← Identity/Crisis
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- [00:01]
Yehuda Kurtzer
What if prayer doesn't work? This question strikes us as a distinctly modern one, an outgrowth of the slow disenchantment of the world. But in truth, the question is an old one and one given. Space to breathe.
- [00:15]
Tessa Zitter
Here from the Sholom Hartman Institute, Thoughts and Prayers is a new podcast that explores what Jewish prayer means and why it still matters. Join host Rabbi Jessica Fisher as she weaves together stories, classic texts and conversations with leading rabbis and thinkers like Yossi Klein.
- [00:31]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Halevi Judai is about the democratization of the spiritual of revelation.
- [00:36]
Tessa Zitter
Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt.
- [00:37]
Terence Johnson
I was representing the second gentleman Emhoff.
- [00:40]
Tessa Zitter
As his rabbi on that stage.
- [00:41]
Terence Johnson
What you had in that moment was.
- [00:43]
Tessa Zitter
The pluralism of America and Rabbi Josh Warshavsky.
- [00:47]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Prayer helps me be the best version of myself. It helps me figure out what do I need in my spiritual backpack.
- [00:53]
Tessa Zitter
Thoughts and prayers inspiring new connections to Jewish prayer in a changing world. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:00]
Yehuda Kurtzer
When Jews were powerless, they stand out because they are the powerless and the vulnerable and therefore they're deserving of persecution. And when our intellectual and moral climate changes such that the worst offenses that you can commit in the world are colonialism, then the Jews are the best representatives of that kind of colonialism and they deserve to be despised. So I guess the core question here is like, how do we get back to a little bit of a less mythologized version of who we are to each other?
- [01:31]
Terence Johnson
I do think there is a preoccupation with mythologizing Jews in America. And often when there's a huge disruption anti Semitism, say in African American communities or anti black racism in Jewish communities, usually two men fighting over something and it's often around power.
- [01:53]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Shalom Harman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording on Tuesday, November 25, 2025. I want to express my gratitude to the Charles H. Revson foundation for supporting the Sholem Hartman Institute's digital work, including Identity Crisis. So a few weeks ago I participated in the SAPIR debates at the 92nd Street Y here in New York City. We'll put a link to it in the show notes if you're interested in listening to the whole thing. The debate was a four person discussion, two on two, moderated by Brett Stevens. The question was about whether Zionism has a future on the American left. Former Congresswoman Kathy Manning and I argued yes. And the journalists Batya Ungur Sargon and Jamie Kirchik argued, no, the setup was difficult. Jamie and Batya were arguing, coming from the right, that the left was a lost cause. Cathy and I were arguing that it's bad for America to allow that kind of partisanship to divide the Jewish community and its interests, and that we were invested in in fighting back against those who would insist that Zionists could not be part of the Democratic Party or the cultural Left. In essence, the sides didn't fully line up against each other. It was still a spirited discussion and thankfully, mostly civil. There was one moment, though, in the discussion that made me quite uncomfortable. Then I haven't stopped thinking about it, and it provides a useful opening for today's discussion. At one point, Bret Stephens elevated a question from the crowd about the breakdown in the Black Jewish Alliance. We'll talk about that a lot today and what that breakdown portends for the future. Kathy, congresswoman from North Carolina, said that she felt that there had been too much reliance on old historical narratives, like nostalgia for when blacks and Jews marched together in the civil rights movement, but that we had not caught up to political and demographic changes. I added, based on a conversation with a black civic leader, that I felt that we in the Jewish community were abandoning our historical work to sustain democracy through support of key institutions and through relationships in the black community, and that we were doing so in part because of our fears and our sense of isolation. At this point, Jamie Kyk snapped at me, you think it's the Jews who have abandoned the black Jewish relationship? And Baya Angar Sargon laughed. You can hear it in the transcript. It's a really uncomfortable moment. Now. Part of me is grateful that that exchange happened out loud. Things of those sensitivity are rarely aired out loud and discussed in public. And since the recent history of what has happened between blacks and Jews in America is so complicated, it was actually good to get multiple perspectives on the root causes out in the open. But the exchange also made my skin crawl, in no small part because none of us on the stage were black and because I felt in my interlocutors a kind of self righteousness in the cause of Jews in America, like an embrace of the feeling of righteous innocence in the breakdown of this relationship. I was so surprised by it and I kind of felt embarrassed to hear it. Worst of all, I think I came away feeling that the pathway towards productive partnership and reconciliation between these two communities is not going to come about by partisan analysis of who's at fault, but by the kind of deliberative relationship building work that will never manifest as spicily On a debate stage. It's an uncertain and sometimes ugly moment in the atmosphere around the American Jewish community and the question of who are our friends and who are our allies. I can't tell you how many Jewish communal professionals and rabbis told me some version of feeling abandoned by their non Jewish neighbors, colleagues, friends in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. And even when some of those relationships remained intact, they've been showing a lot more wear and tear as the war in Gaza stretched on. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL wrote earlier this year that, quote, it's a sad truth that so many of our self described allies simply disappeared or deeply disappointed us when we needed them. In this environment, we have no choice but to concentrate our energies like a laser beam on our core purpose. The reason why the ADL actually was founded so many generations ago to protect the Jewish people. This op ed was cited in news reports that the ADL had removed its language about protecting civil rights from the what we do section on their website. Now you can argue about who started the latest round of two minority communities in America visibly distancing themselves from one another, but it appears to be happening on a national level. Now. There's no doubt that the local story is always more complicated than the national one. There are thousands, I'm sure of inspirational, good partnerships on the ground and that on the political extremes there are also good intersectional alliances that are based on their core commitments. I think I'm more concerned about the messy middle, as I usually am in this era of increased polarization. I think on most issues the Jewish community is at a kind of inflection point. Does the way forward require of us a dramatically different strategy than the Jewish community had in the past? A new strategy entirely, a re upping of what once worked and ultimately, who are we going to be able to identify as our fellow travelers? In the work ahead, I got to know Professor Terence Johnson through a partnership we here at Hartman established in trying to bring some new approaches to Black Jewish relationships to scale. First, we did an experimental program together that involved bringing together a small cohort of Black Jewish and Black Jewish leaders for travel to the Deep south and then to Israel. More recently, over this past summer, we did a study program for folks working in the Black Jewish space that took place at Harvard Divinity School. That's where Terrence Johnson is the Charles G. Adams professor of African American Religious Studies, professor of African and African American Studies, and Director of Religion and Public Life. His broad research interests on African American political thought, ethics, American religion and the role of religion in Public Life does a deep amount of interdisciplinary work. He's the author, I think the most recent book is Blacks and Jews in An Invitation to Dialogue, written together with Jacques Berlinerblau, winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award for Association for Ethnic Studies, as well as books on black religious radical thought, religious culture of African and African diaspora people, and a lot more. Terence, thanks for coming on the show today. I hope I did okay to your very extensive and thorough bio and HC you're great.
- [08:36]
Terence Johnson
You're great.
- [08:37]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Terence, maybe we could start with how we got to this conversation. What do you think happened over the last, let's take even 20 years, because there is a nostalgic story that at least is told frequently in the Jewish community about black Jewish relations that there was a heyday and it is no longer. I have some questions about whether that heyday was actually true. What do you think has prompted what feels like a surfacing of a conversation about the breakdown between these two communities that we're landing in today?
- [09:04]
Terence Johnson
Sure. I mean, it's a great question, and it's really difficult to answer because I would say on the one hand, you know, 67 was a huge sort of rupture in what Jacques and I call ongoing kind of relationship that was often asymmetrical. And yet people found ways to work together around very particular political issues and particularly mostly elite men.
- [09:26]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Right.
- [09:27]
Terence Johnson
Thinking mostly about voting rights around economic issues and really sort of narrowly focus on these topics. And then after 67, there was a real, I think, breakdown within the leadership, and people just didn't know what to do. So I think that that kind of lingered. And then we saw over the last, say, 10 years, a kind of resurfacing of local groups like Rekindo. We saw a lot of activity in Georgia that sort of led to the election of John Alsof and Raphael Warnock, along with Stacy Abrams run for governor. And she was really pivotal in getting those two elected. And then obviously October 7th, I think in some ways expose what people have been really trying to articulate. Right. I think what people were really trying to articulate on one hand, I think a lot of my Jewish friends were saying, saying, well, look, you guys have abandoned us. You don't really treat us as an ally. You seem to come around or resurface when there's a problem. I think for African Americans, a sense in which the allyship ended decades ago. And because we don't live together, we don't really know you. And so we often see you as a part of the system as a part of the power structure. So I think once October 7th came all those kinds of latent beliefs and kinds of uncertainties and anxieties just came full light.
- [10:44]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Talk to me a little bit more about 67, because obviously you're referencing the Six Day War, the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, but I don't know, it feels like. Feels a little bit too simple to me to paint that as the key moment when I would have assumed that the major changes that have happened since the late 60s had more to do with Jews acquiring a new level of social, economic, political mobility in ways that distance ourselves much more significantly from the black minority community, where there was more sense of a shared vulnerability prior. You obviously have white flight. There's so many other social phenomena that have nothing to do with Israel and nothing to do with Jews qua Jews. But that might be also credited pulling us apart. So why does 67 loom so large in terms of your narrative?
- [11:32]
Terence Johnson
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Yehuda and I struggle with it. And the more I sort of read and talk to folk, for some reason, there's something around this collective imagination, around that linked or started with the Exodus narrative that then linked to this kind of moral covenant between African Americans and Jews that they saw linked to sort of this higher kind of principle. And then there's something in terms of the early Zionist writings around socialism, around this utopia, around building social cooperation and kibbutzes at that. For many African Americans, like Edward Blythe, I think he writes something called the Jewish Question back in, like 1897, where he's saying, look, we have to support the emergence of a state in part because we need to protect Jews, but also in part because this will allow us, meaning blacks in diaspora, to also think about a homeland and its necessity. And for some reason, I think it's this notion of having two homes that continues to linger and especially among elites and especially among folk who are on college campuses, that seems to be very central in part because I think it speaks to both in some African Americans mind, sort of the failure of the sort of Exodus story and the failure to kind of extend Yahweh, or God's promise to all people. And I think people can live with, you know, and can debate in terms of Jewish flight from urban areas and even disproportionate amounts to say, of economic growth that African Americans didn't experience. But there's something about, I think, the sort of moral covenant between blacks and Jews that people saw as, oh, this is a Real failure here because of all the things that we actually cultivated and that we could actually, I guess, embrace as our own. I think people felt as if that moral clarity was so crucial to both Jews and blacks. It was like the one thing that even when you tried to kill us, you couldn't take away that light that seemed to resonate. And again, it's all based. Love the utopia. Obviously you know, ideal writing. But even Du Bois is like, ah, now finally we can learn from the rodents of Israel how to care for people, how to provide. He even uses the word health care, how to provide health care to all. And so there was this kind of utopic vision. But I think for people who don't have a land and who don't have economic power, in a strange way, for all of our pragmatism when it comes to politics, that idealism around who we are as a moral people remains very, very strong. Which is why even when people don't even go to black churches, they still have this kind, strange, distant kind of connection to black religion and particularly black churches in general.
- [14:17]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Look, I have had interactions and very meaningful ones both in the programs that we created together, but also more generally in other Hartman activities and elsewhere where I speak a lot and teach a lot about that two homes narrative that contemporary American Jews benefit from. I love that story. It's like deep to what I work on all the time and about the existential change for the Jewish people pre Zionism, from a sense of permanent homelessness to this really unique experience of being able to feel at home in the 20th century following the Holocaust, with the creation of the state of Israel, but also in the American story. And I find it to be one of the most thrilling parts of what it means for me to be Jewish. And the resistance I've gotten sometimes from black listeners is, well, that's nice for you. You feel a sense of at homeness. And my identity in America is still rooted in a sense of homelessness and dislocatedness. But I still can't understand, based on how you're talking about this, why that experience can't be viewed as something of a success of the Exodus story by black Americans who might say, look, we are still aspiring to what you've managed to achieve as opposed to an anchor for some sort of resentment because you've reached this place. Then therefore I can't identify with that story. I mean, I was just talking with our team yesterday about Walzer's Exodus and revolution and the whole pattern of exodus politics, oppression to liberation to Covenant to deliverance to the Promised Land. So it might be that, like blacks, Jews find themselves a little bit at a different place on that kind of journey through the Promised Land. But why do we have to be standing in the same place for us to see ourselves as, in some ways, kindred spirits along the same trajectory?
- [16:04]
Terence Johnson
Sure. I mean, I think speaking from like, kind of the Stokely Carmichael kind of perspective, and when we look at some of the letters of what black women are saying in sncc, they often had different perspective. But Carmichael and I think in Du Bois would eventually say, well, wait a minute, you know, we support the exodus, we support a homeland. And the question becomes, what happens to your neighbors who are there? Right. Do we see coexistence? Do we see the democratic promise of. Of America also happening in Israel? And then obviously, with sort of the growth in thinking about post modernity in terms of the rise of, whether it's Foucault and the rise of, say, postcolonial theory, then it was also an added twist in terms of thinking, oh, well, how do they do think about decolonization? And with the influence of Trans Africa, Randall Robinson turns to South Africa. That played a huge role. And for many African Americans, we learned a really difficult lesson when several hundred people, maybe even thousands, attempted to make South Africa as a kind of homeland. And that sort of blew up in many people's faces. And so I don't think it's resentment, but I think it is this notion of, well, if we're going to have this covenant, if we believe in certain principles, then what do you do with your neighbor in Israel? And the reason why I think it's so crucial is in part because for African Americans, right, because the body and because I think ideal theory, in a strange way, are the only kinds of intellectual foundations that we have. This idea of a people and of institutions living up to its ideals, it's been constant, right? So even people talk about, oh, you're always criticizing America. Well, you criticize America. You're often, you're criticizing your own community. And you criticize your own community in part because you are striving towards something better.
- [17:47]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Right.
- [17:47]
Terence Johnson
You're constantly recognizing the limits of what you can do, but also always the potential. And I think for many African Americans, especially for younger folk, this idea of whatever you want to call it, occupation in Israel, it just stands out. And when I talk to young people, I don't talk about Jews as passing or middle class. For some reason, it's Israel. And I do think it's also this idea of America, right, You know, we are a city on a hill. The ways in which we have used sort of the language of the Hebrew Bible to in some ways support our own exceptionalism, our own expansion in the world. I think it just carries a very, very special place for all Americans, but particularly for African Americans.
- [18:28]
Yehuda Kurtzer
You know, this, we've argued about this before. This is very hard for me because sure, sure, on one hand I do identify with seeing my people as having. It's not a biblical trajectory. I'm not a literalist, I'm not a messianist, but I identify with thinking about this as a political journey through a wilderness. On the other hand, some of the way that you are describing as a response almost makes the Jews like the exemplar of something that's gone wrong in the west in ways that feels like, in essence, classical antisemitism. We don't like colonialism. Like when Jews were powerless. They stand out because they're the powerless and the vulnerable and therefore they're deserving of persecution. And when our intellectual and moral climate changes such that the worst offenses that you can commit in the world are colonialism, then the Jews are the best representatives of that kind of colonialism and they deserve to be despised. So I guess the core question here is like, how do we get back to a little bit of a less mythologized version of who we are to each other? Because the more mythological it is, the more that it becomes like, well, look, I guess the Jews became like everybody else and therefore they're deserving of our opprobrium. Like we can't ever get out of it. How come it can't be that the state of Israel is an imperfect project leading towards the liberation of all. And as America is an imperfect project that should be oriented towards the liberation of all, how do we demythologize some of this?
- [20:03]
Terence Johnson
No, that's a really great point. And I will tell you what. Some of my friends who are Afro pessimists and afropessimism is just simply, I mean, it's a number of things, but one way to describe it is a particular kind of critique of the modern west as basically establishing itself on anti blackness. And this idea that blackness is akin to slaveness and that even when say in the U.S. say for example, we elect Barack Obama as first black president, Afro pessimists say, oh, it doesn't matter because nothing happens to the majority of African Americans. And so I would say my friends who are Afro pessimists would say, oh, I totally agree with you. This preoccupation with Israel, they would say, is actually sickening and speaks to our own anti blackness because they would say we don't care anything about Haiti, we don't care anything about Sudan or what's happening in Tigray and Ethiopia. And yet we focus on what many call this white black binary in Israel, which again, is a very bad sort of way to describe it. That's how some people do and say, oh, no, there's a real sickness here that they want to then deconstruct. And so, as I think about this, again as a kind of outsider trying to understand these different debates, I would say one, I do think there is a preoccupation with mythologizing Jews in America. And I think that's in part because the relationship has primarily happened between men. And often when there's a huge disruption in anti Semitism, say in African American communities or anti black racism in Jewish communities, usually two men fighting over something, and it's often around power. And I would say, at least for the athletes who have been accused of antisemitism and have said horrible things, it's often this desire to want to emulate what they think of as actually wielding power in the world. And I don't know how to get around that with them other than to say, well, you realize how deeply patriarchal that is and in some ways very antithetical in terms of how African American communities have operated in part because of certain kinds of powerlessness and yet having so much richness because we've wielded power in various ways. And so I think, on the one hand, that's one issue, and I do think intellectually, right, this idea of thinking about postcolonial theory has led to certain forms of kind of moral purity that make it very difficult then to deal with nuance and to explore power. And the assumption is that if you do hold power, then you are the enemy. And so it will be very interesting to see what happens as quote, unquote, people who hold power look very differently around the world and increasingly are of color. What does that mean in terms of how and if we will hold people accountable? So I think those two things are, I think, are worth sort of thinking through. On the one hand, how black men and athletes and people in the entertainment field are often driving the tension and driving attention apart because of what they might see as a lack and they're trying to gain something. And there's also this kind of purists around the intellectuals, right, who are looking at Postcolonial theory and trying to apply it in these very strict ways. And I'll say the third component, when I talk to people at my church, I would say in the last two years, what they've said is, oh, we hope the world would end and we want to see peace. There wasn't this indictment against Israel. So I do think there are multiple understandings of Israel, But I think what the condemnation we hear are primarily coming from, you know, I would say two particular groups.
- [23:20]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Right. So your two particular groups are like, prominent individuals, athletes, et cetera, as well as from kind of academic circles.
- [23:27]
Terence Johnson
Yes, yes.
- [23:28]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah. So that I want to come back to that, because it's very interesting to unpack. I want to come back to the question of the churches. I want to talk, though, a little bit about vulnerability. And this was something that we stumbled across when we started to do some work together with how do you bring blacks and Jews in dialogue with the present, but also with some responsible relationship to the past, which helps them understand the conditions of the present? You know, when we did our program, and this is a growing sector, I think, of tourism for the liberal side of the Jewish community, is to go visit Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery and maybe Atlanta as well, and really understand that story, the whole Bryan Stevenson set of museums and the lynching memorial, et cetera, to really locate the story of the transatlantic slave trade and the black experience in a deeper understanding of the fundamental vulnerability that black Americans feel in America. And I think that my hypothesis would be that a lot of what may have kind of helped, for lack of a better word, elicit black sympathies for Jews at an earlier stage in American history, was the Holocaust the story of the Jewish people's persecution, a recognition that, like, this is a people that is trying to recover out of this trauma, even though the trauma was not in America. But what we found doing our work together was that those don't line up particularly well for Americans kind of processing their own particular place. Right. That the Holocaust does not do the work anymore of helping to kind of explain or justify the reason for the existence of the state of Israel. It doesn't help. In my experience, black Americans understand the American Jewish story, and as a result, you wind up with this, like, vulnerability, imbalance. Right? Greater sympathy for the black experience, less sympathy for the Jewish experience. Now, I want to be clear. It's not about a competition, and these things aren't supposed to line up. But how helpful do you think those stories of vulnerability are supposed to be in trying to build relationships between these two communities? And if they're supposed to be helpful, what do we have to do educationally to put them in the narrative in a way that'll be productive?
- [25:39]
Terence Johnson
Sure. I mean, I would say that I have always tried to decenter Israel in part because I don't think the masses of people I talk to outside the academy have the same kind of preoccupation with Israel. I think for them, in many ways it is a different set of politics that they're concerned with. And when we think about, say, what would elicit, I guess, mutual understanding, I think we'd have to unpack. Well, how do we in America think about sort of what we would call uplift stories? And what I've been trying to think through, I'm not sure if I'm correct, but I've been trying to argue that for the last, at least since the Clinton administration, when he was proclaimed as the first black president, we have consumed sort of black stories. And obviously it goes much earlier than this, but we consume black stories of this rise from the ghetto. We consume stories around impoverishment, around black crime and, oh, the first black X or Y, you name it, in a way that I think has become very natural and expect it. And I think, therefore pessimist would say it's actually we need to consume those stories in part because it reminds us that we're still a people who are a problem and a failure. And as I talk to students in terms of again, post October 7th, what I find is that there's no real understanding of Jewish history and what one might call the afterlives of the Holocaust. And so we aren't necessarily understanding what's happening in the Jewish psyche outside of the Jewish community. And so there isn't, I think, a threshold for measuring what is Jewish alienation, in part because we don't see those kinds of headlines right in the New York Times or in major publications, but we regularly see the pain and the bloodshed of African Americans and increasingly, obviously now the immigrant. But there's something lingering about black pathology, right, that I think people have just a real fascination with and curiosity and that we consume in ways that we don't do with any other culture.
- [27:54]
Yehuda Kurtzer
You know, in passing, you alluded to the narrative problem, and this is something I just want to double click on, that we've talked about also in the past, which is when we started doing study experiences together. The arc of the kind of Jewish stories, the narrative stories that we can bring to bear from Jewish tradition to help think about the present are fundamentally larger than African Americans can do with their own tradition, in part because I think, as you've explained to me in the past, an enormous amount of what you might call the firsthand testimony of the black experience drowns on the way over, does not survive the trip, and because of the experience of slavery, doesn't get to be written down by folks who are there. And one of the ways you said it to me was like, Toni Morrison becomes a primary source of the black experience even prior to her own lifetime, in ways that feel strange to how you might characterize, usually, primary sources. Can you unpack that a little bit more? Because I think it's such a critical insight in terms of how these communities do tell their stories to one another and in the presence of one another.
- [28:59]
Terence Johnson
Well, it's interesting because, you know, the Crisis again, which comes out in acp, you know, obviously, Black Jewish alliance, you know, Du Bois was constantly fighting with the editors in terms of how do we inform the people of what's happening. And so in many respects, Du Bois and Edward Blyden are using primary sources, are trying to think through how do we understand civilization for people who supposedly don't come from a civilization. And then even we have this huge debate between Melville Herskovitz, who's Jewish, and E. Franklin Frazier, African American professor at Howard, who are arguing about, well, is there a history? Does Africa play a role in black life? And interesting enough, Herskovitz is like, yes, I can see all these retentions from Nigeria, from West Africa, and both Brazil and in the South. And Frazier's like, no, no, you can't say that, because you're keeping us tied to the story that keeps us as a doomed people. We, too, want to become like every other immigrant who can rise up and become American. So there's an interesting, I think, set of politics that played into the emergence of black studies in terms of how people are thinking about primary sources, how we're thinking about the story of whether or not there are African retentions. For some, it's better to say there aren't any, in part because we want to show that we rebuilt ourselves and we're fully American. Others like, no, no, no. There are all these lingering retentions we have to examine. And so while that's happening in closed circles. And again, the Crisis are a great example of Du Bois trying to push this information out into a broader public. But it's not really until beloved when people are having a national conversation around, oh, African enslavement. In many respects, she pulls out of a real story of an enslaved woman attempting to protect her child from Ohio. She takes this one article she discovers and writes this incredible novel as a way to try to say, no, we have to return to this history in ways that for many African Americans, I would say Michael Staub would say the same thing for Jews wanted to kind of keep buried because it signaled too much of our own failure and inability to protect ourselves. And I think Morrison brought out in a way that was just both beautiful, powerful, and also political in terms of looking at how did folks use religion, how did they use the land, and how did they use each other as a way to not only survive, but to have some kind of wholeness, even when they were enslaved. And so I think it becomes very. A different type of studying people when one is studying novels, which I think are great sources, right? They're great sources. Sources when the archives are limited. And yet now there's a whole move to say, well, you know, how do we expand the archives? How do we expand what are primary sources? But I think Morrison really gets credit for bringing in this broader conversation around enslavement and getting ordinary people to start to grapple with it.
- [31:43]
Yehuda Kurtzer
So this gets at the crux of what I think is one of the issues that's raised by the whole vulnerability point, which is, as I've understood, Afro pessimistic thought. But it's rooted in a kind of embrace, in some ways an angry embrace of the ways in which blackness is the negative identity constructed in America. And it's a kind of irredeemable identity, right? It's Blackness is born because white people designate black people as black, and therefore they are other. And it kind of can't be rehabilitated. It kind of creates a kind of cynicism or pessimism about the possibility of reconciliation of an identity that's born negatively. And part of the reason I think that we are. We've seen a breakdown over the last 30, 40 years is that many white American Jews were able to shed some of our version of that story born in Europe, where the Jews were always the Other, against which Western society was built. And in America, we found a place where we didn't have to be the dominant other, in part because blacks were the dominant other in America. And I'm wondering whether the resurgence of antisemitism, I hate to sound opportunistic about, kind of puts Jews back into this place of being the Other. And I worry that there's going to be resentment from the black community of like, oh, you were fine not being the Other for as long as you were able to kind of coast along and be undisturbed. But now that you've been othered again, you want us to be historical allies again. Does it make sense to you, like the pieces that I'm trying to put together here?
- [33:21]
Terence Johnson
You know, I hear you and I would say in terms of this idea of the negative, quote, construction of blackness, you know, look, a lot of people were contesting Afro pessimism. And I would say part of that construction really stems from is when Ariel Gross, who talks about this idea of the construction of anti blackness in our law, that we didn't quite know what the racial differentiations were, but yet we knew what the black was not in terms of freedom. And so in many respects we do see the ways in which our laws then were really built upon. How do we really legally maintain a kind of disempowered people? And I think at this moment how that translates is in terms of I think people are attempting to or wanting to have that history just acknowledged and really grappled with. And I don't know if when I talk to my colleagues, majority of them are not really thinking about American Jews. In fact, they often ask me, why are you involved in this conversation? And I think again, October 7th exposed something about Israel that clearly had ramifications in the US and yet I'm not sure, other than that horrible event that African Americans are thinking about. Well, are Jews the other. I think they're really thinking, okay, how do we deal with this kind of resurgence of what appears to be a resurgence of reconstruction or a resurgence of Jim Crow in ways that are fairly suffocating. And I would say in ways that in some ways people are saying, I'm just throwing up my hands, I don't know what to do. And so I'm not sure when I look at the literature, folk are necessarily engaging white Jews in that very broad sense.
- [35:05]
Yehuda Kurtzer
It's so interesting. You are the third person in the last week who I've talked to about either antisemitism from the perspective of the Jewish community or anti Semitism coming from Catholics, evangelicals in America and now here who have basically said you're not really the focus of the issue. The stuff that you perceive as happening to you is connected to much larger issues that particular communities are wrestling with. In your case, you say what you call direct the reemergence of Jim Crow. What do you think are the bullet points in that, for a listener who may not have thought about that experience, that black Americans may be having a feeling like they're reliving or relitigating a previous point of history. What are the key touch points? Is it immigration? Is it voting rights? Like, what are the major issues that you see as at play right now?
- [35:51]
Terence Johnson
Well, I mean, for the last 10 years, people have been really complaining about and concerned about voting rights, right? This slowly kind of unraveling the Civil Rights act, voter suppression. We saw it in Georgia with Stacey Abrams election. I think, secondly, the election of Trump the second time around, which was so glaring insofar as people are saying, look, he told you exactly what he's going to do. We saw a proposition in 2025, and yet the only people who maintain strident ties to the Democrats were blacks and Jews. And so it was this idea that I think, once again, people are saying, okay, you clearly have no awareness or concern for our safety. And then with sending troops into Washington, which historically has been a chocolate city, again was a sign of fugitive slave act, in terms of who are you gathering? Both immigrants, but also, how will young black boys get caught up, right, in their attempt to quote, unquote, deport immigrants? Then I would say lastly, I think the whole blowing up of the federal government right where we sit, like 300,000 black women affected with that, and also job loss, I mean, it's been pretty horrific. And I think that the result is, I think people are now saying, oh, so many more people were affected. Everyone was okay when people thought, okay, it's simply going to be the immigrants and blacks who are woke, blacks who don't deserve the jobs they have, blacks who are in positions of power. And obviously we see something very different. But if you look at all the major marches, there are very few African Americans present. And part of it is, I think people were kind of just taking a break. There are some people still meeting and trying to galvanize and trying to rethink the moment. But I will say across the board, there was probably a deep sense of like, wow, we really believed in X. We believed in the democratic process. We believed that we had actually gone beyond segregation and racial discrimination or beliefs in blacks as the other. And in fact, we had not moved on. And so I think that has been, I think, kind of shocking, but also gut wrenching. And I think people are trying to figure out what's next. I mean, on the ground, I can tell you there are thousands of people who are looking at all kinds of ways to leave the country and figure out, can we also get a second passport in terms of people just don't feel safe and are concerned about their children. So there's a lot happening that I think isn't as public.
- [38:17]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah. I want to play out a hypothesis which is also complementary to the story that you've told, but I think it adds a different dimension, which is, when you were characterizing before as like, the kind of academic, progressive critique connected to Afropessimism, the colonialist, all of those argumentation, it felt to me, in retrospect, that that kind of reached its apex in the public conversation in 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the movement for black lives, which was connected to, in some ways, very progressive and very radical politics. And one kind of aftermath of that is the public repudiation of those politics. And what was so tricky about that time was to watch political liberals kind of wake up, for lack of a better word, to this very visible story of black oppression taking place in the public sphere and joining in with a political movement that they don't really identify with. In other words, liberals and progressives are not really part of the same political movement, but they lined up with it. And then when they perceived it having a whole bunch of overreaches to their own politics, they backed away from it and retreated back to their liberal politics. And I'll put myself even in my own camp. Right. And I think that what that may be doing is kind of scaring people off of rejoining into major political movements on behalf of black Americans, including black Americans themselves, with that same notion of, like, well, sometimes people come and march with us, and other times when they don't like the way that the story is being narrated by black Americans, they walk out of that story. Does that resonate with you about what happened between 2020 and now? Because that feels like 2020 was, like, a fascinating blip in this history that felt like it might have created a kind of groundswell around a movement for racial justice and then has kind of gotten deflated again.
- [40:16]
Terence Johnson
Yeah. I mean, it seems like that was, like, eons ago, right?
- [40:18]
Yehuda Kurtzer
It was.
- [40:20]
Terence Johnson
You know, I think what's interesting is that the movement really started around, you know, thinking about, particularly issues around gender and sexuality and how do we rethink sort of, like, politics in terms of love? I think that was just too, like, that's not pragmatic. What are you guys talking about? And in some ways, the focus on we want racial justice for, you know, number of people, for certain people, in terms of those who had been murdered, I think overtook the story. And yet there was something much deeper in terms of what was on the ground with blm. And I think, because, again, we were trying to translate it in a way that people can understand, I think it was partially bound to fail in part because it translated into De and I, which a lot of black professors were like, I understand why you want to professionalize it, but I'm not sure that's going to help because it's simply going to mean a few people will get additional jobs, and people can check this box. But it's not the transformative work that people were hoping for. Right. I think people are hoping for, again, a set of leadership models in which, no, it's actually not just one guy running things, but it's like actually a group of people. It's a council of folk. And so I think part of what we saw, I think with the kind of very rapid kind of rebuttal of a large part of white America, particularly Republicans and evangelicals, was this idea that black folk were getting something they didn't deserve and that we were all being forced to abide by their ideologies. And I would say, again, this is not something substantiated, but I would say part of the issue is that there are so many liberals attempting to understand the problem. And I remember all these schools were, I knew about where colleagues, oh, can you talk to our teachers? Talk to our faculty? And everyone's trying to deal with this issue. And it felt on one hand like window duressing. It felt like I understood there was. I think people had good meaning. But I was always afraid that, you know, when you do something so quickly and try to universalize it, there's gonna be a lot of pushback and resentment. And we slowly saw that during COVID Right. And again, like most issues, we don't have public spaces where we can have the kind of critical, honest dialogue. And I just feel like, in part, in terms of anti Semitism, we need stronger kinds of institutions to allow for more robust conversations, to kind of deal with the intimate issues that obviously go back to the Holocaust, but also deal with the ways in which sort of this ongoing otherness, I think, is it Eric Goldberg or Goldstein talks about in terms of whiteness and otherness? Eric Goldstein and Dora Horn, where. How do we actually deal with the intimacy aspects of Jewish life so that other folk, particularly African Americans, can have a glimpse. We don't need to sit and consume your interior lives, but it's like, we don't know that. And so we don't understand all the complications, I would say, of what's going on, not only with Jewish life in America, but also in Israel. And again, I don't want Israel to overtake the conversation because I think it's. But I would say in terms of, for American Jews, we don't have access. So when someone told me, oh, yeah, I have two passports. Again, not every Jewish person has two passports. But it's like, I have two passports because it gave me the reasons. I'm thinking, wow, that concept is so foreign to me in part because even though I might be critical of the U.S. i'm expecting that, yeah, I might get pulled over, I might get shot, I might get murdered, but I'm not expecting to get kicked out. I do think it's a different kind of existential fear that we have not grappled with, because I don't think many of us knew it. And I'm not sure many Jews want to be vulnerable and to tell us that. And yet I think the more information we have, the greater chances we have of pausing and just saying, ah, okay, I hear you. We can still have a difference. But I think the more we can hear and kind of grapple with those kind of essential crises, it just, I think it broadens the capacity for us to actually begin to build something that's not simply, oh, you're the powerful person and we're not.
- [44:19]
Yehuda Kurtzer
So let me let you do that. We're recording this on the eve of Thanksgiving. I could tell you, as an American Jew, I love Thanksgiving. It's like my favorite American holiday. My whole family's story is tied into a certain story of arrival in America in the early 20th century. And it feels very Jewish to me. It feels very American. And I'm also trying to be a good person. So I'm aware that that's not how Thanksgiving codes to many Americans. But I'm going to quote to you from Frederick Douglass, 1852, Fourth of July speech. I'm going to quote it to you, but I'm sure you might know it by heart. Describing the Fourth of July, Frederick Douglass says famously, what to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless. Your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, your shouts of liberty, inequality, hollow mockery, and so on and so forth. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour. Can you tell me what, to you is Thanksgiving? What to the black American is Thanksgiving? In the spirit of narrating our stories in ways that other people can hear, sharing them out in public, what is Thanksgiving to you, Terrence?
- [45:45]
Terence Johnson
Yeah, you know, to be completely honest, it's actually, you know, it's a mixed sort of day. On the one hand, I'm always grateful to spend time with family and friends and to just reflect, particularly on how I see God's blessings in our lives. And it's also a reminder of our kind of bloody creation in this country. And I think part of how I grew up was always recognizing that. That tension, while it grew out of something that is horrific, that it's our job to come to terms with and to wrestle with it, and we may never come to terms with it fully, but to never to forget in some ways. And so I see Thanksgiving as a time of remembrance, remembering as a time of reflection, and also a time of deep gratitude for my life and for my family, even as so many people suffer and just trying to just deal with that. Right. Particularly as a Christian, how do we deal this ongoing suffering with so many blessings in the world?
- [46:46]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah. Let me ask you one last question, which is. This is from your book, Blacks and Jews in America. You say, this brings us to another shortcoming of the phrase blacks and Jews. It lacks a verb. It thus fails to properly illuminate what precisely blacks and Jews do with one another. So tell us, what do you want us to do with one another? We've talked a lot today about history and vulnerability and narrative. We've talked about theories of the black experience, some theories, the Jewish experience. We're doing, I think, some of what you want to have happen, but what would it look like to create a real agenda of what we're meant to do with one another?
- [47:28]
Terence Johnson
Wow, that's a. That's a difficult question. And, you know, I would just say, you know, as a developing kind of argument or thesis, you know, I really. I want us to be able to have these kinds of intimate conversations in order then to grapple with what is so challenging. Right. And in part, we can't have hard conversations because I think we both think that the other is going to, in some ways, put a knife in our back. And this brings me to, I think, part of the question you were asking around October 7th around Israel that I wanted to highlight. I don't quite think people recognize the degree to which African Americans are Just incredibly self critical and incredibly critical of other black folk. And we see that particularly in the black church. And I've talked about this in terms of, you know, even how Baldwin talks about, you know, black folk. There's a deep love and once you establish love, you can do the criticism. And I think so when we criticize America, we're also criticizing ourselves. And I think, I'm not sure, I'm not saying that's healthy, but when I think of the Millionaire march, I saw it as a beautiful occasion and it was a time for deep reflection. And one of my white buddies told me, actually it was Jacques, he was like, you know, I've never known of a people to have a public kind of outing of their own sins and say, hey, here are the ways in which I violated this covenant, now I want to repair. And I've never thought of it in that way where I assumed it was just sort of natural to have the kind of self critique and to do so publicly and in many different publics. And I think because of that, historically Black students, especially HBCUs and elsewhere, they just held their institutions to a very high standard that in some ways it's unrealistic and yet that those are the same standards we would hear routinely either at the mosque or either in our churches. And I think now part of what we're seeing are young folk are wrestling with that. Well, maybe sort of the moral claims and the political claims were too thick and too narrow, but yet that legacy kind of continues. So I think part of what I want to make sure I emphasize to your audience is that this self criticism of whether it's a nation state or whether it's of individuals, it's ingrained in black preaching, it's ingrained in hip hop music, right? And in some ways you see it playing out even on the basketball court in terms of how people are always trying to in some ways push beyond sort of the borders of what they inherited. And so unfortunately, many of us see, I think the continent of Israel, as in 48 or 67, as a really kind of land that's in some ways with people and barren without technology.
- [50:07]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Right.
- [50:07]
Terence Johnson
In terms of that very sort of stereotypical view of. I'm thinking of a portrait by Henry Oswald Tanner where he has a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah and another painting of Judea, this land, you see a few people, but it's just basically just there's nothing there. And part of what I think this moment calls for is I think, a revaluation of how we're looking at both at all nation states, because nation states are changing rapidly. And I think particularly for for African Americans, what does power look like and what does it mean for us in terms of both how we critique, how we use it? Because I think Obama was a great example of the very limits of what you can do with power. And yet it doesn't mean that the project has been defeated or it can't continue to grow. It just means that you're always facing walls again. It's a incomplete narrative.
- [50:59]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Thank you Terrence.
- [51:00]
Terence Johnson
Thank you Huda.
- [51:02]
Podcast Announcer
Here are some other things that are happening at the Sholem Hartman Institute this week. We invite you to join Pathways to Hope, the Sholem Harman Institute's newest initiative that empowers us to envision and build a brighter future for Israel. At a time when conversations about Israel have been marked by despair, Pathways to Hope offers an opportunity to learn from Israeli leaders who are embracing today's realities with vision and courage. In December, in select cities around North America, you can meet some of the young Israeli changemakers from our Hazon program in Jerusalem. Learn more@shelhamhartman.org events and keep an eye out for more moments of hope that we will share in the coming weeks and months. Come work with us. We're looking for a Director of Academic Programs, a dynamic, collaborative and mission aligned scholar who can balance intellectual leadership, program design and organizational excellence. Check out the link in the show notes for more information about this role and other positions available in North America. Do you read our journal sources in print or online? We want to hear from you. Please complete a brief survey by the end of the year to show our appreciation. One lucky winner will receive a swag bag filled with sources, merch and other fun goodies. Complete the survey at the link in the show notes.
- [52:14]
Tessa Zitter
Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Terrence Johnson. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Annie Beyer Chaffetz, researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Seth Stein, with music provided by so called. We're grateful to the Charles H. Revson foundation for supporting the Shalom Hartman Institute's digital work, including Identity Crisis. Transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisisalomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show Notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere Podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.