As a participant in the Black\/Jewish Teen Initiative (BJTI), senior Natanel Gold feels his world has grown larger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve really kind of bursted my own personal bubble,\u201d he explained. Although he loves the Toco Hills and AJA communities, he says they are remarkably insular. \u201cI don’t really get the opportunity to go out and interact with people who aren’t Jewish, who don’t have the same opinions in politics or in Israel as I do,\u201d Natanel noted. The BJTI community feels very different. At BJTI, he said, he\u2019s \u201creally able to meet other people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those other people include Black and\/or Jewish teens from a variety of different backgrounds. BJTI, a program run by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), brings them together to discuss the intersection of Black and Jewish history–as well as the challenges faced by Black and Jewish communities today. Natanel, who applied and was accepted to BJTI after hearing about it on a prior AJC leadership program, is the first AJA student participant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BJTI\u2019s programming consists of seven in-person sessions, spaced out between October and February, which mostly involve engaging with speakers and participating in group discussions. Natanel has already attended three of those sessions, including an overnight trip to Alabama on October 22 and 23. The trip included visits to an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia; a synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama; the Equal Justice Initiative civil rights museum; and a guided civil rights tour of Selma, Alabama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Natanel feels he learned more on the trip than on other civil rights trips he has taken because many of his Black peers had personal and emotional connections to the civil rights history they engaged with. He saw how these sites had a powerful effect on them, and that helped him appreciate the importance of the events he learned about. It helped him understand \u201cwhat really happened and how it really feels,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
BJTI only has one overnight trip, but Natanel has found the non-overnight sessions of the program quite meaningful as well. At one, Black pastor Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley and Jewish activist Sherry Frank presented to the BJTI group about the importance of fighting for human rights. From this, Natanel learned about Michael Schwermer, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, all civil rights activists (Michael and Andrew were Jewish and James was Black) who were murdered in Mississippi for working together to register Black voters. \u201cIt was very sad to see that these people were working together and were finally really coming to speak, and they were killed,\u201d he said. One of Natanel\u2019s big takeaways from that session was the importance of remembering that no matter where they come from, everyone deserves respect as a human being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BJTI has facilitated, officially and unofficially, intense discussions about contemporary issues as well as historical ones. Natanel remembers one discussion in which Black participants talked about feeling unsafe around police and uncomfortable wearing hoods up in public, and Jewish participants talked about needing police outside synagogues to feel safe and worrying about wearing kippahs in public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Discussions about Israel have also been a big part of BJTI for Natanel. Issues around Israel haven\u2019t come up in official BJTI programming, but Natanel has discussed them at length with friends from BJTI. \u201cI really think we are able to talk about what\u2019s going on in Israel and learn about each other’s history,\u201d he said. Some peers post frequently about Gaza, sometimes posting what Natanel considers misinformation, and Natanel has confronted them about it. For the most part, Natanel thinks these discussions have been productive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Natanel\u2019s session of BJTI will wrap up on February 4. Until then, he looks forward to \u201clearning and growing and building deeper bonds\u201d during the rest of the program. So far, he feels that \u201cit\u2019s been eye opening\u201d and has offered him a unique opportunity to learn through relationships with people who are different from him. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One Student’s Experience of a Cross-Cultural Program<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":2286,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","entry","rows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/IMG_6412-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2285"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2287,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions\/2287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}