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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Black person here.  Keep in mind that this is an anonymous forum, so it's impossible to know whether people are who they say they are.  IRL, I honestly have not heard of any resentment towards Jews by other AAs.

I grew up in the South and did not really know any Jewish people growing up, never learned about the Holocaust in school, and really didn't meet any self-identified Jews until grad school.  My Jewish classmates basically schooled me on a lot of things at that time.  At worst I've possibly detected indifference towards Jews among a segment of AAs (again, particularly in the South) but not outright anti-Semitism, especially among people who grew up as I did in predominantly AA settings where people don't know Jews or know much about their history, and some may see them as just another group of white people.  However, I currently live in a black and Jewish neighborhood in DC where everyone gets along wonderfully.  I like that our kids are growing up learning about each other's cultures, history, holidays, etc.

Also, please keep in mind that the people who post here are not necessarily representative of a community's sentiments towards a particular group of people--opinions on the Internet come with a large selection bias.[/quote]

I am a [liberal] Jew who also grew up in the South. I didn't have meaningful interactions with large numbers of black people until I became a personal trainer and started working in a gym in my 20s. I think this may be different for blacks and Jews who grew up in cities where both groups had large numbers and lived together in working-class communities in the 1920s-60s. In the South, the Jewish population has always been very small, outside of a handful of large cities.

I do think it gives me a different perspective, however, when I hear the argument that white people have all been turning a blind eye to police brutality and other blatant discrimination in the black community. Until the advent of the internet, we really didn't hear much about it. Black people experienced it every day, but white people only heard about particularly egregious incidents in their communities. A lot of people of color don't believe that; they believe because the discrimination was so prevalent all these years, we white people just didn't care enough about it to fight it. But you readily admit you knew little or nothing about Jews and anti-semitism because you hadn't experienced the world as a Jew or as someone who interacted much with Jewish people. Why is it so hard to believe that a lot of white people, including white liberals, are only in the last few years being "schooled" (as this PP calls it) in the extent and brutality of discrimination against AAs and people of color in the US? The internet has allowed us to see these incidents in bulk, in real time, and from all over the US, even if we don't personally know a lot of African Americans.[/quote]
As a black person, I hear you and I understand the point you are making. It makes sense to me that the information highway has been super effective in delivering these egregious incidents into our living rooms and kitchen table discussions. You are spot-on, the advent of the internet has changed the way we view the world - police brutality and discrimination against black people is a stark example.

I guess I do take a small issue with you in terms of what many white people knew about this brutality and discrimination. The black issues you identified have been around for a long, long time. Well before the internet. The Civil Rights Movement began in the early 50's and lasted through the late 60's. The reason why the movement was so effective is because it was broadcast by TV and radio into living rooms and kitchen tables. People knew about the issues - indeed, the world knew the issues and America was embarrassed on a daily basis. [b]Then, it was the TV - now, it's the internet, as you rightly described, above. There were no "blind eyes" then or now. So, IMO, the comparison you're making is not valid.[/b][/quote]

You don't have to believe it, but much as my community brought in Holocaust survivors and Russian refusniks to talk about anti-semitism and discrimination against Jews, your community taught you about the civil rights movement in all its detail (and probably lynchings, police brutality, etc.) when you were a kid in the 1980s and these things were no longer in the news. All I knew about the civil rights movement was that it happened and it was over. I was, indeed, an adult before I even heard there was a counter-narrative to that, much less about ongoing police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, etc.. I know that seems impossible coming from your perspective, but [b]it was hard for me to understand how someone could really, truly, not know anything about Jews or Judaism[/b].[/quote]

I'm one of the black PPs from the south.  Part of it may be that one group (Jews) is only ~1-2% of the US population, and the other (AAs) has a prevalence in the US of about six times that amount (12%).  So it sort of makes sense, aside from any other differences, that many don't know much about Jews/Judaism, but are more familiar with AA history/culture.[/quote]
Jew here. Even more than the fact that we are only 2% of the population (less, even ), we are clustered in cities. In rural areas, you can drive 100 miles without running into a Jew. That means that rural folks can live well into adulthood without even meeting a Jew.

I told the following story in this forum befor and and was told I was lying, but here goes: When I was in high school (MoCo) in the mid 70s, a girl moved into town, we got to talking, it came out that I was Jewish, and her mouth dropped open "But you don't have horns. I was told that Jews have horns!" She was so out of touch that she didn't even realize how insulting this was - she just thought this was a physical trait specific to Jews.

I swear to G-d.[/quote]

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