The Unity Dinner began awkwardly, with scores of strangers picking at plates of salmon in a campus ballroom. College students read icebreaker questions and fumbled through answers.
When a George Washington University freshman picked up a mic to answer whether a hot dog is a sandwich and jokingly cited the teachings of the Talmud, half the room laughed out loud. But the other half looked blank.
And when someone called out, “H.U.!” many people smiled and yelled the expected response from Howard University students: “YOU know!”
The rest looked surprised. They had no idea.
The guests, about half Black and half Jewish, were invited to the dinner at GWU late last year as part of a national effort to combat racism, antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. The initiative was launched by three philanthropic heavy hitters: the UNCF, Hillel International and the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
The goals are to restore the frayed historical alliance between Black and Jewish people; combat tensions that have spiked on U.S. campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza; and replace extremism and polarization with person-to-person connections and empathy.
Less shouting. More listening.
The idea felt radical when Unity Dinners started in 2024, after a year of furious protests over the Israel-Gaza war. Organizers were initially nervous that feelings were too raw to hold joint events. But after several conflict-free dinners, the coalition expanded to 14 cities, including Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and San Francisco, with more than 2,100 students.
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), whose house was set on fire during Passover last year, will welcome a Unity Dinner in Pittsburgh along with Kraft and others. Participants at the dinner will also go to a monument to civil rights activism in the city and visit the Tree of Life synagogue, where a gunman massacred 11 people in 2018.
Still, the headwinds can be heavy.
For many, the GWU dinner in November was their first time having a genuine conversation across racial and religious lines.
“I’ve heard about” Jewish people, said Christy Hill, a junior at the University of the District of Columbia who is Black, “and maybe seen them on TV. But this was my first time interacting with Jews.”
Black and Jewish leaders and groups have formed strong alliances for much of U.S. history. Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald built schools across the rural South in the early 20th century to educate Black children. Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi Germany joined the faculty of historically Black colleges and universities, many of them having an outsize influence on generations of students. During the civil rights movement, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King Jr. Two of the three student activists killed in the 1964 Mississippi Burning lynching were Jewish; the other was Black.
Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the UNCF, describes learning the concept of “Tikkun Olam,” Hebrew for repairing the world, from a Jewish donor to his organization.
It resonated with a Black adage that Lomax knew: Lift while you climb.
But after the Gaza war began, increasing numbers of Black students saw Israelis as White oppressors of Palestinians and joined anti-Zionist chants at protests. Some Jewish students said their complaints of antisemitism were not taken as seriously as complaints of racism would be.
Kraft remembered connections in his lifetime between the two groups and was saddened by the divisions in the country. He was moved at a UNCF meeting with college presidents in early 2024, he said, to spontaneously offer $1 million to launch the Unity Dinners. “This was just a serendipitous moment,” he said.
To bridge the gaps, organizers of the Unity Dinners funded leadership fellowships and held events with the NFL and the NBA, tapping into those powerful megaphones to amplify the message. The NFL and the Pittsburgh Steelers are helping to host the dinner this week, which is being held in conjunction with the NFL draft.
Adam Lehman, president and chief executive of Hillel International, said leaders hope “we can all come out of this period of intense conflict and polarization and actually have this generation of current students lead us to a much more unified future.”
For now, they have a slick video explaining the goal with football metaphors, conversation prompts on index cards, and facilitators carrying mics in ballrooms, trying to get college students to connect.
Students from GWU, Howard, UDC, American, George Mason and Georgetown universities attended the dinner at GWU. There were people wearing kippahs, hijabs, hoodies, jeans and varsity jackets — and one very turned-out Howard senior in a tuxedo.
An Episcopal priest joined one table. So did a Black professor, who told the group, “I’m acutely aware that the Justice Department has accused this university of insufficient vigilance against antisemitism. I want to figure out how to counter that argument that is coming from a bunch of evil people. That’s why I’m here.”
After an awkward pause, a Jewish student from St. Louis, Zach Cohen, read from one of the index cards that they were going to play a game. He posed the first question: “What is the scariest animal?”
“Tiger,” someone responded. Another pause.
After the next question — which vegetable most matches your personality — someone hazarded, “I think I’m most like a sweet potato?”
But as time went on, things eased up. Asked which celebrity would play her in a movie, Howard student Tatyana Mayo paused and then confided, “In my head I want to say Beyoncé.”
“You can say that!” replied Aaliyah Rapping, a Black student from Howard who is also Jewish. Everyone laughed in agreement.
The questions turned more serious. Students were asked what gives them pride, a sense of belonging, and what they wish others knew about their community. The answers became thoughtful.
“Our resilience,” Cohen said. “Throughout Jewish history, we have been oppressed, and we have always been able to bounce back up.”
Mayo said others often believe Black people have moved far ahead of where they actually are. “It hasn’t been that long since segregation and slavery,” she said. “I wish more people understood that.”
Cohen talked about the Jewish summer camp he attended for a decade, a place where he felt free to be totally himself.
Howard students described the energy of homecoming, and how immediately they felt at home on campus in the first moments of their freshman year. “I had grown up in predominantly White spaces,” Mayo said. “It was really nice to be able to do things without having to explain myself.”
When she pulled on her bonnet to go to bed the first night, she looked over — her roommate had put one on, too.
“Howard, like the sleepaway camp, feels like its own secluded area,” she said.
Cohen, who had no idea what a bonnet was, nodded. He totally understood.
By the end, the dinner was buzzing. Students traded contact information and made plans. One table talked about inviting speakers to campus to talk about the Middle East. Another agreed on brunch. A girl wearing a willow-green hijab said some were planning to get together for a Shabbat dinner and for Juneteenth.
Tony Kenner told the room he wanted to start a “Black-Jew” club at Howard. After the dinner, he explained: Growing up east of the river in Washington, he had been surrounded by Black people his whole life.
“It took me 19 years,” he said, “to have a conversation like this.”
Rapping said later that her dad always taught her and her brother to draw on their Jewish heritage as they move through the world: “We were once oppressed, so we have to help others,” she said.
That naturally resonated for her as a Black woman.
Having attended predominantly White schools in Georgia, she endured racism in various forms, she said, such as being blamed for class disruptions she had nothing to do with. She said she had never been confronted with antisemitism until the war broke out.
At the same time, she said, Israel’s pummeling of Gaza left her struggling to reconcile the bloodshed with her understanding of what it means to be Jewish and to leave the world a better place.
“Going to an HBCU, there’s an understanding of liberation movements,” she said, explaining the widespread support for Gaza on campus. “Because we’re Black in America, we attach ourselves to these movements because we see it as a common struggle.”
On social media, especially, people expressed strong opinions without any of the complexities she discerned But when she told friends she disagreed with some parts of what they were saying, she said, she was told, “‘Well, of course you don’t care about babies dying, you’re Jewish. All y’all want to do is take over the world.’ I think a lot of people don’t understand that that’s antisemitic and that the same rhetoric has led to Jews being expelled from countries all over the world.”
She has had good conversations with friends, too. With people who are willing to listen, Rapping will talk one-on-one about the war. “Because I, too, identify with liberation movements,” she said. “I, too, am against neo-colonization and imperialism. But also, as a Jewish person, I understand the necessity of a space like Israel.
“I’m not on one side or the other.”
After the dinner, some of the plans fell apart. A Passover seder at Howard was talked about, but it didn’t happen.
But some students continued to meet, and talk, just as the organizers had hoped. Natalie Martin, who grew up among Black Southern Baptists in Atlanta and had met only one Jewish person before enrolling at GWU, now attends synagogue with friends sometimes, or invites them to her church.
In such a divided world, she said, “it’s just beautiful to see people in community together.”
Rosie Aronson grew up going to a temple in Atlanta whose rabbi was so outspoken about civil rights in the 1950s that the KKK bombed it — an attack that shocked, then united, the city.
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack happened shortly after she began college, she said, and the protests made her freshman year at GWU frightening and isolating. “Very quickly you had to make a choice: Who do you support? You had to be totally against everyone else that doesn’t agree with you.”
Sophomore year was much calmer, but as a Jewish student leader, she found other campus organizations reluctant to partner with her group for events. The Unity Dinner gave her hope. An interfaith center opened on campus.
At the dinner this school year, she bonded with Muslims and Christians at her table about how hard it could be to get excused for religious holidays and appreciated their suggestions of how best to ask. An Iftar dinner during Ramadan was packed, with many non-Muslims joining. This month, Aronson hosted an interfaith seder at the GWU student center.
It’s not perfect. But people are talking.
“It’s always awkward at first,” Aronson said. “Then you start breaking the ice and realize how many things you have in common.”
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