Fordham-NYPL Lecture Series in Jewish Studies: Gil Ribak, University of Arizona

With the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe that began in 1881, European Jewish immigrants encountered black Americans. They became their clientele and neighbors as these Eastern European Jews served as storeowners, tavern keepers, peddlers, pawnbrokers, and landlords in black neighborhoods.

Gil Ribak, who teaches at the University of Arizona and will be a Fordham-NYPL Fellow in Jewish Studies, will discuss the various ways in which Yiddish journalists and writers, social workers, educators, intellectuals, communal activist, poets, rabbis, and union organizers portrayed African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that partially overlapped with the mass migration of Jews from Europe with the Great Migration of African Americans from the South.