Robin Washington is the Forward’s Editor-at-Large. A longtime editor, columnist, radio host and documentarian across mainstream and ethnic media, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Black Jews and an early pioneer of the term “Jew of color.” Email rwashington@forward.com, Twitter @robinbirk.
Sixty years ago, on May 14, 1961, one of two buses carrying an interracial group of Freedom Riders was firebombed on the outskirts of Anniston, Ala. The riders barely escaped with their lives, only to be beaten by the mob outside. Of lesser import but nonetheless seared into America’s collective memory was the fate of…
In suburban Boston during the 1990s, I once caught a glimpse of a Black man wearing a kippah as he exited a shop next to my daughter’s gymnastics class. After dropping her off, I doubled-back to approach him gingerly. Or maybe not so gingerly. “Hey you!” I yelled — startling him, but beginning what Rick…
If you do nothing else over Shabbat on May 14 and 15, whether you go to shul or not, say kaddish. And say it for George Floyd. Say his name. George Floyd was killed on May 25, or 2 Sivan, which corresponds to May 13 this year. If it is your tradition on the following…
If you’re hoping that Tuesday’s Derek Chauvin verdict will spark true reform in American policing, you may have been looking at the wrong trial. Not because the guilty verdict of the fired Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd last May doesn’t signal a sea change in the nation’s justice system. It does. And not…
Anyone searching for the truth — as in the whole truth — in the Derek Chauvin trial might be reminded of the Yiddish phrase: a halber emes iz a gantser lign — a half-truth is a whole lie. I’m not suggesting that witnesses have lied on the stand. But neither the prosecutors nor the defense…
Editor’s Note: This is an adapted version of an essay originally published in the 1997 book “Multi-America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Piece,” edited by Ishmael Reed. We are republishing it now, as the author, Robin Washington, joins the Forward as Editor-at-Large. While some circumstances and facts may have changed — such as the…
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