Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews

Great book on the back ground relationships of African American and American Jews. Been looking for this book a long time.

Good Book

brought for a gift for a teacher.

Bridges and Boundaries investigates the relationship between American Jews and African Americans. The book reads like a compliment to an exhibit and is basically a catalogue with related text.The text portion is very important but rather deeply flawed. There are a series of essays by numerous authors, both African American and Jewish, which discuss the deeply troubled relationship between these groups. The problem that I had with the text was twofold. First, the essays became very repetitive. So many of them pointed to the shared heritage of discrimination and xenophobia, which leads to a very difficult relationship. I got that out of the first few essays, but it was hammered home for too many more pages. Also, the essays appear out of context of time and place. The essays point to the fact that the problems developed over time and were more marked in certain places, yet there is no mention of when and where each essay was written. This makes the reading rather disconcerting. So, on the text portion, I would give the book 3 stars (4 for importance of the subject matter and 2 for organization).The second part of the book contains graphics (from the exhibit?) and related text. This was much better organized and, because of its more graphic nature, much more poignant. Each picture has text that explains the importance of the picture. They are arranged in chronological order, so the reader can view the pictures in context. This portion of the book is much more powerful than the text. This part gets a rating of 5.So, this leads to an overall rating of 4 - 3 for the text and 5 for the graphic portion.