
"Thoughts on Education Abroad" is a monthly column written by CAPA The Global Education Network's Deputy President and Chief Academic Officer Dr. Michael Woolf.
---
Introduction: Safe and Brave Spaces
You might be forgiven for thinking that the history of black–Jewish relations in the United State was one of tension, suspicion, and hostility. For years, the only headlines to include blacks and Jews in the same sentence were ones that screamed mutual mistrust, such as the Crown Heights riot of 1991 and the inflammatory rhetoric of the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan. And yet the truth of that history is more complicated than those examples might suggest…Coalitions of black and Jewish leaders founded the NAACP and the National Urban League; Jewish civil rights protesters and attorneys flooded the South for freedom marches in the '50s and '60s, while prominent rabbis marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr.
"Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations" From the catalogue for 2011 exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco

From every human being there rises a light.
Baal Shem Tov (c.1700 – 1760).
One of the important conversations at the Diversity Abroad conference in Miami (March 2018) focused around a transition in thought from “safe space” to “brave space” in higher education. The idea of “safe space” is protectionist, intended to offer environments in which students who feel marginalized (by race, origin, sexual identity and so on) can feel unthreatened.
Continue Reading