A Jewish Angle on Black History Month

Thu 5 Feb, 7 pm. Vilna Shul, 18 Phillips Street, Boston, 02114. Steven Greenberg, Director, 617 523 2324. 18 donation. Boston Center for Jewish Heritage - [email][events]

Professor Stephen Whitfield of Brandeis University discusses “A Jewish Angle on Black History Month” at the Vilna Shul, 18 Phillips St, Boston, MA 02114 Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 7 pm. Whitfield will present a cultural and psychological analysis of the Jewish immigrant experience in America that is intended to show how some Jews projected empathy and even intimacy onto the black experience in the twentieth century. Working off of the idea presented in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, in which Roth refers to Jews and blacks as “the most unalike of America’s undesirables”,

Whitfield will propose that some Jews bridged or pretended to bridge that gap by identifying with the black experience, empathizing with historically the most despised of American minorities, and in some sense thought themselves to be black-- at least enough to write “black” music or to ventriloquize as though expressing themselves in a black voice.

Stephen Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University, where he also chairs the Department of American Studies. He is the author of eight books, including most recently In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999, paperback 2001). Professor Whitfield has also taught abroad, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the Sorbonne, and the University of Munich.