They’re students at a Black, Catholic college — and they won a national prize for antisemitism education
Left to right: Nehemiah Strawberry, 18, Jamya Davis, 19, Anthony Jeanmarie IV, 20, and Aarinii Parms-Green, 18 won a national prize for their work on an original antisemitism education curriculum. Courtesy of Nehemiah Strawberry
This summer, four students from the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States found themselves at a Shabbat dinner in Israel.
Until recently, Jamya Davis, 19, had never heard of Shabbat. She was raised in a Catholic family in Orlando, and didn’t know many Jewish people growing up.
But Davis spent much of her spring semester at Xavier University of Louisiana working with three of her classmates from the honors program to launch an educational initiative about Black and Jewish relations.
Davis met Anthony Jeanmarie IV, 20, Nehemiah Strawberry, 18, and Aarinii Parms-Green, 18, through Xavier’s honors program director, Shearon Roberts. Roberts thought the group might be a good fit to represent Xavier in Invent2Prevent, a competition funded by the Department of Homeland Security that invites students to create “digital and social tools” to help combat the spread of domestic terrorism.
Some members of the team had participated in the contest in prior semesters. But at first, they weren’t sure what particular issue under the broad umbrella of domestic terrorism they wanted to address.
They found their answer in one of the biggest antisemitism scandals in years: Kanye West’s 2022 antisemitic screeds, in which he claimed, among several conspiracy theories, that Jews control the media, and said he wanted to “go death con 3 on Jewish people.”
“I don’t pay a lot of attention to Kanye West,” now known as Ye, said Davis. But when the public discourse erupted, it was difficult to look away.
“Me personally, I have my own mind. I don’t really care what celebrities do,” said Strawberry, a sophomore chemistry major whose father is a Black Hebrew Israelite. But Strawberry became concerned that white supremacists might wield West’s antisemitic comments to incite violence in the real world.
“We found a news article where KKK members stood in a highway in California and had ‘Kanye was right’ on their banner,” he said.
‘This is not even about Kanye’
The New Orleans-based team decided to focus their Invent2Prevent project on highlighting the historic connection between Black and Jewish communities, with the goal of dispelling conspiracy theories and promoting solidarity.
They familiarized themselves with iconic stories from Black-Jewish history, like that of the rabbis who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in civil rights protests. They learned about Jewish professors who taught at HBCUs, and about all-Black infantry platoons that fought in World War 2. They studied heavy topics — like the lives of Black victims of Nazi sterilization — alongside lighter ones, including Black-Jewish collaborations in soul and jazz music.
Quickly, the project snowballed, and West became a secondary concern.
“This is not even about Kanye,” said Davis. “He helped us get together to want to talk about it, but the history and connection here is so rich and so beautiful, and there’s so much we can do.”
Over six months, the team turned what they learned into 26 educational YouTube videos; a series of geospatial maps highlighting Black and Jewish history across the country; and 13 episodes of a digital game show called “Did You Know.”
The show includes questions like “What was the name of the community college founded in New Orleans by a Jamaican and Jewish immigrant?,” “What is the literal translation of the memorial plaques laid in Germany for Black victims of Nazi persecution?,” and “Who is the Jewish producer behind Ray Charles’s classics at Atlantic Records?” (The answers, which can be found in graphics and interactive videos on the team’s website: Delgado Community College, “stumbling stones,” and Jerry Wexler).
They partnered with local radio stations to air segments featuring their game, and played it with strangers in New Orleans streetcars. They even took it to TikTok, where Jewish singer, actress and influencer Montana Tucker — who has sung with Kelly Clarkson and used the social media app to share her experience visiting Auschwitz — collaborated with them.
Their series with Tucker racked up tens of thousands of views on Instagram and TikTok combined.
The Xavier team told Invent2Prevent judges that Gen Z was their target demographic. But they also thought about ways to spread their work to a wider and less-digital audience. They launched chapters at all the historically Black universities in Louisiana, went to Holocaust Remembrance Day events, collaborated with representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federation of New Orleans, and sat down for a “chat-and-chew” with members of the Tulane Hillel, with whom they connected so well that they are now considering starting a podcast together.
And they worked to give younger audiences, some of whom didn’t have a personal connection to either Black or Jewish history, an in-person introduction to their project. One of Strawberry’s favorite experiences during the project, he said, was playing the “did you know” game with local high school students at a predominantly Black and Hispanic school in New Orleans.
“What was really special was that even the Hispanic students, who didn’t really speak English, they knew what we were talking about,” Strawberry said. “They knew about antisemitism on Twitter and they were interactive with our lesson.”
‘It makes more sense for our communities to be friends’
The Xavier students knew their project broached a controversial subject. But they’ve been surprised by how little negative feedback they’ve received. Davis remembers only one critic, a fellow Xavier student who, at a campus film screening, suggested that the team was focusing too much on antisemitism in the Black community, and not enough on racism in the Jewish community.
Davis understood his point, and emphasized that the group would try to incorporate the feedback.
“It makes more sense for our communities to be friends than to be enemies,” she said.
In June, the Xavier team flew to D.C. to showcase their project at the Invent2Prevent competition. The night before the showcase, they got Insomnia Cookies as a group. They had been working so hard that they felt delirious.
“We were so tired we were just laughing all the time,” Davis said. “There were these two Black men,” working in the cookie shop, “and they were older, full-grown adults. We dove into a whole conversation about taking this leap of faith to do this project. I think they really admired what we were doing.”
“And they gave us a huge discount, so that was nice.”
The next night, the team clasped hands backstage and prayed. Then they went onstage and swept the competition, beating teams from 22 other universities and 18 high schools.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself an activist’
A month later, the four of them embarked on a trip to Israel, funded by an anonymous donor who had come across their work in New Orleans even before they won Invent2Prevent.
They traveled with a group called Passages, which takes Christian students on their first trips to Israel, advertising tours where students can “follow in the footsteps of kings, prophets, Jesus and the first disciples.”
“It was really beautiful to see where Jesus walked, where King David walked, where all the people we knew in the Bible growing up lived,” said Strawberry.
For Davis, too, the trip crystallized connections between Jewish rituals and the religious traditions of her childhood.
“With Shabbat, it’s about getting together with your family and sitting down and having dinner and having blessings for your wife and your kids,” she said. “In the Black community, there’s Sunday dinner after services, where we’d go into the fellowship hall, and we’d bless the food, and if you come across somebody they would pray for you.”
The group left feeling more connected to their work, and making plans to expand their project. Their first order of business: adapt their maps to be used for a K-12 curriculum, and begin seeding chapters at high schools and universities all around the country.
“I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself an activist,” Davis said. “But now that you ask, I guess I could.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
