Professor John Eaves at Spelman College in Atlanta is Black and Jewish. This gives him unique insights to both cultures and groups — insights he realized each group could learn from each other.

So, about four years ago, he created The Black and Jewish Leaders of Tomorrow.

“The intent was for me to bring together Black and Jewish college students in the Atlanta area to build bridges and establish friendships and cultivate relationships,” Eaves said. “The unity dinners were one of the programs that I came up with. United Negro College Fund heard about what I was doing, and I was hired by the UNCF to do unity dinners across the country.”

Today, Eaves is the Program Director of the UNCF Tikkun Olam initiative, organizing Unity Dinners for Black and Jewish students across the country. On Thursday, Feb. 19, the program returned to Baltimore for a dinner at Morgan State University.

Rabbi Alex Salzberg of Towson University Hillel took part in the event after helping host a previous iteration at Towson last fall. He said that that event was “fantastic,” with a large turnout that included Lt. Governor Aruna Miller and Towson President Mark Ginsberg.

“It was largely people getting to know each other. The mood was positive. Everyone seemed to be having a really good time and everyone was interested. The organizers of the event always make sure to make some of the table assignments, so that students are sitting with other participants from other universities, so they’re meeting new people. And everyone was excited to get to know one another,” Salzberg said.

Eaves said, importantly, the dinners are much more than a “kumbaya get together to eat food.” Each event is structured and includes activities and questions for the participants to further the discussion of the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities.

“It’s a dinner with a lot of intentionality,” Eaves said.

The conversations typically revolve around the history of Black and Jewish relations in the United States, as well as the future. Eaves said that his experience teaching at Spelman showed him that these conversations are necessary for young generations to have.

“One of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because Black and Jewish students of today don’t necessarily know the history of Black and Jewish allyship that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement,” Eaves said. “I teach political science, and I just found that this current generation just doesn’t know a lot, but they’re curious, and they come to these dinners with an open mind — and they walk away learning a lot and discovering that Black and Jewish students are more alike than different.”

The importance of having events like this in Baltimore particularly is not lost on Salzberg. Charm City has deep traditions of both Black and Jewish culture, and that is something that the rabbi values and looks to impart on the students who pass through Towson Hillel, too.

“This is something that’s actually really important to me personally,” Salzberg said. “I live in Baltimore City, and this past fall, I was a part of the second Rekindle Cohort, which is a really fantastic program that brings together leaders in both the Jewish and the Black communities for five sessions of dialog and relationship building. And so I was very excited to be a part of this cohort and to do that work for myself, and then to be able to bring it back to my students, has been really powerful.”

Eaves said that the UNCF aims to hold these dinners at both Predominantly White Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, hence the September event at Towson and this one at Morgan State. The first Black and Jewish Unity Dinner was held at Coppin State last year.

“We’re building on a foundation, and the foundation is two other previous dinners,” Eaves said.

Ultimately, Eaves hopes that this dinner and the others are a jumping off point for improved community relations in both Black and Jewish circles in Baltimore and beyond.

“We’re hoping to keep the momentum going. We envision Black and Jewish students doing something after the dinner, in terms of them doing some sort of joint experience, going to the Jewish Museum in Baltimore and the Lewis African American Museum in Baltimore — sort of this experience where Black students and Jewish students can see the parallelisms of resilience and fighting against oppression that both communities have had to take on,” he said. ■

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com