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Speaker 2: Hi, I'm professor Gil rebook your arrow. I guess that.
Speaker 3: Would be me Gil.
Speaker 1: How are you doing, sir, mister professor?
Speaker 2: Now you can call me Gil. I'm sorry that no.
Speaker 1: I like that because there were Doctor Ronald Mack from
Wake Forest University used to tell me all the time.
He says, you know, I worked really hard to be
this doctor. That's how I want you to address me.
So it's like, so, Professor, Yes, you have busted some
serious tale and you've got set in here with crude creatures.
That opens up my soul like it's never been before.
I cannot wait to share a conversation with you.
Speaker 2: Great, I'm glad to hear.
Speaker 1: So explain to me what we're doing, because there's gonna
be a lot of listeners that are stepping into this
going okay, what's up and so? And I think, well,
Gill's the one that knows okay.
Speaker 2: So this is a new cultural history. And this book
kind of reverses a lot of the truisms about, for example,
Black Jewish relationship, and it gives it shines a really
critical light a Yiddish culture, a language which unfortunately today
is hardly spoken only by outrah Orthodox Jews, but it
was spoken by millions of people in the early twentieth century.
And my book covers how that culture described black women
and men. And it starts off with East Europe before
even you know, people came to America, before you know,
Jewish immigrants came to America where you virtually had no
no black population. So how do you imagine blackness? How
do you imagine black women and men? And I show
many examples of you know, American culture, European culture being
absorbed and how you think you already know something about
black people even before you saw one. So that's the beginning.
And then of course when they come to America, when
those Jewish immigrants make their way to America. Now they're here,
and this society has very well established ways of behaving
toward African Americans, of describing them, and Yiddish culture kind
of imports that. It internalizes that, and it shows and
I show in literature, in the press, in the theater,
how black women and men work portrayed. And it's not
always and very often, I'm afraid to say, it's not
a very happy story.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I've always learned, and this
is my lack, I guess of education, but at least
you're opening up my eyes. Is I always thought that
relationship was open and filled with love, because even doctor
Ronald Mack which told me, he says, look, he says,
the cemetery is in the middle of a African American
an area up town, and I thought, that's so loving
to give up that land to the Jewish as well
as the Yiddish families. And I'm always thought there's some
true love there. Am I wrong, Gill?
Speaker 2: No, not wrong at all. But the thing is, people
take the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties that were
kind of the heyday heyday of a Black Jewish cooperation.
Martin Luther King and Reabbi Abram Joshua Heshul You know,
Martin together from Selma, you know, or to Selma in Alabama.
That was a very particular moment, and that came about later.
But the thing is, you cannot project back, You cannot
project fifty seventy one hundred years earlier and assume that
those things were there. And that's the thing. You already
had like precursors of that because unlike let's say regular
or let's say most white Americans, you can see already
Yiddish culture a lot of concern about African Americans. But
there's a lot of ambivalence. There's a lot of ambivalence.
And that's the thing that this book shows. How do
you negotiate those things? How do you negotiate the fact
that you are against lynching, you're against Jim Crow laws,
you're against those things, but you still believe that African
Americans are inferior or that they you know, they have
to work so hard. You know, maybe in one hundred
years they'll be like white people, like white folks, so
and those things are you know, that negotiation, I think
is so interesting, especially when you're talking about immigrants who
don't consume their culture in English necessarily, although English American
culture has so much influence over that. So I think
that that process of ambivalence from it, it's fascinating.
Speaker 3: Please do not move. We've got more with Professor Gil
Ryback coming up next the name of his book, Crude Creatures.
We are back with Professor Gill Ryback. I think that
this book, The Crude Creatures opens up the conversation between
college students today as well as the elders of today,
because the elders have lived it, the college students want
to learn it. And here comes professor gil with a
book that says, I think we need to have a conversation.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, And I hope it will start such
a conversation because right now, you know, PPS has PPS
has the great documentary four parts, I believe, with Henry
Louis Gates, Junior Blacks and Jews. It shows part of
the it shows actually it's a very good, well made,
well made show. But the thing is those things that
I show, the cartoons, the theater shows, the jokes, all
of that. You know, that does not come across because
nobody knew about those materials. I had to of course
translate them sit in archives. Took me a few years,
in three continents, but I translated those things, and I'm
bringing i think, a fresh look and a very important
correction to what people thought that they knew about Black
Jewish relations or you know what, any immigrant group that
comes to America, and you can say that about many
other immigrant groups that lived in areas that did not
have black population, but they already imagined them before coming
to America from you know, a mashup of many sources,
and then when if they come up to America, you
have new dynamics. So hopefully, as you said, this conversation,
this book will will help to open up this conversation.
Speaker 1: So, professor, when you travel to three different continents, were
you fascinated by the fact that it's three different parts
of the world and yet there's so much in common.
Why aren't we talking about this?
Speaker 2: That's a great question. That's a great question. That's what
you know. In my first chapter introduction, the first chapter,
I actually discussed that that what I have about I'm
you know, this book is about Jewish immigrants or you know,
Yidi speaking Jewish. I could have written, I mean people
have read or are starting to write about Korean immigrants
or Chinese immigrants who come from societies that don't have
a black population, but they already pre immigration. They start
imagining them either via literature later on, of course, radio, TV, Internet,
of course, but that's in later years. My book ends
in the nineteen thirties. But those insights you can say
about tons many of the immigrant groups who came to America.
Speaker 1: I'm just so fascinated by this because because I'm a
firm believer that if we do not study our history,
and I mean all corners of history, then we will
never understand who we are and where we are today.
We need things like this, professor, and I think that's
what you feel in your heart by setting this book free.
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely, and keep in mind, look, I'm Jewish myself.
I don't want to be accused of being, you know,
self ating Jew or whatever, or that I'm a race
trader or whatever people would like to call it. But
I think that that kind of as you said, it's
a conversation and actually I show a lot of ambivalence.
You can see within Yiddish culture people are concerned with
Jim Crow laws. They're definitely condemning lynchings. They say always,
you know, American African Americans are number one, We're gonna
we're next in line. We're next in line. After they
finished with them, they're going to come after us. So
there's a lot of concern. But again there's a lot
of ambivalence because there is the influence of the external
society which pervades almost every aspect of life. And I
show that again theater, literature, press, even residential patterns, socio
economic you know, socio economic relations. I'll just give you
an example when when young Jugim Grants comes to North
of Virginia and he comes there, Let's say it's around
nineteen oh four, nineteen oh five. He comes there and
he says, hey, how come people, you know, treat African
Americans like this? Like how come everything black? White? Black? White?
Black white? His brother tells them, you know what, you
have to deal with them for a few days and
then I'm going to talk to you. Ah. So it's like,
you know, it's like that. So they absorb a lot
of whatever is going on around them, which I find
it fascinating.
Speaker 1: You've got to come back to this show anytime in
the future. There's no way that I realized this is
Black History Month. But man, I'll tell you what, this
is an everyday conversation. So please make sure that you
come back to this show, Professor.
Speaker 2: I'd love to. I'd love to, Erro. It's a pleasure
of talking to you.
Speaker 3: You be brilliant today.
Speaker 2: Okay, Professor, Okay, thank you so much. I have a
wonderful day. Arrow. I appreciate your time.