Tagged black-Jewish relations

What Hank Greenberg’s friendship with Jackie Robinson can teach us today

From left: Jackie Robinson in 1945 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Hank Greenberg (Getty Images); Zach Banner (Katharine Lotze/Getty Images); and DeSean Jackson (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
July 17, 2020 / Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle Zach Banner posted a video late last week in response to Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson’s anti-Semitic screed against Jews. After describing his horror at the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Banner preached that as important as the work of Black… Read more »

In ‘Blazing Saddles,’ Gene Wilder helped recall a fading black-Jewish alliance

Gene Wilder, right, in a scene with Cleavon Little from the 1974 comedy "Blazing Saddles." (Warner Bros./Courtesy of Getty Images)
August 30, 2016 / Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA

  (JTA) — Last year I joined some 3,000 people at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark for a wide-screen showing of Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western parody “Blazing Saddles.” In the onstage interview that followed, Brooks, then 89, was beside himself in his delight at sharing his 42-year-old comedy with a real… Read more »

A changing Crown Heights marks 25 years since Brooklyn ‘pogrom’

New York City Mayor David Dinkins, fourth from right, looks on while a Hasidic Jew and a black man argue during riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. (Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
August 16, 2016 / Debra Nussbaum Cohen, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Much has changed in Crown Heights in the past 25 years, since the accidental death of a black boy touched off three days of rioting in which black youths attacked religious Jews in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Many called it a riot. Some Jews call the events of… Read more »