Jews Archives - Institute of the Black World 21st Century

Eva Borgwardt in Manhattan in December at an event calling for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

Black and Jewish activists have allied for decades. What Now?

By IBW21Editors' Choice

The Palestinian cause has revived a partnership forged in the civil rights era — and also created new tensions. By Daniel Bergner, The New York Times — Eva Borgwardt first…

January 22, 2024

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Protesters hold a banner during a Jewish solidarity march across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City on January 5, 2020.

As Jews, We Must Reject White Supremacy’s Efforts to Pit Us Against Other Groups

By IBW21Commentaries/Opinions

Amid fear and mourning, many Jewish groups are turning toward anti-racist solidarity to create real safety. By Jay Saper — I was proud to march against anti-Semitism with tens of thousands of New Yorkers on Sunday in the wake of the heartbreaking attacks on Orthodox Jewish communities from Monsey to Jersey City to Brooklyn. While Sunday’s march displayed powerful unity in our rejection of anti-Semitism, it also underscored a central…

January 7, 2020

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As Reform Jews, we must consider reparations for American slavery

By IBW21Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Jonah Pesner, Chicago Tribune — Americans in general and faith groups in particular increasingly find ourselves reckoning with our nation’s bigoted history and struggling with how to dismantle the racist systems and structures that persist to this day. As the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, it’s time for the Reform movement to join this conversation. It’s time for us to talk reparations. When I first read Ta-Nehisi…

December 11, 2019

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Defiant: Jesse Owens after winning the 100m at the Berlin Olympics, August 1936

The Hitlers in Our Own Country

By IBW21Commentaries/Opinions

How the Nazi persecution of Jews shaped the African-American freedom struggle. By Clive Webb, History Today — Martin Luther King delivered his celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on 28 August 1963 at the March on Washington. Less well known is that one of the other speakers that day was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a political émigré who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His presence at the march demonstrated…

July 10, 2019

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Woman stands in the doorway of then new Historic Colored Entrance at the Lyric Theatre, in Birmingham, Ala

Why Jews should support reparations for slavery

By IBW21Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Rabbi Sharon Brous — There is 2,000-year-old rabbinic dispute over what ought to be done if a palace is built on the foundation of a stolen beam. One rabbi, Shammai, argues that the whole structure must be torn down, the beam retrieved and returned to its rightful owner. No home can flourish on a foundation built illegally and immorally. Another rabbi, Hillel, offers a different take: What sense does it make to demolish it? Let the thief pay for the beam, considering its full value as the foundation of what is now a beautiful home. Neither argues that you can pretend, year after year, generation after generation, that the beam wasn’t stolen.

March 10, 2018

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