Jewish, Latino leaders forge alliances to fight bigotry in U.S.
One source says sporadic attempts to build better Jewish-Latino relations have been happening for years.
By The Associated Press Tags: Jewish Diaspora Jewish World Israel newsWhen six teenagers allegedly beat a Guatemalan immigrant into a coma last July in a Boston suburb, a Jewish and Latino coalition called the attack hateful.
In October, when a Cape Cod Jewish center was trashed and Nazi images were downloaded onto a rabbi's computer, Boston Latino leaders came to a rally to denounce the vandalism as a hate crime.
The responses in the two cases, advocates say, are examples of recent efforts by Jewish and Latino leaders to forge alliances.
The Anti-Defamation League of New England in the northeastern U.S. has planned a Community Seder on Sunday with an immigration theme, reflecting a shift by the Anti-Defamation League to fighting hostility against immigrants and tackling anti-Semitism among some Latinos. Both, it contends, are rising.
Similar events are scheduled this month in Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego and Orange County, California - areas that also have seen growing ties between Jewish and Latino community leaders.
Jennifer Smith, associate regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of New England, said the Boston group is using the traditional Passover event that celebrates the exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt as a means to also celebrate immigration in the United States. Issues around immigration, Smith said, bring Jewish and Latino leaders together.
"As the scope of our communities have changed and grown, we wanted to create a bigger event that was more encompassing of all of our neighbors," Smith said.
The move to build a coalition in Boston began in 2007 after the Anti-Defamation League of New England, a group primarily known for combating anti-Semitism, announced new efforts to fight against anti-immigrant rhetoric and hate crimes. Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League said at the time they were alarmed at the hostility toward immigrants surfacing as the country debated immigration reform.
In addition, surveys of Latinos in the Boston area found that a significant number of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean held anti-Semitic views.
Diego Portillo, president of the Latino Professional Network in Boston, said the two groups can address both matters by joining forces.
"It's really eye-opening," Portillo said. "There are stereotypes on both sides, but we can change that.
The Rev. Jean-Pierre Ruiz, associate professor and chair of Theology and Religious Studies at St. John's University in New York, said sporadic attempts to build better Jewish-Latino relations have been happening for years.
But the Boston example shows that more cities are seeing Jewish-Latino coalitions pop up as they rally around a shared history, immigration reform and cases of violent hate crimes against immigrants, he said.
Eastern European Jews in particular encountered widespread discrimination during the great wave of immigration from 1880 to 1925.
"It's very clear that the Jewish community in the United States is recognizing the importance of outreach to the growing Latino community throughout the United States," Ruiz said. "I think they see parallels in their own experiences as immigrants."
Those outreach efforts include round-table discussions and community events. There have been moments where discussions have gotten tense, said Ecuadorean-born Jerry Villacres, co-chair of the Latino Jewish Roundtable in Boston. People aren't guarded or politically correct, but that's what we need.
Outreach efforts also include sponsored trips to Israel for Latinos - something used in the past to build relations.
For example, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic on the U.S. high court, visited Israel in 1986 as a private lawyer during a trip sponsored by Project Interchange, affiliated with the American Jewish Committee.
Ten years later as a federal judge, she visited Israel again and then joined a Project Interchange U.S.-Israel forum on immigration.
Villacres said he also visited Israel a few years ago through the American Jewish Committee. He has since encouraged other Latino leaders to consider the Anti-Defamation League's offer for Latinos to visit the Holy Land.
"I think in order for us to learn, we have to get out of our comfort zone," he said.
In December, Portillo went to Israel with three other Boston-area Latino leaders on a trip sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League. They were joined by 18 other Latino leaders from Texas, California, and New Mexico. The group visited five Israeli cities and heard from 19 speakers, Portillo said.
Another trip is being planned.
After both sides get more familiar with each other, the next stage will be to act on collective efforts to push for immigration reform, Portillo said.
"Who knows what we can accomplish together," he said. "That's the exciting part."
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Going on 1 of those trips to Israel must be awesome. Why? See all kinds of people from every corner of the World just as the Bible said it would take place. In any case, Israel is a country that assimilates both Arabs and Africans, and pretty effectively. They are called Arab Jews and Ethiopian (Black) Jews. Its not a matter of race.
As a Chicano of Crypto Jewish heritage,this is long overdue
Anyone familiar with American History will also be familiar with the history of those parts of America not settled by the English. In New Mexico one cannot avoid the influence of crypto-Jews, families which fled to the farthest part of the Spanish Empire where they could be both Jewish and beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Latino's are treated roughly by the American right which seeks to make a racist issue to appeal to it's racist right. Just as Jews were targeted by the same elements a hundred years ago. There is a reason WHY America's Jews have been both loyal to the civil rights movement and supportive of those who seek equal rights. Israeli Jews seem to find it hard to understand why American Jews are, overwhelmingly,, not the least bigoted against any other group targeted by the racist right as they were. AIPAC has not the influence it pretends and often offends American jews. Racism is far more an affront to America's Jews than any appeal to their racism.
I am so glad to see this long-overdue alliance between two marginalized ethnic groups. For generations, we have been leaders in opening the door to Latino immigration and one of the most frightening spectacles was to see so many Latinos fall under the spell of anti-Semitic Internet propaganda. Jews and Latinos must not fight each other! We must unite against the common foe of bigotry and the entrenched Anglo-power structure which seeks to exclude people unlike themselves. Long live the Jewish-Latino alliance!
These same jewish groups and leaders who celebrate mass third world immigration in the white western gentile world support the maintaining of a jewish state with a dominant ethnic jewish majority. How about opening up your borders to mass numbers of Africans, arabs and whatever else and celebrating the idea that in the not so distant future, jews will be a minority in Israel?
Considering that the term Hispanic is often used to describe Spanish speaking people in the States who don't define themselves either "of Mexican descent", or "of mixed Indian and Spanish", but those who descend from the Spaniards who came to the New World, many of them Anusim, who have rediscovered their past in the recent decades throughout Latin America, and among Spanish speaking communities in the United States, there is a certain kinship. Yes, Virginia, some of those Spanish speakers might have Jewish forebears, and indeed, identify with Jews for reasons we have yet to learn.