Remembering black America's Jewish 'silent partner'
Blacks and Jews need to get along, my father used to say, or we bring joy to those who have neither group's interests in mind.
That useful bit of wisdom came to mind as synagogues across the country invited guests to join them this weekend. Some would light 13 candles in memory of two tragedies: The 11 shot and killed at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last weekend and the two African Americans shot and killed two days earlier at a Jeffersontown, Kentucky, supermarket.
Indeed, the two events were portraits of how hate can operate without much distinction between targeted groups.
"All Jews must die," witnesses say the Pittsburgh gunman yelled as he entered the synagogue during Saturday morning services.
"Whites don't kill whites," the Kentucky gunman said, according to reports, as he fled past a white man after killing a black man who was shopping for school supplies with his grandson.
It turns out that, had the Kentucky gunman succeeded in breaking through the locked front door at a predominately black church nearby, where a small group was meeting inside, there might have been a replay of the massacre three years ago when nine black worshippers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were killed by an avowed white supremacist.
Yet, in considering where we Americans need to go from here, I found some guidance in another recent bad-news story: the announced bankruptcy of Chicago-based retailing giant Sears.
What, I wondered, would the late Sears chief Julius Rosenwald think of these recent tragedies?
Rosenwald was the businessman and philanthropist, best known not only for leading the birth and growth of 125-year-old Sears, Roebuck and Company, but also for establishing the Rosenwald Fund, which, among other great contributions, donated millions in matching funds to support the education of African-American children in the rural South, where local schools for black children under Jim Crow segregation were underfunded or nonexistent.
In 1912, Rosenwald, a child of Jewish immigrants from Germany, collaborated with Booker T. Washington, the era's most prominent black conservative leader and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, where Rosenwald was a trustee.
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