This exchange is really incredible. I found it thrilling, and even a little bit embarrassing. As Jews, are we really ready for prime time? Do we deserve this moderator, himself a non-Jew, challenging Obama on our behalf? Deep down, I think this is hardly an issue that's worth national attention. Still, I was touched and thrilled to see it on national TV.
Only in America.
Obama's response was thrilling, too (the good stuff starts around 3:11 in the clip). To see him credit Jews, of all people, for such a big part of his campaign... you could tell he was speaking from the heart. I loved this statement:
... What I want to do is rebuild what I consider to be a historic relationship between the African American community and the Jewish community. I would not be sitting here were it not for a whole host of Jewish Americans who supported the civil rights movement and helped to ensure that justice was served in the South.For Obama, who rarely talks about race, this was a very emotionally open moment. He stood up for himself beautifully, citing the challenge he made to a church full of African Americans on MLK day to confront the anti-Semitism within their midst. I for one heard him make the challenge at the time and was greatly impressed by it.
Now, Obama is not Jewish, he's black. He can challenge the African American community to do their share, but it's not his place to challenge Jews. That burden falls upon us. The vast majority of Jews are not racist -- as Obama pointed out, Jews were major supporters of civil rights. Yet in my last post about Obama, we got gems like this in the comments:
I am not a racist but I don't think a colored person can handle running this country.There were worse things said there, too, including one person who thought he was funny to use the S word. Now, I think 99% of all Jews aren't racist, and that's to our credit. But I think it's a stretch to say that Jews, as a group, have close ties to the black community. How many close friends of yours are Jewish? Now, how many are black? Maybe what Obama is suggesting is that we try to bridge that gap. Whatever bad blood has come between us, we have had ample time to heal. If we can come together, perhaps we are not doomed to repeat the tragedies of the past. In this vein, a new Jewish-black alliance is forming in New York City.
One of the ironies of post-civil rights America is the self-segregation of racial minorities. Racism feeds upon segregation, the lack of interaction between separate groups. It's much harder to hate a group when you have good friends within that group. For Jews, interacting with non-Jews can be a struggle. Some rabbis might even say it's dangerous. But it's one of the most important things we can do. It's important for them, it's important for us, and it's important to who we are and what we are becoming. A Judaism that is 99% by-Jews for-Jews is only 1% relevant to the rest of the world. For Judaism to be sustainable, we must make it more inclusive, more relevant. We can start by reaching out to blacks, to Muslims, to non-Jews, and even to fellow Jews we have pushed away. Let's rediscover the humanism within the Judaism. Let's raise the bar in our own communities. Obama can't do it alone.
