Black and Jewish leaders in Denver are hoping to stir up a conversation on how their communities can help each other fight white nationalism.
Caren Press, a Jewish woman from Denver who runs a mentorship program at George Washington High School, has organized a discussion with several leaders from Denver’s Black and Jewish communities to rebuild trust and unite the two communities.
“The Denver Dialogue” discussion is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 15 at the George Washington High School library. The event is open to the public and no registration is needed.
Press said that when Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, posted a series of antisemitic tweets and praised Hitler in an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in late 2022, a light was shown on the fractured relationship between many people within the Black and Jewish communities.
Press, along with Theo Wilson, the director of the Denver branch of the Black educational nonprofit Shop Talk Live, and Evan Weissman, founder of the civic health club Warm Cookie of the Revolution, found after a discussion on Ye’s remarks at a Shop Talk Live event that there are a lot of misconceptions their respective communities have of the other.
Most of the misconceptions, Press said, have come from propaganda from white nationalist efforts to divide communities.
“After that (Shop Talk Live event), we saw there was a need for an agendaless dialogue,” Press said. “The African-American community and the Jewish community do not have an agreement on facts. The white nationalists are pushing a lot of erroneous information because they want to divide us.”
Wilson said the Ye incident, and NBA star Kyrie Irving’s posting of a documentary that contained antisemitic rhetoric, showed there was a hidden resentment from the Black community on how the Jewish community operates in the U.S.
“When our public personas raise these complaints, they’re pulling from the wrong data,” Wilson said. “They’re pulling from Nazi data, from white supremacist data, and trying to make claims that are missing the mark.”
The issue Wilson sees the Black community having is the idea that some Jewish community members who can assimilate better are “policing the borders of whiteness” at the cost of Black progress.
Nevertheless, though, Wilson said he wants both communities to come together and be authentic to rebuild trust with each other.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is see if there is a bridge where we can both be authentic in our truths and repair some of the damage that’s been done by (white nationalism).”
Weissman, a longtime friend of Wilson, agreed that these misconceptions come from white nationalist propaganda and wants to address the intersections of being Jewish.
“There are lots of Black Jews and lots of Jews of color,” he said. “There is a tendency to talk about Blacks and Jews as if they’re only separate, but they aren’t.”
Weissman said there are misconceptions about how white Jewish people are part of or separate from institutions that are racist, and how privilege and victimhood can coexist for some Jewish people.
He said it is important for both communities to show up and reconcile because solidarity is how things can change in the U.S., and divisive rhetoric from white supremacy can be a distraction to social justice.
“My concern principally is trying to get the Jewish community to be involved in cross-cultural and cross-religious investment in our community for human good, for justice and for the further invention of democracy,” Weissman said.
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