U.S. Black-Jewish Relations: My Personal Story (Part Two)
The author speaking to youth at the Birthright Excelerate ’23 event on March 26, 2023
In this piece, our final Friday post before transitioning to a once-a-week schedule on Mondays, I share a slightly revised version of the remainder of my address to young Jewish students and professionals this past Sunday. To read part one, click here.
. . . if you were naming the “other folks” who would be the ones most likely to stick their necks farthest out for you out of a sense of moral obligation—and keep it out there even against the opposition of their “own people”—most of them would probably be Jewish.
—Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place
Part Two of “Black-Jewish Relations: An Omni-American Vision”
. . . we [U.S. Afro-Americans and Jewish Americans] are individuals who have cultural identifications and historical experiences that are different, but which also intersect in our histories and experiences as groups of people.
Now, I’ll get personal.
I was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1963 at Kings County Hospital. As a native New Yorker, I am very used to being around people of a wide range of backgrounds and ethnic and religious traditions. Regarding my exposure to and experience with Jewish Americans, my very first memory is going to Coney Island as a little tyke and falling in love with knishes. My mom would take me to Jewish delis or butcher shops on the regular to get knishes, with their square sandwich shape, muddy gold dough exterior, and delicious mashed potato filling. I’d slice them, then slather those knishes with Nathan’s deli style or Gulden’s mustard. Mmmm, just saying that makes my mouth start to water . . .
Speaking of falling in love, perhaps my very first crush was Barbra Streisand, who I’d see on television singing her young heart out in the 1960s in films such as Fiddler on the Roof. Her singing touched my soul; her talent and transcendent voice magnetized me. In the latter part of his life, the “father of jazz,” Louis “Pops” Armstrong, sang a duet with Streisand, “Hello, Dolly,” which became a hit. Early in his life, Armstrong, who wore the Star of David throughout his life, worked for a Jewish family which treated him warmly. In fact, Armstrong wrote that hearing the matriarch of the family, Esther “Tilie” Karnofsky, sing Russian lullabies planted seeds for his own love of singing. One of her children, a boy about the same age as Armstrong, then eleven years old, helped Armstrong with an advance on his salary so he could buy his very first cornet.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Louis Armstrong
Back to my history. When I lived on East 52nd St. between Snyder and Tilden in Brooklyn at about the same age Pops was when he bought his first cornet, a tall, lanky Jewish boy named Alan befriended me. We and the multi-ethnic array of boys on that East Flatbush block would play marbles, stick ball, and skully together. When my mom, sister, and I moved to Staten Island, I became friends with a short, fellow music-lover, a Jewish-American classmate at Tottenville High School named Howie. Wearing t-shirts featuring images of the rock gods he adored, Howie would share the sounds of soft-to-hard rock with me, and I’d share jazz music with him. I’ll always remember how impressed I was with the keyboard technique of Keith Emerson of ELP, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Howie introduced me to ELP and to KISS, led by the tongue-wagging Gene Simmons.
Gene Simmons of the rock group KISS
When I began to play the alto saxophone at the age of fifteen, I searched for a wise teacher with whom to take lessons. My high school music instructors, Michael DeBetta and Nathan Axel, recommended a local legend on Staten Island, Caeser DiMauro. Caeser, who played classical oboe and alto sax, was a Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonist when performing jazz. One of the places we’d meet to play duets, him demonstrating the behind-the-beat relaxation that typified the “cool school,” tapering his notes at the end of smooth legato phrases, was the Jewish Community Center on Victory Blvd and Clove Road.
Later, after graduating from Hamilton College in 1985, my very first job was with Stan Goldberg Associates, a multi-media technology firm. When Stan interviewed me, there wasn’t much, as a recent college grad, on my résumé. But he gently peered into the windows of my soul and said, “You’re a good person,” hiring me for entry-level clerical work to learn the ropes. One of my next jobs was with the Center for Public Communications, led by Mert Fiur, with offices on 57th St. between 5th and 6th avenues in the Big Apple. Mert brought me into his small firm for a project funded by a large pharmaceutical company; I would scour major national dailies, scholarly journals, and glossy magazines, clipping and categorizing stories, essays, and studies involving health care. The foundations for my later becoming a journalist were laid down right then and there, as I was exposed to professional reportage and op-ed writing on the issues and controversies of the day, as well as creative non-fiction.
Stan and Mert were Jewish American entrepreneurs who gave me a chance early in my work career. In the late 1990s, as head of the Department of Education and Humanities at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Jayme Koszyn hired me to present jazz appreciation workshops for primary to secondary school students across NYC, and to be BAM’s liaison with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation for a rite-of-passage program for Brooklyn youth as a component of its annual DanceAfrica activities. In the early 2000s, Loren Schoenberg, the founding executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, brought me in as a writer, interviewer, and consultant. When I became a jazz columnist for the New York Daily News from 2011-2013, it was a Jewish American editor who gave me that shot.
The Influence of Jewish Thought and Narratives
But it’s not only in my career that Jewish Americans—and by extension, Jewish thought—have played a significant role. In the late 1980s through the early 1990s, as part of a spiritual community in Brooklyn, I studied Kabbalah, which greatly expanded my apprehension of the multi-levels of reality, from the undifferentiated, no-thing, infinite potential of Ain Soph—also spelled “Ein Sof”—to the grounded earthly reality of our material existence. Even before that, growing up as a Christian on both sides of my family, the stories of the Jewish people in Biblical times influenced my understanding of faith, religion, morality, and how a people can resiliently overcome despite adversity, time and time again.
When I met long-time wealth manager Matt Ludmer, founder of the Aligned Center in Irvington, NY, we looked into each other’s eyes and broke into holy laughter. There was a beautiful inner recognition of our souls sharing much in common, before we even knew that such commonalities included a love of basketball and jazz and shared philosophical and spiritual interests. Matt’s a Jewish American practitioner of Judaism and Buddhism. He’s a confidant and friend; we spur each other to continue fulfilling our life missions, our dharma. And when my stepson Emanuel died in 2018, Matt joined other friends and family members in our mourning and remembrance.
Lisa Norton, a kind, open-hearted and highly creative Jewish woman, also attended the homegoing service. She was also the very first person to hire our firm, the Jazz Leadership Project, for a live engagement, presenting our model to students in her design thinking and design leadership class at the New School. Like Matt, Lisa is a student of Integral philosophy. So am I.
Integral philosophy, as explicated by thinkers such as Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin), Ken Wilber (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution), and Steve McIntosh (The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness) is a way of integrating all from our personal perspectives and our individual neuro-cognitive body-minds, to shared cultural norms and aspirations to larger, objective social systems and structures. It’s also a way of viewing our growth and development over time as individual beings and as groups of people and epochs over time, a Big History view. Through my involvement in a community of students and advocates of Integral philosophy, I’ve also connected with Jewish folks such as psychologist Mark Forman, education philosopher Zak Stein, executive editor Adam Bellow, and Amiel Handelsman, a close friend and colleague who just last weekend spent a night with my wife Jewel and me while visiting from Michigan. Our daughter Kaya Thomas, visiting from her studies in Boston at MIT, was with us also. Amiel, Jewel, and I co-taught a course from October 2021 to March 2022 titled, “Stepping Up: Wrestling with America’s Past, Reimagining Its Future, Healing Together.”
Kaya Thomas, Greg Thomas, Jewel Kinch-Thomas, and Amiel Handelsman
About a decade ago, I became acquainted with Dr. Aryeh Tepper, who lives in Israel. We became close friends over many Zoom calls to dialogue about our shared love of ideas and tradition, spirituality and jazz, as well as the work and thought of Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, the author of the 1970 classic, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy. Aryeh, who works with our partner organization, the American Sephardi Federation, is my fellow Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project.
In early 2019, Aryeh and his colleagues at Ben Gurion University of the Negev flew me in for a conference on Jazz in Israel to give a keynote address. I spoke about the great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and his “King David Suite” composition. Later in 2019, I gave a version of this presentation at the New York AIPAC conference, and then again at the national AIPAC conference in Washington, DC in early 2020—right before Covid hit. On both occasions, the excellent jazz trumpeter and band leader Itamar Borochov featured an integrated band performing excerpts from Hampton’s composition, which was Hamp’s love letter to Israel and the Jewish people.
Greg and Aryeh, Co-Directors of the Omni-American Future Project, in Israel in 2019
For the first two annual events of the Omni-American Future Project, in 2021 and 2022, Itamar was also featured. By the way, the keynote speaker we heard before this session, Rep. Ritchie Torres, was honored by our initiative with an award in 2021, as was Wynton Marsalis. In 2022, we bestowed awards on musician and podcaster Coleman Hughes and Harvard political philosopher and public intellectual Danielle Allen.
The Omni-American Vision of Black-Jewish Relations
The Omni-American vision of Black-Jewish relations doesn’t center on the periodic conflicts between Black Americans and Jewish Americans, bigoted statements by celebrities, or fringe groups such as the Hebrew Israelites, who have no traction in the mainstream of Afro-American life. Groups will have conflicts. Individuals have conflicts. This is especially true when differing groups of people live in close proximity. If there’s a power differential, that’s a basis of conflict too. Black American intellectuals and Jewish American intellectuals have had public spats over the decades. In my own relationships with Jewish folks there have been challenges and disagreements. But those weren’t primarily because of the Jewish identity of my friends, colleagues, and employers, or because of my racialized identity as “Black.” I’ll say it again: individuals and persons from groups will have conflicts. It’s the human condition.
The question is: what is the basis of collaboration despite our differences, and even through our differences, and what do we share in common? The Omni-American vision presents a narrative that begins with Negro Americans and Jewish Americans playing jazz music together in the 1930s, with Benny Goodman integrating Carnegie Hall with Afro-American musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, and others. And in the 1960s, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel exemplified collaboration grounded in shared spiritual principles and shared civic democratic values and aspirations grounded in justice. Today, it’s up to us to write the next chapter of the story.
Aryeh and I, as well as our colleagues in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the American Sephardi Federation, and the Jazz Leadership Project, invite you to join us in our Omni-American effort to make the United States and the world a better place—before it’s too late.