Diversionary Tactics

Recently I attended a presentation about Jews of color and a screening of a film about Jews who live in Sefwi Wiawso, Ghana. Held at a progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, the event was led by the filmmakers Adam McKinney and Daniel Banks, Ph.D. At the very end of what had been a lively Q&A, a man thrust his hand up and let loose the oldest line in the book: “But we all know these people aren’t Jews!”

The comment engendered gasps and groans around the room. One audience member responded, “I am astounded that you would say such a thing in this space at BCC, a space expressly created to respond to the needs of those who also were told they don’t belong.”

The hosting organization Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) is known as the world’s oldest gay and lesbian synagogue. The congregation has actually redefined itself over several decades, now advertising itself as “an inclusive community of progressive lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and heterosexual individuals, our families and friends.” The inclusion of other groups was a result of hard-won battles by some BCC members who found the words “gay and lesbian” in the synagogue’s description to be just as limiting and exclusionary as the synagogues that had made them feel unwelcome for being gay or lesbian.

The two people least shocked by the man’s pronouncement were McKinney and Banks. The filmmakers hear this sort of theme—variations on who may or may not be declared Jewish—repeatedly in discussions of their film and most recently on the pages of New York’s The Jewish Week, which dismissed their innovative presentation “Belonging Everywhere” as irrelevant and labeled the workshop leaders themselves as angry. The article’s original subhead, which has since been deleted on The Jewish Week website, read in large type, “But if they’re angry, will anybody listen?” Lest I misrepresent McKinney and Banks in any way, let me state my disclaimer upfront: All the anger in this article is solely mine. None of it came from Banks and McKinney, who are—for the record—some of the warmest, kindest people I’ve ever met.

McKinney, 31, is a professional dancer who has performed with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and other leading companies. He is also a dialog facilitator who has used active listening and healing movement for the past ten years to counsel communities of color and young people.

Choreographer and theater director Banks, 42, serves on the faculty of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative. He has been facilitating weekly conversations about culture, ethnicity, color, class and identity for fifteen years, as well as co-founding with McKinney the arts service organization DNAworks, which promotes community and personal healing through dialog and art.

McKinney and Banks followed the same script in Los Angeles as they use in all their workshops, including the presentation in New York. With none of the vitriol attributed to them by The Jewish Week writer, the men gave an introduction peppered with anecdotes, then aired their film, “We Are All One: The Jews of Sefwi Wiawso,” sandwiched between commentary and anecdotes, and a post-film discussion. Among the anecdotes were some that ought to have engendered real anger but which were recounted matter-of-factly by McKinney and Banks in the context of a topically-appropriate discussion on race, racism, and Jewish lives.

Adam McKinney grew up in the midst of the Milwaukee Lubavitcher community where he and his family were treated with as much kindness and respect as any other Lubavitcher. His family belonged to a Reform temple and he attended Orthodox day school where many of his teachers were Lubavitchers.

He grew up studying Talmud and Mishnah, making Shabbat weekly, taking the requisite trip to Israel, acting in Purim schpiels, and making the occasional sweep for chametz required of his people. After he turned 13, he donned tefillin and prayed every morning at the school.

It was only when McKinney ventured outside into the larger Jewish world that he encountered Jews who considered him a stranger. Staring at his face, they would ask him, “How are you Jewish?” Eventually, he developed a thick skin and relied on wit: “I’m fine Jewish. How are you Jewish?”

As a white convert of Jewish patrilineal descent, I have only encountered this question once. At a highly respected conservative synagogue near my home, an elderly cantor making the rounds before services to welcome newcomers, upon hearing my last name, looked down his nose at me and deigned to utter, “Ohhh, aaah, you are not of our faith!” (Any anger noted in the previous sentence is mine.) But McKinney who grew up reciting Torah, rather than helping Mom set up the crêche (a household nativity scene, pronounced cresh) as I did, continues to hear this question hundreds of times a year.

When McKinney is out and about, he says, many a person—upon learning of his multiple heritages—inevitably asks, “Which part of your heritage—Black or Jewish—do you identify with?” The crowd at BCC, by now nearly all on board, titters in anticipation of McKinney’s next line.

McKinney gives the crowd a genuine, winning smile. He states pleasantly, “I come fully Black. I come fully Jewish. There is no part of me that can be divided.” The audience roars with applause.

When McKinney and Banks present together, notes Banks, their heritages are often erroneously assumed to be the same since they have similar skin tones. But while McKinney’s father identified as a black male and his mother as an Ashkenazi Jew, both of Banks’ parents identify as Ashkenazi Jews. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Banks says he was given a strong Jewish upbringing and lived in an “idyllic Jewish bubble” until he left home at 17. As he grew older, Jewish strangers and people close to him seemed to feel entitled to make thoughtless comments about his physical characteristics and insinuations about his race, provoking in him a feeling of not belonging. Once, he was asked to come in the kitchen door at a suburban Jewish dinner party because he was assumed to be the hired help.

Banks has yet to find a New York synagogue where he is accepted as he is, with no questions asked. He reports that he has sometimes felt disappointed, hurt, and excluded by his experiences but not angry. In line with his work as a facilitator of dialog about privilege, identity, and class in academic, social and artistic situations, Banks seems to be oriented toward building bridges, not tearing them down.

The words and accusations thrown at McKinney and Banks in The Jewish Week sounded increasingly familiar to me as I read them. They are the same tactics used against women and feminists to belittle the individuals and distract from the message.

Even though McKinney and Banks do not sound a bit like Black Panthers, as the article might suggest, what’s wrong with anger anyway? Why would anger turn Jews off? My mother often recounted to me as a child, how she would listen to my father and his uncle deep in in a heated debate in the living room, each entrenched in his righteous passion—and then, the next time she passed through the room, she would hear that they had exchanged positions and were each arguing from the other’s position with just as much vehemence. As a matter-of-fact, isn’t righteous anger, particularly over injustice, highly valued in Jewish culture?

As I read the following statement in The Jewish Week article, “What emerges in talking to the two artists is not only a desire for more inclusiveness, but a certain bitterness toward Ashkenazi Jews,” I immediately thought of how the word “bitter” has been brandished to denigrate and discount women’s rightful feelings of anger. My hope is that people who read The Jewish Week’s account of the workshop, “Belonging Everywhere,” will surmise that the accusations of anger say more about the writer, than the workshop leaders.

McKinney and Banks will leave New York in May 2009 for a three-month stint in Israel. McKinney will work with Beta Dance Troupe, a company of Ethiopian Jews in Haifa. “I will be choreographing dances that will express their experiences as an African immigrant community and as African Jews in a post-Holocaust Israel,” says McKinney.

Banks will be working with Arab and Jewish Israeli youth in a cooperative venture that he says entails “using hip-hop theater as a tool for community empowerment and leadership.” Previously, Banks has used hip hop theater in working with South African youth in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

For more information about these projects, visit www.dnaworks.org.
Copyright © 2008 Corinne Lightweaver.