Young scholars are re-exploring through contemporary thought, practice and tradition, politics,literature, film, and culture. Beth Elohim invites some of these scholars to discuss their cutting-edge work, in dialogue with Rabbi Daniel Bronstein, as part of our Bagel Brunch series

Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights
Henry Goldschmidt

Dr. Goldschmidt’s’ book of the same title is the first major scholarly work to look beyond the sensationalized violence of August 1991, exploring the everyday realities of Black-Jewish difference in Crown Heights. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Goldschmidt argues that collective identities like “Blackness” and “Jewishness” are particularly complex in today’s Crown Heights because the neighborhood’s Afro-Caribbean, African-American, and Lubavitch Hasidic communities understand their differences in dramatically different ways—either as a racial divide between Blacks and Whites or as a religious divide between Gentiles and Jews.

$5 class fee