The sanctuary of The Temple on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. “Be bold, be hard working, be audacious, and be allies” was the advice of Dr. Michael L. Lomax, CEO and president of UNCF to the Black and Jewish friends, neighbors, and college students in the audience.
A fireside chat about the Black and Jewish communities was held on Wednesday, April 22 between Lomax and his longtime friend, Harvard professor, distinguished scholar and documentarian Henry Louis Gates Jr., moderated by Lisa Rayam, host of “Morning Edition” on WABE.
Gates is the host and producer of a four-part documentary, “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History,” which is now streaming on PBS. But the evening was focused on the two communities banding together to fight one common enemy.
“Let’s call it what it is: It is the rise of white supremacy. And white supremacists have two groups they consistently hate. They hate African Americans and they hate Jews,” said Gates. “There are two streams that have been constantly running under the floorboards of Western civilization: one is antisemitism and one is anti-Black racism.”
Gates was inspired to make the documentary because of three historic and shocking events: the 2015 mass shooting that killed nine people at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, the 2017 white nationalist riots in Charlottesville, VA, and the 2018 mass shooting that killed 11 people inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.
“I decided something had to be done. There had to be a wake up call, because we were seeing the rise of virulent antisemitism and the resurgence of anti-Black racism,” Gates said. “I made this series to tell the history, and as a call to arms, because things are only going to get worse and we’re going to need each other more.”
Gates made a point of mentioning the series began production before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.
Lomax said in the days after Oct. 7, he called his Jewish friends to reassure them that he was an ally as college campuses erupted with protests, many of which were rooted in anti-Jewish and anti-Israel language. When Lomax saw the reaction of students at Columbia, where he attended graduate school, and other prestigious universities including Harvard and Emory, he was “aghast.”
“I’ve been to Israel, I have many Jewish friends … what I wanted to find out is, ‘Is this really what students think?'” Lomax said.
Lomax returned to an old idea – “a Jimmy Carter approach to diplomacy” he called it – and he worked with Dr. John Eaves’ to promote and increase Unity Dinners between Black and Jewish communities. Over the last two years, around 1,200 Black and Jewish college students have sat down to break bread and face difficult questions.
“This was my way of committing to checking the temperature of our students on these issues, but also doing something that I thought was essential … getting a new generation of Black students and Jewish students to get to know one another,” Lomax said.
Unity Dinners hosted by UNCF, Hillel International, and Blue Square Alliance have been such a successful model that one was held this week at the NFL draft in Pittsburgh with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
“When you bring young people together, they don’t act like the people that we saw attacking one another on big university campuses. They sit down, they’re curious, they’re maybe a little awkward, but they want to get to know each other,” Lomax said.
The Atlanta program came to a close as students from Emory, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, and others filed into the Unity Dinner to discuss the future.
