Really excited to hear @temasmith, @nadinebh_, and @BlewishAnd talk about race and racism in the Jewish community!

. @nadinebh_ :being Black and Jewish, you can feel like your existence is inconvenient. It's intensely painful to feel erased like that.

. @temasmith: feeling torn between these two communities is something that's come up for Jews on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. It's challenging for me when people try to make monolithic narratives of things like "black antisemitism."

. @temasmith But when I call that out in the Jewish community I get accused of being an antisemite, or of being "more loyal" to the Black community than the Jewish community. That's a troubling, divisive narrative.

@temasmith: I've experienced a growth in virulent anti-Blackness in the Jewish community—especially on social media—particularly as I've called out anti-Black racism within the Jewish community.

@BlewishAnd: It feels infinitely beautiful and complex to be at the nexus of being Black and British and Jewish. People expect to hear about the challenges, but there's real beauty in existing in this space, as does my 6yo son, who *loves* being Black and Jewish.

. @BlewishAnd: Both our communities have existed here for thousands of years, and there's lots of hurt and pain in both. Sometimes that pain manifests as strife. And this can feel really unsafe. When you speak up as a Black British Jew, you can get pulled down in both communities

. @BlewishAnd it feels like you're always either fighting anti-Black racism or antisemitism.

. @BlewishAnd: a cornerstone of British colonialism and the Holocaust is that non-white people are inferior. These beliefs are still in power today, and both the Black and Jewish community are living in the history and present of this trauma. We need a joint pursuit of justice.

. @BlewishAnd: the twin conversations around antisemitism in Labor and Windrush could have been an opportunity for our communities to come together, but we didn't. We need to pay more attention to what's going on to one another.

. @temasmith: There is so much in our Jewish tradition and communal wisdom making it an imperative to come together. One of the biggest threats to the Jewish community in NA is from white supremacist violence—they don't like Jews or Black people, so we're in this together.

. @temasmith: our safety as Black people, as Jews, and as Black Jews is bound up together. If we're busy fighting each other, we aren't addressing that. It's a Jewish moral imperative, but it's also a real, tangible necessity for our safety to address white nationalism together

@nadinebh_ : what we saw with the Wiley situation was that there are tensions between Black and Jewish communities that need to be addressed. Something is fundamentally wrong if Black Jews are being treated this way from both sides of their identities. We need to be constructive

@BlewishAnd: there's a Zulu concept called Ubuntu, meaning that my humanity is inextricably bound up in yours. You can't exist as a human in isolation. We need to encourage and collaborate with one another to create and build community.

Moderator: What do we need to do to not just talk the talk? Who bears the responsibility to make sure we're not bystanders

@nadinebh_: Communal leadership and communal press. The Jewish press, for example, has too often been inflaming tensions rather than promoting solidarity

. @nadinebh_, as individuals, we also can't shy away from having difficult conversations in our own communities.

. @temasmith: at the @URJorg biennial last year there was a lot of lifting up and centering of Black voices. Relationships being built. The movement endorsed reparations for Black Americans. It's symbolic, but important for the largest US Jewish org to take this kind of action.

. @temasmith in Canada there's also dialogue going on between Black and Jewish organizations. This is a slow process but it's happening.

. @temasmith but we also really need to do hard internal work. We can't just keep leaning on the fact that Jews were involved in the civil rights struggle. What are we doing now?

It's uncomfortable, but that discomfort is good. Without that pain and work, there's no movement

. @BlewishAnd we need to claim that antiracism platform back. It can feel like change is impossible, but it is always achievable. What's the role of leadership? We all leaders if we choose to be in the space and need to take that responsibility.

. @BlewishAnd: Judaism is an ongoing conversation about who we are as a community. We need to keep doing that, keep improving. Education is also crucial. We need to decolonize curricula to talk more about both Black and Jewish life in Britain. All of this is British history.

. @BlewishAnd: I don't understand how you can have these conversations about the Black and Jewish communities without Black Jews being at the table.

Moving to questions now.

Q: Are Brits too quick to dismiss racism as a US problem

@nadinebh_: Yeah this is especially true with white nationalism, which we don't take seriously enough in UK. People tend to think it's worse in the US, but that's not so.

. @BlewishAnd: every time I start talking about racism people try to bring it back to the US. Here, racism is more covert, but it's still here. People feel like it's not racist if people aren't using the N-word but that's not true. I feel that within the Jewish community here too.

. @BlewishAnd: BLM is exposing fault lines that already exist. People will say racist things about Black folks and then say "I support BLM"

. @temasmith: I have an interesting vantage point where things are like UK, but close proximity to US. Canada needs to get off its high horse—especially around indigenous issues. We have racial profiling and violence of Black folks here like in US. The *structures* are the same

. @temasmith: it's different in the US than UK/Canada. Black people as descendants of slaves vs descendants of colonized people. We need to stop seeing racism as just US cops killing Black people. Health inequities, Windrush, etc etc. It might not be US but it's still deeply bad

Q: Jewish communities have gotten good at talking about *interfaith* engagement, but how do we get better at talking about white ashkenormativity and talking about how diversity within Jewish community makes us stronger.

. @temasmith: We need better history of Jewish community. But it can't just be "Jewish show and tell" which is still otherizing. We need to actively push for representation of not white-Ashkenazi folks in our orgs. And leadership need to push for that representaiton.

. @temasmith: we can't be successful in doing work outside of our community if we don't start with doing the work within our community.

. @BlewishAnd: We need to teach our children. Cheders and Jewish day schools need to teach about histories of Jewish communities all over the world. I'm always the one teaching about Jamaican Jews because nobody learns about it.

. @nadinebh_: the Jewish community needs to see itself as a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community. We're not a monolith.

Moderator, closing: Let's build a world where @BlewishAnd's son can feel proud to be Black and Jewish—where no one has to feel like they have to choose between parts of their identities.

That's it. Grateful to @temasmith, @BlewishAnd, and @nadinebh_ for sharing their wisdom and pushing the Jewish community to do and be better.

Thanks for following along with the thread. Apologies if I misattributed any of the quotes above.