In my forthcoming book, By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Betrayal in a Jewish Family, I imagine the lives of my father’s sister, a white Ashkenazi daughter of immigrants and her African American husband who were living in segregated Chicago in 1940.

As I write this looking back 80 years, I recognize the gathering, urgent concerns of the 1940s' Jewish community and Black community cascading into separate, unconnected silos. Whether or not individuals had political or religious outlooks that crossed ethnic borders, daily struggles were segregated. Finding and keeping a job or a place to live or experiencing the dignity of putting on a uniform or waving a flag to represent your country, the nature of each of these for white Jews was different from the experiences of African Americans. For the very few interracial couples like my Aunt Rose and Mr. Arnwine, troubles could be neither fully shared, nor separately siloed.

My metaphor, separate siloes of concern, keeps coming back to me. Today I read in Eddie Glaude’s book (2020), Begin Again: James Balwin’s America and It’s Urgent Lessons for our Own:

“By what would become know as the “long, hot, summer” of 1967, urban rebellions exploded in 159 cities across the United States—in states from Florida to Nebraska; on college campuses in Jackson, Mississippi and Houston, Texas; and in places like Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood…..A week after the riots in Newark, Detroit exploded, leaving forty-three people dead, more that seven thousand arrested and the city devasted.”

I now think there is a date, not only when the conception of Israel changed from eternally vulnerable to the muscular, ordained by God owners of the land and when concurrently cities across the U.S. burned with raging refusal to accept the status quo, but also the time when the separate silos of concerns for the Black and Jewish communities filled and were capped. Except in the rarest of circumstances, Jewish and Black communal concerns did not touch. How did interracial families and individuals who were both Black and Jewish experience 1967 and beyond? I want to know.