My Jewish Mentor
Among the many things I found so fascinating about Mr. Zidel's marvelously relaxed art classes, was his ability to weave into some of his discussions, random aspects of Jewish culture. I'd end up learning why many Jewish men wear a yarmulke and why it was necessary that he "keep kosher." I discovered the meanings of Aliyah and Halacha, and became privy to many other aspects of his culture that I found both fascinating and enlightening. I also found myself intrigued by his constant use the word Jew as opposed to Jewish. The term "Jew" had always struck me as an undignified and disrespectful shortening of the word used to describe that faith. Mr. Zidel helped me resolve those kinds of questions as well. It seems that due to his willingness to share a bit of his culture in a manner completely devoid of the dogmatic fervor characteristic of religious zealots of any faith, it finally began to register what Jewish-ness, could be about.
Meanwhile, I was already aware -- from previous history classes in junior high -- of the abject extermination of six million Jews in the manifestation of Nazi savagery recognized as the Holocaust. I can vividly recall the bleak, gray images flickering on our class's projector screen of the carcasses of thousands upon thousands of rail-thin Jews being impassively dumped from front-loaders into trenches fashioned into mass graves, cascading downward like some macabre human waterfall. For me, the sight was sickening literally. It was the ultimate atrocity.
And so it remained; right up until -- while reading From Slavery to Freedom, by John Hope Franklin in my 10th grade history class -- I was astonished to learn of the sub-human depravity inflicted upon African slaves during the Middle Passage resulting in the deaths of as many as 60 million Africans. Of course, there was no film, but it was easy to construct the imagery of millions of Africans leaping or being thrown overboard slave ships, cascading to their deaths during the course of that period, and of millions more who died of disease, torture, starvation and who knows what else along the way. I also learned that the term "ghetto," which by then was being used to describe most black communities like Roxbury, is a term originally concocted to describe those areas of occupied Europe where Jews were instructed to live before being shipped off for extermination.
I also took note of the participation by the Jewish in the civil rights movement. At some point, it became apparent that Jews were reliable allies out of the realization that the Jewish community --like African-Americans --faced the same danger posed by bigotry and discrimination from the same sources. Hence, to me, the productive inter-faith partnership between blacks and Jews during the civil rights movement was the pragmatic by-product of the awareness by both communities of the vested interest they shared in participating in a righteous struggle.
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