbolized by the photograph, said Patrick Best, a student at the Douglass Academy.
“I learned there was a Jewish person who knew Dr. King,” he said. “I bet you my mother and my father probably didn’t know that.”
Some 60 students from the Harlem school, the Heschel School and the Central Park East Secondary School have taken part in a series of meetings since November in conjunction with the Jewish Museum’s upeoming exhibition, “Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews.”
The exhibit is co–sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Featuring more than 350 artifacts, it opens March 22 at the museum’s temporary quarters in The New York Historical Society, Central Park West and 77th Street in Manhattan.
Sherwin Barrow, left, a student at the Frederick Douglass Academy, was among a dozen seventh–graders from the Harlem public school who visited the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan. With him are students Jonathan Fisher and Sam Feinstein-Feit. Photo/Helayne Seidman
Students from the three elementary schools are making first–ever visits to each other’s classrooms and are studying facets of Jewish and African–American culture. They are reading bigraphies, expressing their personal experiences through prose, poetry and improvisational theater, and creating joint artworks to be displayed at the museum.
The students have learned about the common experiences Jews and blacks have as members of minority groups.
Best said he was struck by the similarity between the Holocaust and the African–American history of slavery.
“We have opened a door” to better understanding, said Tamar Major who coordinates the museum’s programs for Jewish schools. She called the exhibition theme ’‘a springboard“ for the related activities that are geared for the teens.
”We’re having Jewish kids and African–American kids meet each other and work together for a common goal,“ Major said.
Though the exhibition opens in the shadow of last summer’s interracial riots in the Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn, planning began four years ago, before the recent decline in relations between the black and Jewish communities, she said.
Similar educational programs could head off the type of violence that occurred in Crown Heights, Best said.
”If they [offered] something like this in the schools, the situation could be handled,“ he said.
Sam Feinstein-Feit, an eighth–grade student at the Heschel School agreed. Feinstein-Feit said he was ”nervous“ before the first joint program with black students a few months ago.
”Now that I’ve met these kids,“ he said, ”I feel very comfortable.“
If black and Jewish teenagers had met earlier in similar circumstances, he added, ”what happened in Crown Heights wouldn’t have happened."
Posted March 13, 1992 12:00 AM
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