Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

MUSIC:


Ilana Kaufman:
Every Jewish person should have access to Jewish life and we need to do everything we can to make sure that access is unencumbered.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. Today it's my pleasure to speak with Ilana Kaufman, the CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative. We'll be discussing Ilana's Evolve essay, Multiracial Jewish America: Telling Our Stories. Kaufman's essay first appeared as an afterword to the second revised edition of Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, which is a book by Marc Dollinger, a historian at San Francisco State. And Marc was actually a guest on the show back in the summer of 2024. I recommend checking that interview out.
There was a whole saga controversy around the publishing of the second edition of that book. We'll put a link to some of the news coverage in our show notes. But basically when they were going to print around the second edition in 2020, Marc added a 2,400-word edition talking about the Black Lives Matter movement and Jewish complicity in perpetuating racism. And the publisher Brandeis University Press and ended up not publishing it and there was a huge controversy over that. It ended up getting published by by NYU, and just the Black Jewish Alliance writing about it is fraud in many ways. I mean, it's certainly an overly simplistic story to say that Jews and blacks worked really well together in the Civil Rights Movement and then there was a breakup of that over the rise of Black power and the aftermath of the Six Day War and the left's turn on Israel.
But it's also fraught because Blacks and Jews are not separate populations. There have been Black Jews in this country for a long time, and I think that's where Ilana's criticism of the book came from. But what's interesting is that Professor Dollinger gave a very prominent space in his book to a critic of his work, and Ilana will speak to that, speak to their relationship and explain far better than I can why these important questions, these important issues are fraught and it matters how we frame them.
We cover a lot in this interview. If you appreciate the substance and depth of our episodes, consider leaving a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Ratings and reviews really do help people find out about our show.
Okay, let's introduce our guest. Ilana Kaufman is the Chief Executive Officer of the Jews of Color Initiative. Her work sits at the center of Jewish community, racial equity, and justice. Its focus is grant making, research, field building and community education. Her Eli talk titled Who Counts? Race and the Jewish Future, garnered more than 50,000 views. It's really a must watch, I highly recommend it and we will share a link in our show notes. Ilana Kaufman, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.

Ilana Kaufman:
Thank you so much, Bryan. Good to be here. It's really [inaudible 00:04:22].

Bryan Schwartzman:
Oh, great, great. Been reading your work for some time, so it's great to be in conversation. So I'm sure, I guess I feel compelled to tell you a story. You've probably heard a similar story a thousand times in your work and I don't know if it's like people come up to you and offer confessions or something, but because of where we are in time, in place, I'm thinking back January 2009, I covered politics for the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. It was Barack Obama's first inauguration, I had covered the campaign.
My editors say, "Bryan, go out and tell the story of the state of Black Jewish relations in Philadelphia. Go." And I was happy to. I spoke with Federation leaders and civic people and rabbis and Black clergy and head of the local NAACP and the African-American newspaper in Philadelphia. And nobody suggested, "Hey, why don't you include a Black Jewish voice in there?" And I knew for a fact that we have a pretty vibrant Black synagogue locally and it was not considered part of the community by Federation at the time, and I didn't push for inclusion. And it's one of the things I've... Where I kind of failed to tell the full story.
But I know I've heard you talk about this, why is the framing or of dichotomy so harmful? And I think it persists even today, Black on the one hand, Jewish on the other.

Ilana Kaufman:
I love your question and I love your story and thank you for sharing it. It makes me think about when I was working with the Jewish Community Relations Council and I would go out to kind of talk about community relations with Black communities and Jewish communities and I'd be standing there as a Black Jewish person and I'd literally have to sort of say in some ways, forget that I am Black and Jewish because in some ways it complicates how you all have been trained to think about these dynamics because the training and the framing has always been so binary.
The harm comes from, first of all, our US Jewish community is like 2% of the US population depending on how we're counting ourselves and if we're including all of our young people, we're at least 7 million in a country where, again, just 2% of the national population. The United States is multiracial by design and by kind of cultural and community physics, and so part of the harm is in the Jewish community never inviting us as communal members to understand ourselves as multiracial in a multiracial context.
And so I think about myself and my own Jewish education starting when I was five or six or seven years old, going to synagogue and never seeing reflections of Jewish Americans who were not white. And so every conversation we have about intercommunity, interracial dynamics and relationships, the framing we've had just by design suggests that there's nobody in the middle. And the failure to imagine ourselves as a multiracial people means we can't see ourselves in community and we're not looking for ourselves in community because we think we look one way.
The failure of the imagination means that when we are designing programs for American Jewish community or designing efforts to respond to antisemitism, for example, if we're only thinking in a narrow context about who is Jewish, then we're failing to create programs that actually support all Jewish Americans. We're maybe putting ourselves in even a more dangerous situation because we're not able to create unity among ourselves and therefore our challenge in creating unity outside of the Jewish community.
And then I think on just a very deep fundamental level, the failure of our imagination to think that there are not millions and millions of Jews in the interracial middle means that we're not planning for opportunities for all of our Jewish community to be able to engage in Jewish life, engage in spiritual life, engage in going to shul if that's what you want to do, engage in having access to Torah, which is kind of our fundamental obligation to one another.
And so there are so many problems with it, but on just the deepest level, every Jewish person should have access to Jewish life and we need to do everything we can to make sure that access is unencumbered.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I just think you just had a piece in the Times of Israel, you wrote about Jews of color developing, I think I got the quote right, a nuanced and complex identity consciousness, which can you say a little bit more about that? That's a fascinating term or a phrase.

Ilana Kaufman:
Yes. I mean when you think about it, I am 52 years old for your audience out there, I was born in 1972 in San Francisco, California, and I spent my entire formal Jewish education, as I mentioned, not seeing any reflections of Jews who were non-white outside of my brother, like three other members of the synagogue.
When I wanted to engage in conversations or when I talk with other Jews of color about their life experiences or when you look at the research from the Jews of Color Initiative, the organization that I help lead and our study, Beyond the Count, that talks about the perspectives and experiences of Jews of color, so many of us have been and are asked to separate our identities. Sometimes people say to us, "Why can't you just be Jewish?" Or sometimes there's a tension between the idea that fully accepting and integrating ourselves as people of color, perhaps you're queer in the community, perhaps you have a disability, but fully integrating our multiple identities will in some way compete with our Jewish identity.
And when you're in a context where the Jewish identity might be under threat here in the US, that's a tension that we have to hold in the American Jewish community. Every Jewish American, every person has multiple identities. Perhaps you would self-identify as male, but you're not particularly masculine-presenting in your gender identity, you're holding multiple identities, you're navigating that all of the time. Perhaps you grew up and you were somebody who didn't have a lot of resources and you were poor and you had to mask your poor identity because you went to a private school for example, and you were the scholarship kid, but you, you're always holding those tensions.
If we build our capacity to actually understand our multiple identities, if we build our capacity to hold our multiple identities simultaneously, where I can be a woman, I can be Jewish, I can be Black all at the same time because they don't compete. In fact, they enhance one another. And then when those identities are strong together, they make me whole. And wholeness makes people strong, and strength means people can do things in service to their families or communities themselves, we only want people to be whole. And then when we see the impact of asking people to separate identities, we know what happens when people are forced to hide who they are. That cost is too high.
And so I would argue that the hard work, the struggle of working through integrating identities and having communities have the capacity to celebrate and hold multiple identities at the same time strengthens the community, it certainly strengthens the people, and it makes us actually more powerful in our identities rather than in some ways peeling off identities, which just weakens people, weakens faith, and it ultimately weakens community.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Before we get too far, I should probably ask, can you tell us about the organization you lead and some of the work you're engaged in?

Ilana Kaufman:
I would love to. I am the founder and chief executive officer of the Jews of Color Initiative. We were founded around 2017 in response to Jewish communal questions about the experiences and quite frankly, some of the numbers of Jewish people of color.
We were founded to be an organization focused on field building, and so we are in service to the Jewish communal organizations across the country, the communal ecosystem and the US community at large to understand the experiences and perspectives of Jews of color. We are in the business of centering Jews of color and cultivating the leadership of Jews of color. We build out Jewish communal organizations, projects and entities, and we do that by funding. There are projects, our organizations and our ideas through grants, and we focus on things like leadership development, policy and practice, curriculum development, the building of actual programs and organizations.
We help build capacity for the entire US Jewish community and beyond through commissioning research about what I think as the most fundamental questions in the Jewish community. And so our first study counting inconsistencies was a meta analysis of current demographic data to help us understand how many Jews of color there are in the United States prior to 2017. Despite the fact that as Jews, we have been in the business of counting people since our biblical days, we've never done an actual assessment, a count of the diversity of the US Jewish community. And so my organization commissioned a study to look at current data and to help come up with some of those numbers.
We have commissioned a study called Beyond the Count, which has the largest data set of Jewish people of color in US history. There are over a thousand respondents, and they're are about the experiences and perspectives of Jews of color. For your listeners out there, if you're wondering where are all of the Jews of color in the United States? For those of you who are saying, like, "How many Jews of color can there be? We don't see them in our community." There are more than a million of us in this country, and if you look at current data, something like 20 to 25% depending on the geography of Jewish communal families are multiracial. And so all of this diversity is out here and we don't see it. And our work is to help the community understand our diversity.
And then we have to appreciate that just like the rest of the United States, racism has grafted on to the US Jewish community. And so part of our work at the Jews of Color Initiative, we call ourselves a JoCI, if we're using our short term, is to help the Jewish community and beyond understand the impact of racism and then to help our leaders and our funders and our community planners out there be catalyzed with data, with information, with facts, with the capacity to deepen empathy and to respond to those themes through communal interventions so that we can help, quite frankly, our community reduce the racism that I think is part of the US general community, and so we're in no way singling out the US Jewish community.
Beyond reducing racism we want to build skills, capacity, empathy, and ultimately our goal is to help the US Jewish community thrive in its multiracial self. The US Jewish community is becoming more multiracial, multiethnic, in some ways multi-faith, when you look at the data every single day. And the Jews of Color Initiative is in the business of helping this community understand and see itself as multiracial thrive, using the data to inform our work, and then ultimately to help this Jewish community be stronger and more fortified for, hope through our next 5,000 years.

Bryan Schwartzman:
How much change have you seen since 2017? I mean, I guess that's a hard thing to quantify, but I'll ask it anyway.

Ilana Kaufman:
Yeah, let's try. In 2017, there were like four or five or six Jews of color lead focused organizations in the United States. Today there are something like 30 or 40, and most of those organizations have been seeded and funded with grants from our organization, the Jews of Color Initiative.
In 2017, there was one, two, maybe three, what you call Jewish cohort experiences for Jews of color. Those are fellowships. And depending on the year now, there might be five or 10 out there. And so that increase is really significant. In 2016, 2017, 2018, there were probably fewer than five communal institutional funders making grants in significant scale to Jews of color in the United States. And now there are probably 20 for whom not only Jews of color, but really fortifying our multiracial Jewish community, our priorities in their grant making.
You have a slow increase in clergy of color in Jewish communal spaces, which is beautiful and wonderful. And I'd say one of the ways we think about success is if you look at the demographics across age range, the greatest number of Jewish people of color are in our young people, as you can imagine, zero to 25, 0 to 18, depending on how you define young people in the Jewish community. If you look at the data, and this is, at this point, the data is, I don't want to say it's fairly universal, that might be an overstatement. But if you look at Pew's data, if you look at our data, if you look at other data, we know that the numbers for the young people are something like 17% of the community are people of color, in some cases up to 20%.
And so another way that we think about success is when you look at the Jewish education environment, particularly the K-8 environment, you see quite a bit of racial diversity in the Jewish community. When those young people matriculate into middle school and into high school, and race becomes a much more potent issue in general and particularly when people of color are in predominantly white environments, you see some attrition of Jews of color from those spaces. And so one of the ways we would see and we think about success is over maybe the next few years, five years, 10 years, we would love to see the high school midrasha classes packed with the diversity that was reflected when those high school students were six and seven in their religious school classes. That would be a sign of real success.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I do feel compelled to ask how the last year and a half has complicated, challenged your work. October 7th, the skyrocketing of antisemitism. Suddenly we've got, certainly I had say a Jewish community that feels besieged, defensive, not typically the time of openness and expansiveness.

Ilana Kaufman:
Yeah.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We've even seen some prominent voices that sort of say DEI is partial... Especially on college campuses, which is not exactly what you do, but is partially to blame for the rise in antisemitism. How has that impacted your work and is there a way through it?

Ilana Kaufman:
Yeah, I mean such an important question, and I just want to begin by saying it's been a very hard 15 or 16 months for the Jews of Color Initiative, for many of our communal colleagues, but it's not been nearly as hard as our community members who were murdered or kidnapped or the people who are in Gaza suffering from the onslaught of bombing and being starved. And so I also need to just put it in perspective and-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thank you.

Ilana Kaufman:
Thank God we're hopefully moving toward a ceasefire for everyone's sake. The Jews of Color Initiative was founded, and despite the fact that fighting racism is political, we have a very apolitical path that we walk because we are in service of the diversity of the Jewish community.
And so one of the things that sets up how I think about the last 16 or 15 months is that we made a specific point in how we think about our organization, that we don't focus on international affairs, we only fund domestic affairs and domestic projects. And so we've stayed out of the fray until October 2023. And so I think that the impact has been kind of in different parallels.
We felt an enormous amount of pressure to take a position or a stand in October 2023 in terms of the situation that catalyzed what we've all gone through, and particularly what our communities, our diverse communities have gone through in Israel and Palestine. And as an organization in service to, we have very right of center community members, we have left of center community members. We are in service to everyone so that Jews of Cutler can go out and express their ideas and their programs and their perspectives. That's not our job, right? We are the intermediary.
And so the first hard part of it was just holding that intermediary space in a time where people want you to put a stake in the ground with what your position is. And that's a tough line to walk because we're also a nonprofit organization and we fundraise to be able to make the grants that we make. And so there's a lot of pressure on our organization, and we chose to sort of stay our path and continue to be in service of the most diverse population we can. Our job is to be in service to those who have a Zionist perspective, and our job is to be in service to those who are critical of Israel and Zionism, and we want to be in service to that diversity of population. And so that was a hard line to walk.
The other pressures we felt include, to your point, Bryan, while our work is not about DEI and specific diversity, equity, and inclusion in specific, any organization in the nonprofit space that is entirely run by people of color and focused on people of color has gotten caught up in this dynamic. And we felt an enormous amount of pressure, for example, when our Jewish community, particularly our white Jewish community colleagues and allies felt disappointed by what they perceived as a lack of response from communal allies of color outside of the Jewish community as this wave of antisemitism has been rolling over the United States.
We have many of them come to us wondering why the Black community is not responding in the way that they thought they should, or how can we get the Black community or the Latino community or the Asian community or the indigenous community to respond in service to this perspective or that perspective. And so we became a bit of... I think we became a bit of a kidney for the community where we were flushing some of the toxins that they were running through the systems. And that was hard.
We had grantees disappointed with us because we did not take a political perspective. And as people of color, people thought we should have one point of view. As Jews, people thought we would have one point of view. And so we had a couple of grantees choose not to continue to receive grants from us because they thought we should be focusing on much more political issues. And we appreciated that and understood that and respected that decision.
The other thing I would say is in 2014, 2015, the US Jewish community was on a different side of enjoying communal life. For decades, the US Jewish community had been able to assimilate into a state where antisemitism didn't feel like it was flaring around us all of the time. We were able to focus on other kinds of community initiatives. Jewish farming was born. There was a whole era where we were focusing on other things in the Jewish community. Around 2016 in Charlottesville, that really changed. And at the same time, we also had the situations of, for example, the murder of George Floyd. And so in 2016, 2017, 2018, the Jewish communal ecosystem and the funders who support it had a very broad scope of what their funding priorities were.
Post-October 2023, those funding priorities have really shifted and we understand that. We understand that. And so the Jews of Color Initiative and many more organizations in this country that do work in the space around racial justice have seen an attrition of funding and funders. Those funders are just pointing their compasses elsewhere, which is important. Fighting antisemitism is really, really important. But fighting antisemitism at the cost of not fighting racism doesn't advance the larger community efforts out there.
And I think it's really, really important that those of us who have leadership opportunities can hold our capacity to fight racism and fight antisemitism at the same time because ultimately that's going to be most in service to keeping this multiracial Jewish community safe and building alliances with folks outside of the community.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Time out here. February is Jewish Disabilities Awareness and Inclusion Month, JDAIM for short. It's so vital that everyone be part of a community where they are nourished, seen as their full selves and have their needs met.
Making this happen is a huge ongoing undertaking. On February 18th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, Ritualwell is hosting a virtual program called Writing Disability Torah. The conversation will be led by Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer from Ritualwell and Rabbi Asher Sofman from Thriving Communities at Reconstructing Judaism, and it'll feature Reconstructionist Rabbinical College students, Mat Wilson and Rakhel Silverman-Gitin, who are each doing work in this area. I've interviewed both of them and I'm working on a separate article for our website, and each of them have inspiring, enlightening stories and perspectives to share. So it really would be worth it to hear from the two of them.
Your $18 registration for this event includes a new special collection of curated poetry, prayers, and teachings about disability from Ritualwell. We'll include a link in our show notes and you can register at Ritualwell.org. Okay, now back to our program.
Switching gears slightly, I'm wondering if you can tell us how you became involved with Professor Marc Dollinger's book Black Power, Jewish Politics around... I mean, we've had him as a guest and know a little bit about how a second edition of his book was initially sort of canned from publication by Brandeis University Press, and how did you turn up in this story?

Ilana Kaufman:
How did I turn up in the story? I love the question. So before I was the CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative, before I was a regional officer for the Jewish Community Relations Council in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was a program officer at the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund.
I was assigned to a territory that was covering the most southern edge of San Francisco all the way to the most northern edge of Sonoma County in Northern California. So I had about 1,000 square miles in my territory, and I had all of the traditional day schools and JCCs, synagogues. I had the most traditional, most vanilla portfolio ever.
And so Marc Dollinger was on maybe the board of the Federation at that time, and he and I first just interfaced as... I was a staffer at the Federation and Marc was on the board. But one of the first projects we ever connected over was a demographic study for the Jewish Community Federation Endowment Fund in San Francisco. And I had never been exposed to the process before, and so I simply got to join the study as a staffer and I was fascinated by it.
And as an aside, you all can see that engagement in that community study at the Federation absolutely informed how I think about the work of the Jews of Color Initiative and the studies that we do now.
So Marc was involved, we were around the same table, me as a staffer, Marc as a board member, and we started to just have conversations about the diversity of the Jewish community, his work as a historian, my work as a social scientist, and now as a grant maker. And we in fact, first started having conversations about diversity training, if you will, and Marc and I did a couple of trainings for the Federation where we co-taught different content at his invitation. As Marc and I started to develop a relationship, I learned more about his writing. I moved into the community relations space and we just started having conversations about Black Jewish dynamics.
Marc invited me to speak on a panel in one of his classes at San Francisco State University, and I remember sitting on the panel and there was a student in the back of the room who raised his hand and said to Marc, "Professor Dollinger, what happened to the Black Jewish relationship of the 1960s?" And this young man asked it in this very affectionate way where he was like, "What happened? How did it go south?" I'm sitting on the panel and Marc looks at me and looks at the young man who asked the question and the rest of the class. And Marc says, "Not that I'm the one who wrote the book on that question, but I actually wrote the book on that question and I have an answer." I didn't know this at the time, so this took me totally by surprise. And Marc holds up like the manuscript of the book in the middle of this class and starts to reference some of the points that we've been talking about. Marc makes a point that he even maybe wrote some of my thoughts into parts of the end of the book.
Marc invites me to lunch. We're sitting around at lunch having a conversation and we're both social scientists. We love talking to each other about a variety of things. And Marc's now telling me about this book, and I think he's asked me to read the manuscript in its full text, and he's telling this story at lunch, and I just need to say Marc is telling the story, he has smiles on his face, his eyes are twinkling. He's fully enthusiastic about the story he's telling me, and he is gushing, waxing poetic about this story of reformed rabbis marching through the South with Torahs, and what an amazing experience it was for these rabbis. And he's going on and on and on about how amazing this experience was.
And I'm listening to him and I look at him and I just say to him, "Did it ever occur to you to invite any Black Jewish people on this walk? What are y'all doing marching through the South? A bunch of white folks on behalf of all the Jewish people carrying a Torah, having an experience that you're trying to tie together to Black history, but there's no Black Jewish people there? I don't understand." And he looks at me and he says something like, "You just ruined my whole book."
And the thing was is when you start to ask him, "Where are the Black Jewish people in this book, Marc?" He had to sit there and think like, "Oh, that just blows up the whole premise of my entire text, because the entire book is based on a binary structure of Black people and Jewish people." And so that's how the relationship began.
As Marc worked through the first edition, as I understand it, the idea of putting Black Jewish thought or multiracial, integrated Jewish people of color thought into the text really did unravel the structure of the first book. And so if you read the first edition, there's an afterword that kind of addresses all of these other ideas, the Black Lives Matter movement, Jews of color, I think that cultural appropriation might be in there. And you can see that... It's not that they're afterthoughts, but they really do disrupt the physics of the book.
Marc let me know he wrote some of my work into the appendix or the afterword or the supplements in the back of the first edition, and I was incredibly flattered and I thought it was wonderful. I'm a historian, so then I went and read the whole text, and I would also say I was also a little bit like, "It's really hard for me to read this book given that you've written it from such a binary perspective." And the chapter that really burned my bum, if you will, was the one around the Soviet Jewry movement and the history of that movement and what I learned about my own history from reading that particular chapter.
But that's how it all got started. And then when Marc had the invitation to write a revised edition of Black Power, Jewish Politics, he invited me to write the foreword for it, and then when I wrote what I thought was going to be a foreword, the incredible editors just said very clearly, "This is not a foreword, this is the afterword." And so that's how I ended up being invited to write the afterword for the second or the revised edition of Black Power, Jewish Politics.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Interestingly that, I mean, this is a work of history, you have an academic background. There's some of your personal story in that afterword, how you grew up, how your first thoughts on some of these issues were formed. I guess I'm wondering why, maybe I don't read enough academic books, but I'm always surprised when they go personal. So why was it important to put your own story into that afterword?

Ilana Kaufman:
Yeah, first, it's not that I'm loathe to talk about myself, but for a long time, particularly in this work, Jewish communal colleagues who had not understood the racial diversity of the Jewish community and who were not exposed to people of color and Jews of color in their lives, when they would meet me, they would find me curious and sometimes that curiosity would be expressed in pretty offensive ways, not intentionally, but because it was just clunky.
And so as a strategy both to sort of keep myself whole and not expose myself to some of the unintentional small-mindedness that comes with being raised with a particular narrative that all Jews are white, I took a kind of pedagogical strategy with my work where I wouldn't talk about myself, but I would only talk about the data. And it kept me safe, it advanced the conversation, and so it kept the work moving in a very efficient and high-functioning way.
I also understand that the way we build connection and relationship and trust is through stories. And there's been a mutual building of trust, I think in some ways with me and the community as I've shared more, it allows us to deepen our conversations. I think that's particularly important for me as I travel in communal spaces where it's harder to make connections because connections with Jews of color are fewer, and so we have to find other things in common when we're building our connections.
And so for example, I just traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, Greensboro, Savannah, Georgia, Sarasota, Florida. I met maybe one other Jewish person of color on the trip, but the stories that I was able to share with others, both Jewish and not helped build very, very powerful connections. And so the power of story is really important.
When I wrote the afterword for Black Power, Jewish Politics, I wasn't given a lot of structure in terms of my writing prompts. And so one of the things I want to say to your question, Bryan, is I erred on the side of writing whatever I wanted to write. I've not written an afterword before, and so I read... Or foreword since my initial assignment was a foreword, so I read many, many, many of them. I'll confess that I even Googled what's the format and formula of a foreword.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I would've done the same thing.

Ilana Kaufman:
Right? And what I noticed when I looked at different texts was in a foreword, there is an invitation to be more personal. And so I just sort of took that invitation and went with it.
As I started writing, I realized that one of the things I wanted to talk about, for example, was my critique of the chapter around the Soviet Jewry movement.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sure.

Ilana Kaufman:
And we can talk about that more if you'd like, but the only way for me to talk about that is to have a personal context, which is how painful it was. First of all to go through the experience of being educated in a traditional Jewish community.
In my neighborhood in San Francisco, my synagogue was in my neighborhood, which happens to be on the edge of the Western Addition in San Francisco, which growing up was a Black and Japanese community. The pain of growing up in that community and having no reflections of myself in my Jewish communal life, just sort of going back to that experience, required some personal discussion because it was painful and it's worth talking about in the text like the afterword.
But then reading Marc's chapter about the Soviet Jewry movement and then literally having these memories flow as part of our religious school requirements, walking from the synagogue to the Soviet consulate to protest through the Western Addition, through the Fillmore District that has this incredible history of Black Power movements, carrying these signs that said, "Let my people go," that I then understood our Jewish community borrowed from my Black community, but I was never taught that when I was marching in my own home neighborhood, which was a Black community to help free Soviet Jews, it felt really problematic and it felt worthy of a critique, and it felt worthy of sharing some personal reflection because it reveals the complexity of what we're talking about and what we're dealing with.
It reveals that... I don't think my religious school educators were mal intended, but I do think there was a pedagogical failure there. I don't think that anybody's really to blame or at fault, but I do think we need to be held accountable to what happens when we borrow from other people's histories, but don't tell that story. And the failure of telling that story means that we might be losing our community members because that story could have brought us closer and brought us in.
Imagine telling me at seven or eight or nine or 10 that my black Jewish identities are key to helping liberate Soviet Jews because we're borrowing from the pedagogy of the Black Power movement to free our Jewish sisters and brothers out there. That would've been... I mean, who knows what it would've been because it's a hypothetical, but I imagine it would've been profound.
And I now have a 19-year-old and I have had the privilege of helping educate my own 19-year-old using multiracial curricula in the Jewish community, having them have reflections of Jews of color around them. And what I will say is I can't speak for my 19-year-old, but I lost a very, very close family member over the winter break and my 19-year-old-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sorry to hear that.

Ilana Kaufman:
Thank you. My 19-year-old came to the hospital while my aunt was dying, and the person who drove my 19-year-old to the hospital said to me, "You know, Ilana, they were praying on their way to the hospital." And I said, "They were praying what?" I was so confused, and they said they were praying Jewish prayers on the way to the hospital.
And so the fact that my 19-year-old who's Black, who's Jewish, who goes to an HBCU is so integrated in their identity that they could draw upon their Jewish resources while we are in the process of preparing for the passing of one of our family members means that they have had access to a Jewish life that has been meaningful to them. They've been able to be sort of formally trained around rituals and prayers in a way that they were able to absorb that information in a formal educational context, which means that they've had some kind of multiracial-affirming experience that we want all of our young people to have so that when they're dealing with the passing of life or they're having a simcha or they're doing whatever, they have Jewish tools to draw upon in ways that allow them to be whole. And so, yeah, that's some of that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah, each time you talk, there's so many fascinating tidbits. There's like seven questions I want to ask and I see different directions of the conversation. I guess I'll ask one followup. We don't actually talk about the Soviet Jewry movement a ton today. I mean, it was probably the last time almost every sector of the Jewish community was unified and it actually affected foreign policy and relations between the US and Soviet Union, and it was inspired by an earlier movement. I mean, should we as a Jewish community, be drawing lessons or looking to that time more than we do, or is just things were so different and the world were so different in the '70s or then?

Ilana Kaufman:
I mean, I think we should study all of our history, but that's my bias. I think there are very potent lessons to extract from the Soviet Jewry movement that can be applied to every moment. I think about the pedagogy of liberation and teaching that which is really important.
I think it's extremely important that American Jewry understand that our history of diaspora and marginalization around the world, because there is a reason why antisemitism has not been solved for 5,000 years, and understanding the Soviet Jewry movement is an essential part of understanding that history and understanding what might be happening in the future. So there's all those kind of curricular content, pedagogical reasons.
But I think there are other deeper reasons. I think that I've worked with many, many colleagues who are part of the waves that came from the Soviet Jewry movement. I have worked with many colleagues from the Ukraine and from the former Soviet Union, and they have experiences internationally and domestically of marginalization that are not dissimilar to Jews of color. They have experiences of being othered, of not having access, of not having the communal narrative or the communal aesthetic align with or be a shared experience. And so there's something to learn from that.
But I would also say that when my... The 19-year-old of whom I've been talking was a junior or senior in high school, they had to do a project about... Interview somebody who was an immigrant to the United States, and my young adult chose to interview one of my colleagues from Ukraine. And one of the incredible things about that experience was, and I think this is something that Ashkenazi Jews have lost because of racism.
One of the experiences in those interviews with my colleague was that that identity from the Ukraine is an identity where they stand out here now either because of language issues, maybe because when they were in the Ukraine or the former Soviet Union, they didn't have access to learning Jewish rituals and Jewish customs because that would create a vulnerability and there might be consequences for that.
And so when you think about the diversity of the US Jewish community, the folks who are not people of color, one of the things we've lost is the diversity of all Jews in this country. There's been a flattening of Jewish identity that has made Jews of European background white. And one of the things we should learn from in terms of our colleagues from the Soviet Jewry movement is one of the hard parts about coming to the US is that it's been hard to fully integrate into the sort of general narrative of US Jewish community. But one of the great gifts is a retaining of identity and ethnicity that is different, and actually helps celebrate the diversity of US Jewish identity and community.
My mother's parents are from Romania and Poland. We have folks who come from other parts of Eastern Europe or even Western Europe, and somehow all European Jews have been flattened into white, and there's a cost to that. And so there are a lot of things we can learn from studying the Soviet Jewry movement, everything from liberation pedagogy to really understanding the importance of the diversity of Jewish ethnicity in addition to racial diversity.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'll stick with history for one more question. Going back to the student in Professor Dollinger's class about what happened to the Civil Rights Alliance. I guess I'm wondering why this is just such a tricky period to talk about and delve into. I'll share, I just wrote a little piece about Stanley Levison, who was a name I was not familiar with, I don't think is a household name, and was actually one of Dr. King's closest or very close associates, and I had a hard time doing it because I really didn't want to say, "Look, here's proof, Jews really were... Really did all this great stuff during this time." And yet I thought this was history folks should know about. And it seems in 2024 a fraught topic to get into, or it was probably fraught in 1968 too.

Ilana Kaufman:
Yeah. I mean, okay, one of the things I love about Black Power, Jewish Politics is that it says out loud to Black folks, Jewish folks, Black Jewish folks, social scientists, social justice folks, that the narrative of white Jewish people not only helping with the Civil Rights Movement, but our narrative somehow kind of gives credit for the Civil Rights Movement to Jewish Americans. There's a narrative. We helped build the NAACP. I mean that's true, but... Or we helped make sure that the Civil Rights Act was passed. That's true, I understand that. Yes, it was signed inside the building of the RAC in Washington, D.C.

Bryan Schwartzman:
The Religious Action Center [inaudible 00:52:46]-

Ilana Kaufman:
Yes, sorry, yes, the Religion Action Center. But we also did really difficult things in the Civil Rights Movement institutionally, for example. Some of the actions of the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League or some of the actions of other communal entities that also pushed back opportunities for Black Americans, through legislation, through policy, through being fearful that Black people would have too much power in this country.
If we told that story, that it just wasn't one way. If we complicated the narrative, it would actually build some more credibility and it would build some more muscles to understand this moment, which is I know a lot of white Jewish colleagues and folks out there feel like we invested in the Civil Rights Movement, and now where are our allies now when we're being attacked as Jews and we're suffering under so much antisemitism? We cannot frame the dynamic as we invested in your liberation and now you owe us something. And when it sounds like that, it fails to recognize the complexity of the context.
The other things that are happening are because there's a sense of communal disappointment some of the commentary infused with that disappointment is expressing as rather racist, kind of targeting people of color who are being anti-Zionist or more anti-Zionist than white folks are, for example. Well, that's just not true. Or sort of saying like, DEI diversity, equity and inclusion is at fault for this particular dynamic. That's not true. My question to critique of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives is what happened? What were we thinking as American Jews and what were white Jewish folks thinking when we didn't think we needed to be in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives? Why were we busy funding and supporting initiatives but not also in making sure the experience of Jewish Americans were inside of those initiatives?
Because we were enjoying quite a bit of safety as assimilated Jews thriving in kind of a pretty positive economic time across the US and we didn't think we needed it. That's a problem. We did not understand our own vulnerability in this context in the US and then it came back to bite us.
And so I think that we need to do a much better job in the Jewish community of teaching true, honest, brave, kind of Jewish American history. I think we need to do a much better job of talking about what happened during the Civil Rights Movement and the complexity of the Black Jewish relationship. I think we need to do a much better job of writing into curriculum the experiences of diverse Jews, of all kinds of backgrounds, and it's beyond representation.
But when we're telling the story of the diaspora to kind of contemporary times, as soon as... First of all, we all know that our diaspora journey means that we weren't white in the beginning, right? But if we can pull on that thread and tell our story in a way that reflects the reality of the Jewish people, then when we're telling the story, at least people see themselves in it. First of all, that builds community. If we are talking with diverse communities, racially diverse communities who are not Jewish, it builds credibility and trust when we reflect ourselves as the diverse people we are and represent ourselves authentically.
I remember being in Baltimore, doing some work in Baltimore, and I met a colleague, an African-American guy who's not Jewish, and we were talking about Jewish diversity. He said to me, "It's funny, Ilana, Black people know there are Black Jews. I didn't know that Jewish people knew there were Black Jews." And so we just have to do a much better job of transforming curriculum, narratives, representation. We need to be much braver about telling the truth and complexity. We need to recognize the impact of the US brand of racism on the US Jewish community and not critique ourselves for having some of that racism graft onto us. But just sort of say, "Of course there's racism in the Jewish community because we're part of the United States and we need to be vigilant in fighting it because we are a multiracial people and our obligation is to thrive."
And I would end by saying we need to have some capacity to push back on the leadership in the community that perpetuates the dynamics that are not helpful. There's a pretty big pulpit out there speaking on behalf of the Jewish people, and I don't believe it authentically or accurately represents our perspectives and our voices.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay. I'll share a couple more things as we're winding down. I'm thinking, so I guess this would be about 1988 as I'm leading into my bar mitzvah year, we showed up on the first day of Hebrew school, this is Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing, Queens, and we had a Black Hebrew teacher. And this completely floored me. I'm like, "I didn't know this was possible."

Ilana Kaufman:
Right.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And I think that was pretty much the reaction of every student in the class. And I'm sure there were a number of jokes in the hallway that I would love to take back. And you mentioned you have a 19-year-old. I have a 14-year-old and 11-year-old, both girls, and have tried to teach them not to be floored in that situation. And I guess this is my way of asking what should we be teaching our children about the diversity of the Jewish people? How should we be teaching them? And I may borrow some of what you say in my own households.

Ilana Kaufman:
Right on, right on. I mean, the first thing I think we should do is ask the young people their experiences. Like I said, I was just traveling around the Southeast and I had the absolute privilege of sitting with a high school midrasha class in Sarasota, Florida. And I was having two separate parallel discussions in the same synagogue with the adults, if you will. They, in the first conversations, they said to me, "There are no Jews of color in our community. This might be a bit of a theoretical conversation." It turns out that many of those in that community have grandchildren of color, in-laws of color, they just hadn't really thought... They just had not been invited into the conversation. So the first thing they need to do is just have the conversation and make space for it and have that be the natural sense of the way we think about the Jewish community, that we are diverse.
Our young people are having a different experience. You talk to those young people, and it may not be right there in their midrasha class, although that midrasha class was actually racially diverse. I don't think that the adults saw that, but it was very clear to me, and that's how they self-identified. But every one of those young people talked about having friends at camp who are not white, who experience racism pretty regularly, who they worry about.
And so the first thing we need to do is ask questions because our young people are actually in more diverse spaces, and they're seeing this on a much more regular basis than we think they are. That means we're opening the conversation and saying, "We know the Jewish community is multiracial." So the second thing we need to do, and these are not in hierarchical order, let's say they're in simultaneous order, is to see and understand ourselves as multiracial. That might mean that you will walk into a Jewish communal space and see no people of color. Number one, we know that depending on where you live geographically, on a good day, like 35% of the Jewish community is engaged in institutional Jewish life. So it might just be an expression of engagement and affiliation. But we know institutionally there are reasons why diverse people of all backgrounds stay out of institutions. They can be very marginalizing.
So the next thing we need to do is not assume because we don't see racial diversity, that it's not here. We should look at the data and say, "We know every time we walk into a room, something like 15% of this room should be people of color. Every time we walk into a Jewish communal environment where the age range is from zero to 25, 17 to 20% of that group should be people of color." So we have to know the data, and when we walk into spaces, we should wonder, not be critical, but we should wonder, how does this space reflect the racial diversity of the Jewish community?
We should wonder. I call it being a lay demographer. Everywhere we walk into, we should be scanning the demographics and making notes. Let's say the space is all white. There's nothing wrong with that. But if we're making decisions in those all-white spaces on behalf of a multiracial Jewish community, then that means our pedagogy has to be different. Before we make those final decisions, we have to say to ourselves, "Who's missing from this conversation? Who might this impact who is not represented in this effort?" We need to get more feedback and more data because we might do something accidentally that will actually harm the Jewish community rather than heal and advance it. So it's about being a lay demographer, it's about pedagogy, it's about inquiry.
And then I'd say one other piece is navigating racism is really hard. And this is a country that really rewards us for being self-centered, for advocating for ourselves, for marginalizing others in service to advancing. And none of it is good for building community, and none of it helps us grapple with how we are worried about the impact of becoming more racially diverse in the US. And so we need to grapple with racism in a way that also helps reinforce the reality that it doesn't mean that in any way we will be less Jewish, or in any way we will focus less on Jewish issues, if you will.
What it does mean is that we have to have the capacity to allocate resources across multiple themes or identities in ways that don't have those resources competing. And that's something we actually have control over. I think depending on the data you were looking at, something like $2 billion a year moves through the US.-Jewish philanthropic complex, if you will. There's not a paucity of resources. I think there's a paucity of imagination. There's a paucity of intentionality. Might be a paucity of goodwill. But it's not about resources. And so when we have conversations that say, "Well, if we're going to focus on DEI or racism, then we're going to have to reduce our attention on antisemitism," it's just not true. It's just not true.
So I'd say the other thing we need to do is assume that all ships can rise together. Everyone can win. And if we take collaborative and cooperative approaches, we actually might be able to solve multiple problems at the same time.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Ilana Kaufman, thank you so much for this conversation. It was really powerful on my end, and you gave us so much to think about.

Ilana Kaufman:
Bryan, I loved your questions. Thank you for your interest in my work and my perspectives, and thank you so much for giving me a chance to talk about my stories and our data and my love for the Jewish people. I'm so grateful.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah. And we hope to have this conversation again.

Ilana Kaufman:
Right on.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thanks so much.

Ilana Kaufman:
Right on. Thank you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So, what did you think of today's episode? I would like to hear from you. I'm still waiting for my inbox to flood. Go ahead. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you'd like to share. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org.
Evolve will be back soon with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and I'll see you next time.

MUSIC:
[Foreign language 01:06:37].