Teaching African American-Jewish American Relations in the United States: A Special Section

Editor's Introduction Teaching African American-Jewish American Relations in the United States: A Special Section Riv Ellen Prell At the 1995 Midwest Jewish Studies Association conference I organized a panel on this topic. Two ofthe papers presented at that conference are revised and presented here. The panel coincided with the publication of several books on black/Jewish relations which are also reviewed. Together, these essays and reprinted syllabus suggest that this important and often painful topic is a particularly challenging and relevant area for teaching. The papers by Prell and Buff both underline that the questions posed by a study of the conflicts between the groups are especially pertinent to our understanding ofthe tensions between .how American Jews locate themselves in the United States economy and culture, and how others do as well. That contested location is important to any analysis ofAmerican Jews in the twentieth century. At the same time, both papers suggest that the multicultural classroom must be challenged by understanding this conflict in light ofthe pluralism ofJewish experience and the parallel diasporic relations ofJews and African Americans. What appears through one analytic lens as a fairly straightforward difference based on economic power turns out to be a more complex comparison of the experience and "construction" of two minority United States communities through another lens. The book reviews not only discuss the three most recent works on the topic but do so from the perspective ofthe authors. Both Hasia Diner and Debra Schultz have conducted their own research in the area and reflect self-consciously on the works' ability to respond to the issues that framed their own work. The purpose of the section is to facilitate the work of others who are interested in teaching in this area, and to provide a range ofperspectives on the topic. ...