. good morning and welcome to mosaic. i am honored to be your host. our faith community across country spend time talking about how to communicate history and values to its community. to the next generation and one of the ways in which faith communities have done this is to the communication with writing and with reading. and we want to invite you into a conversation with two youthors one is a children's book author and another is an academic. we will talk with professor mark dollinger but in the >> my fifth. thor who s wra won

>> fifth and that is bitter and sweet and let's jump in and tell us a little bit about what bitter and sweet is. >> thank you. i am delighted to be here with you and it's children's picture bock about a little girl named hannah whose family moves to new town. and at first hannah can only see the by ther in the move and feels the loss of her friends and her home which she loved and all the little things about that life that a child would notice. and she eventually does learn to find the sweet in her new situation. and the point of the story for me is about more than just a move. it's about change. and i think it's really important for us as adults to help kids learn some resiliency around change. because as we know, change happens whether we sort of want

it or not. in a the love aspects of our lives. >> i think we live in a world even if you stay in the same place, for example, the san francisco bay area, transition is all around us. and whether it's a transition to a new school or neighborhood or a transition to a new peer group, then there's a lot of issues to to get stimulated and parents struggle with ways to articulate as you said, ways to understand resilience. ways to understand and perceive and act and behave. and i am wondering how in bitter and sweet you as a children's author kind of conge gate the bitter issues to the language of a child. >> that's a good question. i think first you are right. i think change is all around us and particularly for kids this time year when we are going to longer days, a little darker days, and schools just started

not too long ago for kids and change can be not just a school teacher each year or a new team to be a part of. change is all around us. and in bitter and sweet, he tried to focus some of that, again, on what a child would notice. i talk a little bit about her noticing her art coming down from the classroom walls. her noticing the house she used to have she could ride her bike happily on the street and her new house on the hill. so the little details that as adults we may not think we are the big parts of a move to a child can be really important. and the way i try to help hannah feel better and learn resiliency around this is the first time she starts to feel comfortable in her new surroundings, and is at shabbat. and i think it's a time for all of us where you get to kind of pause and relax your shoulders and it's a sensory part of our

week, where there's sweet wine and it's also a lovely family time. and so i think helping kids at adapt to change is about continuing the rituals that whether it is from a jaouish family or other cultures are a part of what would anchor the child and make them feel more comfortable. >> and i am wondering how you think about the ways in which you articulate something leek adapting to change and things that are particular about how you use your own faith tradition in this case, the end of the workweek and jewish context of the shabbat and i know it's big question but we struggle with that when we face life's challenges. >> absolutely. well as i mentioned, i think so many traditions have these beautiful rituals and things about them that can help anchor children.

i do think that i anchored this story in a jewish family and tradition. one the other elements is hannah reaches to her grandmother when she finds out she has to move. and the grandmother shares with her granddaughter that she moved not just to a new town, but a new country. she shares her immigrant story. and i think in this country where we are a country of immigrants, and there's so many stories about people coming and adapting, and finding their way in a new land, in a new town and community, so, i think there's a lot that's general not just particular to the jewish faith. i also -- the other way hannah feels better about her situation is when a new friend reaches out and that's something that can happen with anyone. >> we will take break and return in moment.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am honored tore your host. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with children's author sandra feder about her fifth children's book called bitter and sweet about a young girl named hannah who moves because her father gets a new job, and she is going through the transition of a new home and a new neighborhood,

and a new school. and the title bitter and sweet is woven into the story throughout the story and it has a very lovely ending. and can you gave little bit of a peek into how that evolves and anybody who is listening will be even that much more enticed to go out and buy the book. >> thank you. so in the story, bitter and sweet first refers to how hannah feels about moving. she canent only see the bitter and harder part and finds the sweet and one of the ways she finds the sweet is a friend gives her gift of hot cocoa. and at first she doesn't realize she needs to add some sugar to the cocoa so the cocoa itself tushes out bitter which reinforces at first her feelings. she figures out she needs to add sweet but it's really when she figures out what she needs is not just the cocoa, but the friendship. and the gift from her friend maya who reaches out a hand to

hannah and it is when hannah realize she needs to reach back out to feel connected that she finds the sweet in the situation. and i think that is true for situation, a coity,hang a ndrea portant, on vest someyourself in the situation that it becomes that much sweeter. >> and are you suggti th resilience has lot to do with how you understand your own use of self and relationship and the ways in which you receive and give? >> reporter: absolutely. i think that's a huge part of resilience. and i think building resiliency with children is also just getting them to recognize their past experiences, what they have learned, what they were able to put in, and get back from those situations and how to apply that in the future. >> we started out talking about how faith communities try to talk about their own history and values to build resilience and to build identity into the

next generation and here it is you have a children's book that pushes into that landscape. and i am wondering kind of in a big way, what do you alof our f our children. if we are trying to help they understand life is full of change some we control and some which we don't helping them understand their part of the longer narrative and traditions of their family and faith traditions can really be a wonderful foundation for them. i think that's hugely important whatever that tradition may be. >> so, if someone would like to buy bitter and sweet how do they buy book. >> i like to support indy bound which supports independent booksellers and it's available on the major buying websites for books and you can check out my own issandras feder.com and there's links there as well. >> believe it or not we have

cot come to say bye to this nvon. thanks for being here and we encourage you to please go to your website our independent bookstore and buy bitter and sweet by sandra feder. in moment we will welcome professor mark dollinger.

good morning. and welcome back to mosaic. i am rabbi eric wipes and we are going to intro cues you to a history professor at san francisco state university. welcome professor macmarc dollinger. >> great to be here. >> you wrote a book called black power jewish politics reinventing the alliance of the

1960s. so, that's a potent title. >> yeah. >> so, let's just jump in as an academic, you have just a lot of freedom to choose what you write about and the content you put in to something and let's start at the beginning and ask you how did you arrive to this particular topic? >> this is somewhat embarrassing story. from my very first week at cal berkeley as a freshman i was raised in the los angeles suburbs of 1970s and learned about jewish social justice what is to repair or heal the world, and we learned about dr. king, and we learned about the civil rights movement, the march from selma. i was excited to arrive at berkeley. i signed up and the second stop for mow of course was the black student union table. and i walked up and introduced myself, and i said let's start

a black jewish dialogue and my african american colleague burst out laughing. and kept laughing until the horrified look on my face that i didn't get the picture. and i guess that called the moment he said, hey, i am from harlem. and when he said that i understood it was an african american neighborhood in manhattan but i understood it was a deeper statement that he was making to me. that his upbringing and my upbringing and certainly his look at african american history and my look at it would be fundamentally different. and as i wrote to open the book, that was actually the moment that started the particular project. this is sort of my answer to that conversation with him. >> and so, where did that conversation go? i know it's culminated in marvelous book that we wantpeop

how did the conversation continue. >> i joked because that was the end of the black jewish dialogue of 1982 at uc berkeley and i decided i needed to educate myself and study classes and african american history classes and began looking at american juwish history and did my graduate work in jews and social justice and and the mated by jewish, americaness and race and this book is really sort of my big of the focused attempt to get at really big questions through a very specific moment. >> and each community the black community and the jewish community in the united states has a lot of parallel use of faith tradition, and a parallel use of using faith tradition to advance their own respective communities causes.

and also in that context, each interest in what we might think of as intersecting other communities. so that's a big topic i know. but, i know that something you have given a lot of thought so s to the content >> ta ttle ofbit the book. >> this is where it gets tricky. and what you saw was a good and accurate depiction of the way in which we tend to understand the relationship between faith based traditions and social justice. certainly, the greatest example from the civil rights movement is the rabbi who was a hero and i define a hero as someone willing to risk their power and their own privilege to benefit the other. in this case african americans in the south. sadly, as i did the research, i discovered that even as we have a few genuine heroes, the relationship between the faith tradition and the actual

activism was inverted. which is to say looking at the civil rights movement, those for whom short of traditional understandings of jewish law are most applicable the orthodox community was least involved in justice work outside of the jewish community in terms of african american racial equality and conservative movement moving liberal had more of reform move with the least oak observeant and most engaged but it was the jewish socialist an communist and secular jews and cultural jews who were down there. so for me as an academic, it was fascinate to be raced in tradition i understood my faith informed it yet when i looked at the evidence it turned out to be much more complicated. >> and i think that part of the complication is sort of a big thing i would love to know what you think before we take a break, our jewish community of

light is coming to reflect on our history of immigrants. we came in from place, by in large n which prejudice was based on religion and ethnicity to mace where prejudice was based on skin color and so, in some ways we were able to assimilate and succeed because we got to in our own minds, pass as white although in the culture, we were white. and so, an issue that we are dealing with in the jewish community is how do jews understand our whiteness which in some ways, feels a little out of sync with how we internalize our identity but on the other hand is part of the american jew issue dentity. and i wonder where you are in that thought and we are going to take a quick break. not to put you on the spot, and come back. >> this is one of the most complex questions animating most of my work now. one reason i love the discipline of jewish studies is the question of jews and racial definition. that whiteness is what we call

socially constructed. and ws hiory they have white n talking about white skin eastern european jews and there are times when they are white. most scholars concluded by 1960s, if not 1950 american jews were white and the story of social justice is a place of whiteness and power and privilege. even as so many jews and generationally don't self- define themselves as white. because they point out rightfully, there's anti- semitism and sadly it's spiking in recent times. >> we will take a quick break with that and return to this conversation with professor marc dollinger in moment.

good morning. welcome back to mosaic we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with professor marc dollinger who occupies gold machine chair in the department of jewish studies in the department of san francisco state. let's talk about the core these noise there's three parts to the book. and it einvolved backwards. i was really interested if how american jews were the movement

picked up in the mid-60s when as an anticommunist movement it should have come in the mid 1950s. beme and more ed faith and traditional. and even jews who turned to the far right did it at this moment. and the more i look were ulatg a decreated by and in fact, black nationalists and a young generation of african american proclaimed it was okay to be public with your identity. and i was interested to see that jews followed that model more than they actually you know, a we could say authenticly created something jewish. and from that i worked backwards to the mid 1960 when the black jews alliance split up and i was raised believed that that was horrible terrible time of great discord and it was a disappointment that the

alliance dissolved. and i read the primary sources, and discovered that jewish leadership saw it coming and they understood it and i appreciated it. and they discounted the impact of black anti-semitism because they understood that jews were white and privileged and for finance i moved back knot 1950s. to see how much of what happened in the 60s and '70s, the jewish leadership was aware of even before, and i found out ten years before 50 years before they understood differences between what it meant to be white and jewish and african american and they were predicting not only an interfaith alliance but it would have to split up because there's no way the alliance could survive given the different american experiences of the two groups. >> you say they within a jewish leadership context who were the

they seeing, thinking, writing. >> yeah. >> talking about this. >> that's an excellent question. i elected to study leaders of national jewish organizations and the regional offices. for this reason,th they are mostly men, mostly white, and they are mostly middle aged. and in the pros and cons to do that. the pros is these are jewish leaders towhat someone who is claiming jewishness was claiming. the challenging part for historians most of the jews involved in the movement why moth actively identified with jewish organization and some would deny jewishness had anything to do with it so i wanted to focus on them. >> i think every historian classically looks to the future. >> right. >> and so, i am wondering given all of this, and all of what's in our world at large, both san francisco bay area, the united

states, and really beyond, what is our jewish, black, future? if is that is the way a to ask the question. >> i am a historian it's tough enough to predict the past but the book is about historical memory. and it's about the way we elected to remember a history that was actually quite different. in the epilogue i try to critique myself to say what i failed in the book and looking to the newture what can we do, toon me it's clear jews of color we have an increasing population of jews of color and to read a book about the black jewish aloyance in relationship when one is both black and jewish complicates our entire understanding. so the next generation is to critically examine how much jewishness and judaism is code for whiteness and privilege. and the extent to which it is coming from the faith tradition. and i think here we have to

look to our brother in the jews of color community to guide us. >> and so, how does somebody actually buy your book. >> thank you. so the regular website and locally in the east bay. >> you yourself are you in the middle of a book tour or. >> yes, i am in the middle of a book tour across the country right now, and on my website it will have the details. >> wonderful. and certainly your classes san francisco state. >> yes. >> that's fascinating. so we will stop in just a moment and say good-bye, but, i am wondering if you can reflect on a particular piece of this is that is the narrative you wrote a jewish towh degree afri americisclass th understandorot >> right this is an excellent

question. and the first two words of the bock are black power but it's not about black power it's about jewish politics and i am using the frame of the black power movement in order to get into an understanding of what is jewish and what is american, and how it is that american jews are cult rating to the culture for scholars and african american history they will have their own questions. >> wonderful. thanks so much. we hope you enjoyed this morning together on a conversation about resilience. buy books from sandra feder and professor marc dollinger. thanks so much for being with us.

live from the cbs bay area studios, this is kpix 5 news. right now , something we haven't seen for more than a year. 49er faithful feeling this to fans stands at levi a look at a much different fan experience. and the efforts from the governor which is one month until his recall election. cool colors and covid-19 fixings. resu good morning. t might it is sunday, august 15th. i am deven fehely. >> marine layer great to start the day in the immediate bay and