Robin Lieberman

“Being oppressed doesn’t make people hate oppression.” This was my father’s tart take on things. “It only makes them know they don’t want to be the ones to be oppressed.” The sad part was, that Jews and blacks were lumped together in everyone else’s worst jokes. There was a black-Jewish link through time in Detroit. Every generation of Jews had its signature high school. Within their echoing halls and funky locker rooms, every half generation had what passed for integration, but was in fact transition from white to black. Still it was contact, sometimes powerful. All my life in Detroit I knew black aficionados of Jewish culture and vice versa—Pentecostal grandmothers who would only buy kosher meat, black teenagers who knew the right Yiddish word, countless Jews aspiring to soul music, and later, to nonwhite righteousness. Our neighborhood, a cauldron of instability, produced many a crossover confection.”
― Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir