In the late 1930s, Jewish clarinetist and jazz bandleader Benny Goodman, known as the King of Swing, invited two Black musicians — Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton — to play in his orchestra. It was a watershed moment that marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation in the music business in America.
“That was unheard of,” said Greg Thomas, CEO and co-founder of the Jazz Leadership Project, based in Stratford, Connecticut. “It’s all part of a long tradition of Black and Jewish Americans working together, starting with the father of jazz, Louis Armstrong, who got his first instrument from a Jewish family in New Orleans, and who wore a Star of David all his life in honor of that family...”
JTA article: Black and Jewish Americans unite to talk about fighting antisemitism and all that jazz
...Thomas, along with Israel-based educator Aryeh Tepper, will be hosting an upcoming online event ... “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Racism Together,” to be held over two evenings next week,[with conversations], music and [awards]. The two-part series will be webcast via YouTube and Facebook, starting with “Stomping the Blues of Racial Essentialism” on Oct. 24 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. ET, and then “The Omni-American Vision: Culture, Not Race,” on Oct. 25 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. ET.
Among honorees, speakers and discussants will be Wynton Marsalis, Big Chief Donald Harrison, Itamar Borochov, Aryeh Tepper, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jonathan Silver, John Wood Jr., Zainab Zeb Khan, Pamela Paresky, Andrew Zimmern, Jason Gruberman, Ephraim Isaac, and others.
On a closely related note, with h/t to Tara the Antisocial Social Worker for finding this feminist site — WeHuntedTheMammoth.com — article, Misogyny can be the first step down the slippery slope towards fascism... which cites and links a new report “Antisemitism and Misogyny: Overlap and Interplay” (pdf here), concluding that
Anti-feminism and misogyny can act as slip roads towards antisemitism and other forms of racism. In recent years, the far right in particular has become increasingly adept at steering the former prejudices towards the latter.
Shabat shalom
(apologies for being so late...)