> >> good morning and welcome to mosaic. i'm honored to be your host this morning. communities across the country spend a lot communicate its history and values to its community to the next generation. one of the ways in which faith communities have done this is through the communication with writing and with reading. and so we would like to invite you into a conversation with two authors.e authors. one is a children's book author and another is an academic. we will talk with professor mark dollinger in a moment. but in the meantime, i

would like to introduce you to sandra feeder who has written a wonderful children's book. this is your fourth children's book. book. >> i'm fifth, actually. >> and this is called bitter and sweet. so why don't we jump in and tell us about what "bitter and sweet" is. >> thank you. i'm delighted to be here. it is a book about a little girl named hannah whose family moves to a new town. at first, she can only see the bitter in this move. she feels the loss of her friends and her home that she loved and all of the little things about that life that a child would noticee notice. she eventually does learn to find the sweet in her new situation. the point of the story for me is about more than just a move. it is about change. i think it is really important for us as adults to help kids learn some resiliency around change because as we

know, change happens wherever we sort of want it or not in a lot of aspects of our live. >> i think we live in a world tt world that even if we stay in the same place, that transition is all around us. whether it is a transition to a new school or a transition to a new neighborhood or a transition to a new peer group, there is a lot of issues that get stimulated and parents struggle with ways to articulate and ways to understand and perceive, act, and behave. i wonder how you as a children's author kind of conjugate the bigger issues down to the language of the child. >> that's a really good question. and i think first of all, you are right. change is all around us and particularly for kids this time of year when we are going to longer days, a

little darker days, school has just started. change can be not just a move or a new school but a new teacher each year or a new team to be a part of. chane of. change is definitely all around us. and in "bitter and sweet", i try to focus on what a child would look at, her art coming down from the classroom walls. she notices that the house she used to have, she could ride her bike happily on the street but her new house is on the hill. little details that as adults we may not think are big parts but to a child can be very important. the way i try to make hannah feel better is the first time she starts to feel comfortable in her new surroundings is shabatt shabat. it is a time for all of us when you get a pause and relax a little bit. it is a

very sensory part of the week where there is sweet wine to taste and haula to smell. it is a lovely family time. it is about continuing the rituals, whether it is from a jewish family or other cultures, are a part of what would anchor the child and make them feel more comfortable. >> i'm wondering how you think about the ways in which you think some of the universal adapting to change and things that are particular to how you use your own faith tradition in this case, the end of the work week in the jewish context of the sabbath, and the rituals around it. how do you think of weaving the particulars to the universal? i think this is a big question. but i know we struggle with that when we facs face life's challenges. >> absolutely. as i mentioned, i think so many traditions have these beautiful rituals and things about them that can help

anchor children. i think i anchored this story in a jewish family, in a jewish tradition.e tradition. one of the stories is that hannah reaches out to her grandmother when she finds out she has to move. and her grandmother shares that she moved not just to another town but to another country. and we are a country of immigrants and there are so many stories of people coming and adapting and finding their way in a new land, a new town, and a new co. i think there is a lot that is general about the story, not just particular to the jewish faith. the other way hannah starts to feel better about her situation is when a new friend reaches out. i think that is something that obviously can happen with anyone. >> sandra, wonderful. we will take a quick break and return o

children's author, sandra feede, in a moment.

> >> good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i'm honored to be your host. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with children's author sandra feeder and her book called bitter and sweet. it is 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 a new school. the title "bitter and sweet" gets woven in throughout the story and it has a wonderful ending. i wonder if you can give us a peek to how that evolves so anyone who is listening is enticed to go out and buy the book. >> bitter and sweet first refers to how she feels about moving.t moving. first she can only see the bitter, the hard parts of the move. she does find the sweet and one of the ways is a friend gives her a gift of hot cocoa. at first, she doesn't realize she needs to add some sugar to the cocoa. so the cocoa itself turns out bitter which reinforces her feelings.e feelings. she soon realizes she needs to add the sweet to it. t it. it is when she feels out what she needs is not just the cocoa but the friendship. and the gift from her friend maya

makes a big difference. she reaches out a hand to hannah and it is when she realizes that she needs to reach back to maya to feel connected that she finds the sweet in the new situation. i think that is really true for all people when you are new in a situation, a community, having a friend reach out is so important. it is when you invest something of yourself back into the situation that it becomes sweeter. >> in some ways are you suggesting that resiliency is how you understand yourself and relationships and the ways in which you receive and give? >> absolutely. i think it is a huge part of resilience. i think building resiliency with children is 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. here you have a children's book that pushes into that kind of a landscape.m landscape. i'm wondering, kind of in a big way, what do you hope the book will do in that arena? >> well, i think all of our faith traditions, all of our family histories have so much to teach our children. if we are trying to help them understand that life is full of change, some of which we can control and some of which we d, we don't, helping them understand they are are a part of the longer narrative, and the traditions of the family and faith traditions can be a wonderful foundation for them.i them. i think that is hugely important, whatever that tradition may be. if someone would like to buy bitter and sweet, how do they buy the book? >> i like to support indy bound which supports independent book sellers. it is available on all of the major buying websites for books. you can check out my own website have is sandra v feeder.com and there are links

there as well. >> wonderful. believe it or not, we have come to say goodbye to this conversation. thank you so much for being here. we encourage you to please go to your website or the independent book store and buy the book. in one moment, we will welcome prr mark dollinger.

> >> good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i'm raric weiss and we are about to introduce you to mark dollinger, history professor at san francisco state university. welcome professor. >> great to be here. >> you wrote this wonderful book called black power, jewish politics, reinventing the alliance of the 1960s. so that

is a potent title. >> yeah. >> so let's just jump in. as an academic, you have a lot of freedom to choose what you write about and the content you put into something. let's start at the beginning and ask you, how did you arrive to this particular topic? >> somewhat embarrassing story.m story. from my very first week t week at calberkeley as a freshman, i was raised in los angeles in the suburbs in the 1970s. there i learned about jewish social justice, what we call now to repair or heal the world. we learned about dr. king, the civil rights movement, the march from selmai selma. i was so excited to arrive at berkeley. my first stop was the table for the jewish student union and i signed up as all good jewish kids were supposed to do. and then the second stop for me was of course the black student union table. and i walked up

introduced myself and i said let's start a black jewish dialogue. and i'm african american colleague burst out laughing and kept laughing until he saw the horrified look on my face, realizing i didn't get the picture. i guess to sort of calm the moment, he said, hey, i'm from harlem. and when he said that, i understood that literally harlem was an african american neighborhood but i understood that it was a deeper statement he was making to me. that his upbringing and my upbringing and 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 the moment that started the project. this is my answer to that conversation with him. >> so where did that conversation go? i know it has culminated in this marvelous book that people want to read d

contemilate. plate. how did that go? >> i joke because that was the end of the dialogue in 1982. ad 1982. and i decided to educate myself. i took a lot of black studies classes, african american history classes. i also began looking at american jewish history, ultimately doing my graduate work in jews in social justice. and i have been animated by the intersection of jewishness, americanness, and race. this book is my biggest attempt to try to get at some really big questions through a very specific moment. >> and each community, the black community, and the jewish community, at least in the united states, have a lot of parallel use of faith tradition and a paralleled 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 communitieso communities. so that's a big topic i know. i know something you have given a lot of thought about. so it's a big question but it goes to had the contentf content of the book. i'm wondering if you can talk a lie a little about the content of the book. >> this is where it gets trickyt tricky. what you offered is a good depiction in which we understand the relationship between faith based traditionse traditions. the greatest example whee have is abraham joshua who was a hero who was willing to sacrifice to benefit others, in this case, african americans in the south. sadly, as i did the research, i discovered even though 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 traditional understandings of jewish law are most applicable, the orthodox community were the least involved in justice work, at least outside of the jewish community, certainly in terms of african american racial equality. conservative movement which is moving a little more liberal had a little more of the reformed movement, the least observant and the most engaged. to be honest, it was the jewish socialists, communists, is secular jews were mostly the ones down there. for me as an academic, i found it fasing to be raised in a tradition that my faith informed it but when i looked at the evidence, it was more complicated. >> and i think the complications complication is a bag part -- i would love to know what you th.

our jewish complunt is reflecting on our history. we came from by in large in whiche discrimination was based on religion. and now we got to a place that discrimination was based on race. and we were at a place where we could fit in because we were white. so how do we understand our whitenessh whiteness? which is out of sync in which we internalize the identity but it is part of the jewish american identity. i'm just wondering where you are in that thought and then we will take a quick break and come back. >> this is one of the most complex questions and it is animating most of my work now.e now. one reason i love the discipline of jewish studies ie question of jews. there have

been times when jews have not been considered white, even when talking about eastern european jews. and there are times when jews definitely are white. most scholars have xuncluded that by 196 if not 1950, american jews became white. must o of the story of social justice comes from a place of whiteness, power, and privilege, even as many jews and generationally do not define themselves as white because they point out rightfully that there is anti-semitism and sadly, it is spiking in recent times. >> we will take a quick break and return to the conversation with professor mark dollinger n just a moment.

> >> good morning and welcome back to mosaic. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with professor mark dollinger o dollinger who occupies the goldman chair in the department of jowish studies at san francisco state university. wee university. welcome back, mark.s mark. let's talk about the core thesis of the book. >> right. there are three parts tothe book. it kind of evolved backwards. i was really interested in how american jews became more ethnic in their judaism in the last 60s and 70s. the soviet jew removement

picked up in the mid 60s when as an anti-communist movement, it should have come in the 1950s. jews rediscovered their faith and they became more kosher and traditional. even jews who turned to the far right did it at this moment. te moment. the more i looked at it, the more i realized they were emulating a model created by the black power movement. black nationalists and a young genern young generation of african ames african americans proclaimed it was okay to be public with your identity. i was interested to see that jews followed that model more than they as we could say authenticically created something jewish. from that, i worked backwards to the mid 1960s when the black jewish alliance of the king movement split up. i grew up lurping that it was a horrible time of discourse and disappointment

that the alliance dissolved. tn dissolved. then i read the primary sources and discovered that jewish leadership saw it coming and they understood it and they appreciated it. they discounted the impact the black anti-semitism because they understood that jews were white and privileged and enjoying middle class status. then just for fun and to push the thesis, i moved back to the 1950s to see how much of what the and 7h leadership was aware of, even before. and i found out 10 years before even 50 years before, they understood fundamental differences between what it meant to be white and h and jewish and what it meant to be african american. and they were predicting not only a nice interfaith alliance but that it would have to split up because there is no way the alliance can survive given the different american experiences of the two groups. >> and when you say they within a jewish leaderership context, who were the they seeing, thinking, writing, talking

about? >> that is an excellent question. i elected to study leaders of the national jewish organizations and regional offices. they are mostly men, mostly white, and mostly middle aged. there are pros and cons to doing that. the pros is, these are jewish leaders proclaiming to act in their jewishness on what they are doing. i wanted to see what someone who was claiming jewishness was claiming. the challenging part for historian, for historians, most of the jews in the movement were not involved with the organizations and some would deny that jewishness had anything to do with it. so i wanted to focus on them. >> i think every historian classically looks to the future. >> right. >> i'm wondering, given all of this and our world at large, san francisco, united states,

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

faith tradition. we have to look at our brothers in the jews of color to guide us. >> fascinating. so how does someone buy your book? >> the regular websites and locally, arthur coleman in the east bay stocks it. >> and you yourself, are you in the middle of a book tour? >> yes, i'm in the middle of a book tour across the country and i'm website will have the details. >> wonderful. and certainly your classes at san francisco. >> yes, yes. >> we will stop in just a moment and say goodbye but i'm wondering if you can reflect on a familiar piece of this which is that, is the narrative that you wrote a jewish narrative? i wonder to what agree african american history classes would have even the same understanding or not? >> right. this is an excellent

question. and the first words of the book are black power. bt power. but it is not about black power. it is about jewish politics. i'm using the frame of the black power movement to get into an understanding what is jewish and what is americand american. and how it is that american jews are acultureating to this culture for scholars and african american history, they will have their own questions. >> wonderful. thank you so muche much. we hope you have enjoyed this morning with a conversation on resilience. ple resilience. please buy, the books from sandra freeder and professor mark dollinger. thank you for being with us.

>> live from the cbs bay area s, this is kpix5 news. >> we are not against giving a d to people in need. we can't understand is why here? > >> battle is brewing in one of e bay area's wealthiest community over a safe parking site for the the homeless. > >> another bay area county moves county moves into the lowest tier of covid transmission. but that doesn't mean the pandemic is over. > >> and farmers are expected to h sacramento soon with a message from the governor. > >> good morning. i am devin fehely. let's start with darren peck. > >> we will cool down 10 to 12 ds for most of the warmest inland . we hit 100 yesterday ine