The opening scene in the first of four episodes of the PBS series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” captures a truly wonderful event: a Passover Seder led by culinary genius Michael Twitty that also includes his fellow rock-star Jews of Color Jamaica Kincaid and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, among others. Rabbi Shais Rishon regales the group with a brief accounting of his Black and Jewish ancestry going back to the 1780s — an origin story that would seem to offer a natural entry point into the history of Black and Jewish life in America, at least through the 20th century.

Except we never hear from him again — or any other Jew of Color seated at that table.

What we do get in the four-hour series presented by Harvard historian and “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a reductive depiction of the histories of Blacks and Jews as two separate groups. That’s despite the incessant reminder that I, and countless other Jews of Color, including those seated at that Seder table, have been making for decades: “Blacks and Jews” is a misnomer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Jews can be Black and Blacks can be Jews — and you cannot talk about the relationship between the two without acknowledging those who inhabit that intersection and have been influencing each group’s attitudes about the other for millennia.

Someone who has lived in both of those spaces all his life is University of Connecticut philosophy professor Lewis Gordon, who describes the binary as endemic in academia.

“They’re really invested in an ongoing stereotypical discourse, in which Blacks are represented by Christians and Jews are represented by whites,” he said. “Ultimately, they’re always talking about it as ‘Blacks and Jews,’ even when Black Jews are in the room.”

To be sure, there are other Black Jews in the program’s interview rooms, including Rabbi Capers Funnye of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. But Funnye is one of many luminaries asked to comment on facts, incidents, or dynamics specific to one or both of the communities, rather than on the history of his own: a historically rich congregation that has served as a bridge between largely Black Israelite groups and predominantly white Jewish denominations.

And Funnye aside, Israelites aren’t mentioned at all, even as Israelite communities have crossed paths with mainstream Jewish congregations around the country for more than 150 years — a history the producers told me they were aware of but didn’t have the time or space to address.

“The Hebrew Israelite community is so complicated in and of itself that it felt almost like we could only bite off just the smallest piece of it,” co-producer Sara Wolitzky told me over Zoom. “We didn’t want to get that wrong, because it’s such a complicated set of experiences in its own right.”

That may be, but that’s like saying Jerusalem is claimed by both Jews and Palestinians; let’s talk about Tokyo instead.

As for that binary discussion, the series is competently told and offers deep dives into areas not widely covered in other Blacks-and-Jews works. In particular, it recognizes that Black and Jewish allyship wasn’t always a one-way street, in which more privileged Jews came to the aid of downtrodden Blacks. In the early 20th century, it notes, Black newspapers editorialized against pogroms in Europe and against the rise of Nazism.

The vein continues with the recording of Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching standard, “Strange Fruit,” though in a curious understatement it describes its Jewish songwriter Abel Meeropol — writing as Lewis Allan — as a schoolteacher, rather than as the fiercely progressive adoptive father of the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who also wrote lyrics for Paul Robeson.

A lesser-known story the series does allow room to breathe is that of the other Brown v. Board of Education: Esther Brown, a Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, whose successful school-desegregation efforts in partnership with African American parents helped lay the groundwork for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case — named, as it happens, for a different Brown.

To each of these peaks of progress and partnership are valleys of dispute and discontent. Jewish support of Black entertainers was often accompanied by economic exploitation; Jews fighting against restrictive covenants were undermined by others building whites-only Levittowns.

The alliance reached its zenith, of course, in the Civil Rights Movement, though the program largely confines that story to the 1960s, omitting crucial Black-Jewish collaborations that preceded it — including that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Jewish adviser and fundraiser, Stanley Levison. And while it briefly mentions one Black Jewish civil-rights leader, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Chuck McDew, he’s described as a “Jew by choice” — a moniker not used in reference to Jews in the program void of melanin.

At least he’s included. Sammy Davis Jr., who was also intensely involved in the movement, is nowhere to be found.

“Sammy Davis was a convert, right?” Wolitzky said, suddenly imposing a standard that apparently wasn’t a problem when talking about McDew, whose Judaism very much informed his decision to become a movement leader. “When you’re talking about Black Jews or Jews of African descent, there are so many different versions of that. Highlighting only one example like a Sammy Davis Jr. can misrepresent that.”

I’m sorry. You can laugh at, laugh with, or make one-eyed–Black–Jewish–Nixon-loving jokes all you want about Sammy, but you can hardly deny he was a major force in bringing awareness to the entire world — let alone to Blacks and Jews — that a person could be both, and proud of it. There is no way to deny his existence shaped the attitudes of both Blacks and Jews about the other.

Following the movement came the inevitable breakup, with Civil Rights morphing into Black Power and white activists expelled. A particular flare-up is highlighted in New York’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville school dispute between largely Jewish teachers and Black parents. Yet again, a key figure in that conflict who would later become a Black Jewish darling of mainstream Judaism is missing: Julius Lester, who during the dispute was accused of stoking antisemitic flames on his radio show before his Conservative conversion two decades later.

The series finally does return to Black Jews in the final episode, briefly, to recount Israel’s airlift of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, an act presented as if a more than 2,000-year-old community had suddenly been discovered. That segues into the revelation that there are Black Jews in America, and that it is suddenly acceptable to be one — a conversation that is quickly swallowed up by euphoria over the biracial phenomenon of Barack Obama.

If it sounds like I’ve been incessantly harping on where are the Black Jews?, co-producer Phil Bertelsen expressed exactly that.

“Do you have any questions beyond that?” he asked.

I did. I was curious about the mechanics of the production, and whether or not he and Wolitzky had documented how many times they showed the alliance holding hands versus reaching for each other’s throats.

“I didn’t count them,” he said.

Viewers don’t have to either; we get the point. It’s “I love you,” “I never want to see you again!” “I love you…” and on and on. And in that, the series is instructive. What’s missing is a strong summation that countless others who have written about the perpetual Black-Jewish makeup-and-breakup ritual have noted: If the two communities didn’t truly care for each other, they wouldn’t be talking about each other so much.

That’s something nearly every Black Jew I’ve ever met would tell you — including the ones at the Seder table. It’s too bad they didn’t get the chance.

The post The PBS series ‘Black and Jewish America’ gets it right — except the Black and Jewish part appeared first on The Forward.

Public schools have been barred from sponsoring official prayer since the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, a landmark decision that cemented the principle of church-state separation in American law.

Now, lawmakers in several states are advancing measures that aim to bring prayer back into public schools — with potential to reverse decades of precedent as politicians push for Christian prayer to return as a commonplace part of the school day.

In Tennessee, a bill introduced last month would require public schools to set aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of “the Bible or other religious text.” Students would opt in to the prayer period by getting their parents to sign a consent form, which also requires participating students to waive their right to sue.

Texas enacted a nearly identical law last year, empowering school boards to institute prayer and Bible-reading periods in schools across their districts by March 1 — a move more than 160 religious leaders urged school boards to reject in an open letter last month.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton encouraged students to use the time to recite the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.”

In Florida, a proposed amendment to the state constitution would allow students and teachers to lead prayer over a loudspeaker at school-sponsored events — even though the Supreme Court ruled student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games unconstitutional two decades ago.

Meanwhile, a federal bill introduced by Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.) last month would withhold federal funding from public schools that “restrict voluntary school prayer,” and new guidance from the Department of Education released last week allows teachers to pray with students.

Nik Nartowicz, lead policy counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the Supreme Court’s church-state separation precedents like Engel v. Vitale aren’t in immediate jeopardy — but they are steadily being undermined.

“Teachers have a little bit more right to pray in public schools than they did last time. And then it just kind of slowly builds,” Nartowicz said. “The very principles of religious freedom in public school are very clearly under attack.”

A Jewish plaintiff

In 1951, the Board of Regents of New York proposed that public schools start the day with what it called a “non-denominational” prayer. Students were able to opt out with a parent’s signature.

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen,” the prayer read.

Five families sued, arguing that the school-organized prayer violated their constitutional rights. They came from a range of religious backgrounds, including Judaism, atheism, Unitarianism and humanism.

But the case quickly took on a Jewish character, as a Jewish parent named Steven Engel became the lead plaintiff, and a broad cross-section of Jewish organizations became involved with the case. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith and the Synagogue Council of America — which represented 70 Jewish organizations spanning Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — all filed briefs urging the court to strike down school-sponsored prayer.

According to Bruce Dierenfield, author of The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America, when the court released its decision the blowback was intense — and, at times, antisemitic.

The Supreme Court received the largest amount of hate mail in its history. Politicians called to amend the Constitution and impeach the justices, and 15 states refused to immediately discontinue prayer and Bible reading in their schools. An angry protester burned a cross in plaintiff Lawrence Roth’s family driveway.

“Some people say this case produced more of a backlash than almost any other case in American history,” Dierenfield said. “It seemed to be the death knell of ‘Christian America.’”

A changing landscape

In the decades after Engel, the Supreme Court repeatedly reinforced the ban on school-sponsored prayer, controversially ruling that even required moments of silence could be unconstitutional if intended to encourage prayer.

That line shifted in 2022. The court sided with Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach in Washington state who had been placed on leave for praying at midfield immediately after games, sometimes joined by players.

The school district’s actions “rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”

The Kennedy ruling “was kind of a slap at the absolutism of Engel,” Dierenfield said. “It epitomizes somewhat of a new day.”

The decision also hinged in part on disputed interpretation of facts: The majority argued that Kennedy had engaged in “short, private, personal prayer,” while the dissent said he prayed with students in a setting where they could feel pressured to participate.

The case highlighted the often-blurry line between voluntary and coercive prayer, a tension made more complicated by peer pressure and the authority teachers and coaches hold over students.

According to Nartowicz, teachers and students are free to pray or read religious texts as long as they don’t disrupt or pressure others — but that boundary is crossed when teachers pray with students. Even though new policies make prayer and Bible-reading periods opt-in, he said, the practice can still feel coercive.

“If a teacher’s praying, because teachers have so much control over students, a student might say, Oh, I need to pray in order to make sure I’m in the good favor of so-and-so to get a good grade in their class,” he said.

Rabbi Michael Shulman of Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville, Tennessee, who wrote an op-ed speaking out against his state’s school prayer bill, shares similar concerns.

He said children at his congregation are often the only Jewish students at their schools, and a school-sponsored period for prayer would only worsen their feelings of alienation.

“Anytime religion and government mix, there’s a danger of signaling that this is what the state is promoting — which beliefs are normal, which ones are not,” Shulman told the Forward. “So when public schools, that are state institutions, promote this, it really changes the meaning of what ‘voluntary’ is.”

‘Exactly the right time’

School prayer advocates are explicit about their goal: They want the Supreme Court, which currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, to take up their case.

It’s unclear if the court will choose to weigh in. In November, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a case where a lower court had upheld a ban on broadcasting a pregame prayer over the loudspeaker at a high school football game.

But proponents of school prayer aren’t giving up. The Tennessee bill states that “the idea of separation of church and state departs from the religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of Tennessee” and lists 11 Supreme Court decisions, including Engel, as examples of rulings that it says conflict.

“I think this is exactly the right time to have this issue brought back into the public square, both because our Supreme Court has, I think, more properly aligned in most recent decisions and because I think we just need to have prayer back in our schools,” Rep. Gino Bulso, the bill’s sponsor, told The Tennessee Conservative.

Meanwhile, Paxton has pledged to defend in court any school district that implements a voluntary prayer period.

For those who remember how fiercely Engel divided the country, a new showdown at the Supreme Court feels almost inevitable.

“I sit on tenterhooks all the time about seeing that somebody’s going to bring a suit saying that they have the right to have organized prayer in public schools. I would not be the least bit surprised to see a case — see the Engel case come up again in the Supreme Court,” Jonathan Engel, Steven Engel’s son, said in a 2023 documentary. “So we may have to fight this battle again.”

The post Proposed laws aim to test the Supreme Court’s ban on public school-sponsored prayer appeared first on The Forward.

Gunmen killed three people and abducted a Catholic priest and several others during an early morning attack on the clergyman’s residence in northern Nigeria’s Kaduna state, church and police sources said on Sunday.

Saturday’s assault in Kauru district highlights persistent insecurity in the region, and came days after security services rescued all 166 worshippers abducted in attacks by gunmen on two churches elsewhere in Kaduna.

Such attacks have drawn the attention of US President Donald Trump, who has accused Nigeria’s government of failing to protect Christians, a charge Abuja denies. US forces struck what they described as terrorist targets in northwestern Nigeria on December 25.

The Catholic Diocese of Kafanchan named the kidnapped clergyman as Nathaniel Asuwaye, parish priest of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Karku, and said 10 other people were abducted.

Three residents were killed during the attack, which began at about 3:20 a.m. (0220 GMT), the diocese said in a statement.

A Kaduna police spokesperson confirmed the incident, but said five people had been abducted in total and that the three people killed were members of the security forces.

“Security agents exchanged gunfire with the bandits, killed some of them, and unfortunately two soldiers and a police officer lost their lives,” he said.

Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement on Sunday that Nigeria’s security crisis was “increasingly getting out of hand”. It accused the government of “gross incompetence” and failure to protect civilians as gunmen kill, abduct and terrorize rural communities across several northern states.

A presidency spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

Pope Leo, during his weekly address to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square, expressed solidarity with the victims of recent attacks in Nigeria.

“I hope that the competent authorities will continue to act with determination to ensure the security and protection of every citizen’s life,” Leo said.