LESLEY PEARL
Bulletin Staff
"Facing Each Other: Blacks and Jews in the Popular Media" is a spicy title for a class at any university. And considering that it was offered for the first time last semester at San Francisco State University -- a campus that gained national prominence for its black-Jewish eruptions -- controversy seemed certain.
Yet the class ended in December without incident. In fact, at the second-to-last meeting the 30 or so students -- Jews and blacks comprise two-thirds of the class -- munched on iced cookies shaped like dreidels and menorahs and calmly debated the impact of media coverage of the 1994 riots in Crown Heights, Freedom Summer and Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March.
Listed as Jewish Studies 311/Journalism 311, the course was an effort "to create a competing narrative" at S.F. State, said Erna Smith, who co-taught the class with Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman. "It's all we can do.
"The narrative about S.F. State is [that] it's an inhospitable place to be Jewish."
That perception prevailed two years ago, when a mural of Malcolm X was unveiled on campus. Painted by a black student, the mural displayed Stars of David, skulls-and-crossbones and the words "African Blood." It was replaced with a less controversial mural.
In addition, there have been ongoing skirmishes between Hillel and the Pan-Afrikan Student Union.
"The politics aren't going to go away. All we can do is create a competing story on campus," Smith said.
Smith, who is African American, is chair of the journalism department. Zoloth-Dorfman, an observant Jew, chairs the Jewish studies department.
The two instructors had never met prior to developing the course curriculum. However, both agreed that the campus' ethnic diversity and the myths about various groups needed to be acknowledged, addressed and discussed.
"We needed to create a space for dialogue to happen. To be aggressive. To be offended. And not walk away feeling defeated. It's a discourse that happens in a way that is constructive," Smith said.
Smith's expertise in media and interest in this issue -- she authored an article called "Transmitting Race: The Los Angeles Riots in the Television News" -- seemed like a natural lens through which to view the black-Jewish relationship. Also, "Journalism is a mirror of the most visual acts of human society," Zoloth-Dorfman added.
To examine the way blacks, Jews and their relationship to each other are portrayed in the media, students read Nation of Islam's newspaper The Final Call and The Forward, a national Jewish newspaper, each week. They also read local daily newspapers, as well as the New York Times and the Northern California Jewish Bulletin.
Guest speakers included representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, the Nation of Islam and a local black-Jewish dialogue group called the Isaiah Project. Discussions ranged from defining terms and histories of both blacks and Jews to how race is reflected in newsrooms and newspapers.
Among the more heated discussions was whether the black-Jewish conflict is real or a creation of the media, and why it's "a very real issue which gets high salience from Jews, but not for African Americans," Smith said.
"It's just not a top issue for blacks," she said, pointing to higher-priority problems in the black community such as drugs, violence and absentee fathers.
As a final project, students presented group analyses of the ways in which various publications covered the Million Man March, the Crown Heights riots and the 1967 black voter registration drive.
For example, one student noted that the New York Times -- writing for a mostly white, educated audience -- reported as a "concerned outsider" during the Freedom Summer killings, while the black paper New Amsterdam News embraced a conspiracy theory.
Another student pointed to a first-person essay in Commentary by a Jewish student that "compared the black voting efforts to Jewish strategies to lift oneself up. It imposed a mythology of Jewish experience as universal," he said.
This knowledge "gave me a new way to look at the media," said Naomi Silverman, a senior at S.F. State. "Certain backgrounds contribute to what gets in the news. I don't take articles at face value anymore."
Both Smith and Zoloth-Dorfman maintain that they were uncertain how the class would evolve. But as they joked with the students during the final days of class, it was clear the instructors were pleased with the results.
"Several things could have happened. It could have been the usual contentious battle. Or no one could have come," Zoloth-Dorfman said. "At the first class 65 people showed up. Many were those of historical leadership of Jews and blacks at State. They were here and they were passionate and they were ready to talk."
However, not only political types joined the class. Raphael Srabian, a senior majoring in film studies who is neither black nor Jewish, enrolled at a friend's suggestion. He wasn't sorry.
"It was interesting. Blacks came in and expressed their scars. Jews did the same," he said. "Everyone comes in here with a sense of respect, though. They talk about past issues and everyday issues.
"The truth is, I'm Armenian and I had my own genocide. Everybody has some kind of scar. And we can all understand each other. But you need to come to this class with an open mind and hear what other people are angry about."
Zoloth-Dorfman added, "This is one model for how we begin civic discourse. It's personal. It's scholarly. It's what a university can do."
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