and isis just 4 dodoses a yer after r 2 starter r doses. seserious allelergic reactcts and an incncreased risk of ininfections oror a lower a ability toto fight thehem may occuc. tell your r doctor if f you he an infectition or sympmptom, had a vaccccine, or plplan t. there's nonothing likeke clearer r skin and betttter movemenent-and that meansns everythining! ask your d doctor ababout skyi todaday. learn how abbvie coululd help you save. (upbeat music) good morning and welcome to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric weiss and i am proud to be your host this morning. our faith communities spent time talking about how to communicate its history and values to its community to the

next generation and one of the ways in which faith communities have done this is through the communication with writing and with reading. we would like to invite you into a conversation with two authors . one is a children's book author and another is an academic. we will talk with the professor in just a moment but in the meantime i would like to introduce you to a children's author who has written a wonderful book . this is your fourth children's book. >> my fifth, actually. >> it is called bitter and sweet . why don't we jump in and tell us about what bitter and sweet is . >> i am delighted to be here with you. it is a children's picture book and it is about a little girl named hannah his family moves to a new town . at first she can only see the bitter in this 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 learns to find the suite in her new situation. the point of the story is about more than just the move. it is about change and it is important for us as adults to help kids learn some resiliency around change because change happens whether we want it or not and a lot of aspects of our lives. >> i think we live in a world, even if you stay in the same place, the san francisco bay area. the transition is all around us. whether it is a transition to a new school or transition to a new neighborhood or transition to a new peer group, there is a lot of issues to get stimulated and parents struggle with ways to articulate, ways to understand resilience and ways to act and behave. i am wondering and how bitter and

sweet, as a children's author, conjugate those bigger issues down to the language of a child. >> that is a really good question. you're absolutely right. change is around us and particularly for kids, when we go to longer days and a little darker days. school just started not long ago for kids and change can be not just a move or a new school but a new teacher each year or a new team to be part of. change is all around us and in bitter and sweet i tried to focus that on what a child would notice. i talk a little bit about her noticing her art coming down from the classroom walls. her noticing that the house used to have , she could ride her bike on the street and the house is on the hill. the details that as adults we may not think we are the big parts of a move but to a child it can

be 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 is at shabbat and i think that is a time for all of us where you get to pause and relax your shoulders a little bit and it is a very sensory part of our week where there is sweet wine to taste and there is food to smell and a lovely family time. i think helping kids adapt to change is also about continuing the rituals , weather from a jewish family or other cultures, are part of what would anchor that child and make them feel more comfortable. >> i am learning how you think about the ways in which you articulate something universal like adapting to change. and things that are particular about how you use your own faith tradition in this case, the end of the work week and the jewish context of shabbat and the rituals around that.

how do you think about weaving the particular into the universe. i know it is a big question. we struggle with that. >> 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 with a jewish tradition. another element is that hannah reaches out to her grandmother when she finds out she has to move in the grandmother shares with her granddaughter as she moved not just to a new town but a new country. she shares her immigrant story. i think in this country we are a country of immigrants and there are so many stories about people coming and adapting and finding their way in the new land, in a new town and community. i think there is a lot that is general about the story, not just particular to the jewish faith. i also --

the other way hannah starts to feel better about her situation is when a new friend reaches out. and i think that is something that can obviously happen with anyone. >> we will take a quick break and returned to children's author sandra feder in just a moment.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am rabbi eric weiss and i will be your host . we are having a conversation with children's author sandra feder about her latest book. her fifth children's 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 home and neighborhood and new school. the title, 'bitter and sweet' gets woven into the story throughout the story and has a very lovely ending. i am wondering if you can give a book into how that evolved so anyone who is listening will be that much more enticed to buy the book . >> thank you. in the story, 'bitter and sweet' first refers to how hannah feels about moving that oppose she can only see the bitter and the harder parts . she learns to find the suite and one way is , a friend

gives her a gift of hot cocoa. at first she does not realize she needs to add some sugar to the cocoa. the cocoa turns out bitter which reinforces her feelings. she figures out she needs to add some sweet. it is really when she figures out that what she needs is not just the cocoa , but the friendship. and the gift from her friend , makes a big difference. meyer reaches out to hannah and it is when hannah realizes she needs to reach back out to meyer to feel connected that she really finds the suite in a new situation. i think that is really true for all people when you are new in a situation. having a friend reach out is important and it is when you invest back in the situation it becomes that much sweeter. >> in some ways are you suggesting that resilience has a lot to do with how you understand your own use of self and relationship and the ways in which you receive and give . >> absolutely. that is a huge

part of resilience. building resiliency with children is also just getting them to recognize their past experiences . what they have learned and what they were able to put in and get back from the 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 you have a children's book that pushes into that kind of landscape and i am wondering in a big way, what do you hope the book will do in that arena. >> i think all of our faith traditions and all of our family histories have so much to teach our children. for trying to help them understand that life is full of change and some we can control and some we don't. helping them understand they are part of this longer narrative and the traditions of their family and their faith traditions can really be a wonderful foundation for them.

i think that is hugely important . whatever that tradition may be. >> if someone wants to buy 'bitter and sweet' how do they? >> i like to support independent book sellers. it is available on all the major buying websites for books and you can check out my website and there are lots of links. >> wonderful. sandra, 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 your independent bookseller and by 'bitter and sweet' by sandra feder. one moment we will welcome , professor.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am rabbi eric weiss and we will introduce you to a history professor at san francisco state university. welcome, professor. >> great to be here. >> you wrote this wonderful book called black power, jewish politics. that is a potent title. >> yes. lech jump in . as an academic you have a lot of freedom to have what you write about and the content that you put into something. what we start at the beginning and ask, how did you arrive to this particular topic . >> somewhat embarrassing story. for my very first week at cal berkeley as a freshman i was raised in los angeles in the suburbs of the 1970s and i learned about jewish social justice . and we learned about

dr. king and the civil rights movement and the march from selma and was so excited to arrive at berkeley. my first stop was at the jewish student union and i signed up as all good jewish kids were supposed to do. the second stop for me was the black student union table and i walked up and introduce myself and i said, let's start a black jewish dialogue. african-american colleague burst out laughing. and kept laughing until he saw the horrified look on my life realizing that i did not get the picture. and i guess calm the moment. and he said, i am from harlem. and when he said that i understood literally that harlem was an african-american neighborhood in manhattan but understood it was a much deeper statement 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 a route to open the book, that was the moment that started this particular project. this is my answer to that conversation with him. >> where did that conversation go ? it is culminated in this marvelous book that we want people to buy and read and contemplate. how did the conversation continue? >> a joke because that was the end of the black jewish dialogue at berkeley in 1982. what i decided is i needed to educate myself . at berkeley i took black study classes, african-american history classes and i began looking at american jewish history. ultimately i did my graduate work in that. i am animated by the intersection of jewishness, americanness and race and this book is my biggest focused attempt to try to get us some really big questions through a

very specific moment. >> each community, the black community and the jewish community, in the united states, have 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. that is a big topic, i know. i know that is something you have given a lot of thought about. it is a big question but goes to the content. i wonder if you could talk about the content of the book . >> this is where it gets tricky. we just offered was a very good and accurate depiction of the way in which we tend to understand the relationship between faith based traditions and social justice. probably the goods example we have from the civil rights movement is a rabbi who

was a hero and i define a hero or somebody was willing to risk their own power and their own privilege to benefit the other. in this case it is african-americans in the south. sadly, as i did 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 traditional understandings of jewish law are most applicable, the orthodox community, were the least involved in justice work, outside the jewish community. in terms of african-american racial equality. conservative movement which is moving a little more liberal , had more of the reform movement was the least observant and the most engaged. but to be honest, it was the jewish socialist and communist and secular jewish people and secular jews, i

found it fascinating to be raised in a tradition where i found that my faith is what informed it. when i looked at the evidence it turned out to be much more complicated. >> i think part of the complication, i would love to know what you think before we take a break. our jewish community of late has come to reflect on our history as immigrants . we came from a place by and large in which prejudice was based on religion and ethnicity to a place where prejudice was based on skin color. in some ways we are able to assimilate and succeed because we got to, in our own minds, pass as white . although in the culture, we were white . an issue 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 jewish

identity. i am wondering, where you are in that thought and that we will take a quick break . not to put you on the spot. and then come back. >> this is one of the most complex questions and it is animating most of my work now. one reason i love the discipline of jewish studies is the question of jews and racial definition whiteness is what we call socially construct did. there have been times in jewish history where jews have not been whites or considered white . even talking about white skinned eastern european jews and times in which jews are white. most scholars have concluded that certainly by 1960 if not 1950, american jews became light . and much of the story of social justice comes from a place of whiteness and power and privilege, even as so many jews do not self define themselves as white. because they point out readily that there is an by semitism and sadly, it has been rising. >> we will take a quick break

and return with this conversation with professor marc dollinger in just a moment.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with professor marc dollinger who occupies the chair in the department of jewish studies at san francisco state university. let's talk about the core thesis of the

book. >> there were three parts. it kind of evolved backwards. was really interested in how american jews became more ethnic in their judaism . in the late 60s and 1970s. the soviet movement picked up in the mid-60s when as an anti-communist movement it should have come in the mid-1950s. jews rediscover their faith and became kosher and became more traditional. even jews he turned to the far right, did it at this moment . the more i looked at it i realized they were emulating a model created by the black power movement. in fact, black nationalist and a young generation of african-americans proclaimed it was okay to be public with your identity. i was interested to see that jews actually followed that model more than they actually -- as we could say, authentically created something jewish . from that i worked

backwards to the mid-1960s , with a black jewish alliance of the dr. king years split up and at least i was raised believing that was a horrible, terrible time of great discord and it was a disappointment that the alliance dissolved . are the primary sources and discovered that jewish leadership saw it coming and they understood it and they appreciated it and they discounted the impact of black anti-semitism for example. they understood that jews were white and privileged and enjoying middle-class status . for fun and to push the thesis i moved back into the 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 10 years before, even 50 years before, they understood fundamental differences between what it meant to be white 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. there is no way this alliance could survive , given the different american experiences of the two groups. >> you say they within a jewish leadership context, who were that they ? seeing, thinking and writing a talk about that? >> excellent question. i elected to study leaders of national jewish organizations and the regional offices. for this reason 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 were doing. i wanted to see someone who is claiming jewishness, what they were claiming that the challenging part for historians, most of the jews involved in this movement were not actively identified with jewish organizations and some would deny the jewishness had anything to do with it . i wanted to focus on them.

>> i think every historian, classically, looks to the future. i am wondering, given all of this, and all of what is in our world at large, both in san francisco, the bay area, the united states and beyond. what is our jewish, black , future ? if that is a way to ask the question? >> i have to stay at am in historian and is tough enough to predict the past but the book is about historical memory. it is about the way we have elected to remember a history that was actually quite different. in the epilogue, i cried to critique myself and say what i have i failed in this book and looking to the future and what can we do. it is clear that jews of color. we have an increasing population and to read a book about the black jewish alliance and relationship when

one is both black and jewish, complicates our entire understanding. i think the next generation is actually to critically examine how much jewishness and judaism is actually code for whiteness and privilege and the extent to which it is actually coming from the faith tradition. and i think we have to look to our brethren in the jews of color community to guide us. >> how does somebody actually buy your book ? >> brandeis university book and regular websites but locally you can buy it in the east bay. >> are you in the middle of a book tour? >> i am in the middle of the book tour across the country right now and my website has the details. >> wonderful. and your classes at san francisco state. fascinating. we will stop in just a moment and say goodbye but , i am wondering if you can reflect on a particular piece of this which is , is the

narrative you wrote a jewish narrative ? i wonder to what degree african-american history classes would have even the same understanding are not? >> an excellent question in the first two words of the book are black power, but it is not about black power it is about jewish politics . i am using the black power of the movement to get into an understanding of what is jewish and what is american and how it is that american jews are coming into this culture. >> wonderful. thank you so much. we hope you enjoyed this morning together on a conversation about resilience. please buy the books from sandra feeder and professor marc dollinger. thank you for being with us.

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