From Bed-Sty to Israel: black teens on a kibbutz - Bedford-Stuyvesant area of New York City

Commonweal, July 16, 1993 by Abigail McCarthy

It is still hard for Americans to admit that things are better, or are done better, in other countries, other cultures. Yet we bump into the evidence every day in the pages of our newspapers. Take, for example, the repeated statistics demonstrating that where the sale of guns is controlled, as in England, the number of homicides is minimal compared to ours. Or the repetition in the current health-care debates that our Canadian neighbors across the border do not share our fears of financially crippling illness because the universal, single-payer, health-care system there protects them in a way which most Canadian citizens find very satisfactory.

We have heard, in an abstract way, that many of our citizens live in third-world conditions. It is a shock, nevertheless, to learn that the French medical relief organization, Doctors of the World, which sends volunteers to underdeveloped nations like Somalia and Ethiopia, also has an affiliate in New York City. Its volunteers work in parts of the city where people do not have even the most basic medical care. According to one of the volunteers, Dr. Nadia Marsh, the people there are worse off than the poor of the third world because they do not have the extended families which provide a sense of security for third-world people (New York Times, May 4, 1993).

It is upsetting, too, that the people of Israeli kibbutz communities are taking in troubled black teen-agers from places like Bedford-Stuyvesant and giving them the acceptance and sense of family they cannot find here. The striking and heart-warming film, Blacks to the Promised Land, made by Madeleine Ali, an AfricanAmerican who is a convert to Judaism, is making the rounds of small theaters. It documents the experience of one group of such teen-agers and their hosts. It is a film all Americans should see, if for no other reason than to learn how attractive, engaging, and "normal" these--our own--teen-agers can be.

They may walk the mean streets of "Bed-Sty" and struggle in a special school. They may admit to having "boosted" (shop-lifted), or having been truants for months at a time, but they are lively and humorous and, in their serious moments, admit to a constant yearning for a better life and a better world.

In the documentary itself the viewer is left wondering as to how these students from the Bedford-Stuyvesant Street Academy were selected. They are obviously a superior group. They express themselves well in standard English. They are well-dressed. The two mothers interviewed seem to have an intelligent and realistic understanding of their children's lives.

Inquiry revealed that Stewart Bialer, a teacher at the academy, himself Jewish, had initiated the project. He was concerned that his students had no hobbies, did nothing constructive to speak of, and were passive recipients of the culture conveyed to them via film, music, and television. They needed immersion, he thought, in another culture to ~earn new habits and get perspective on their lives.

The hardest part of getting the project under way, he found, was not fighting through the school bureaucracy, but selecting the students. They had to be stable and independent enough to sustain the experience. They had to be warm toward each other and willing to share. His selection seems to have been flawless.

The stereotypes against which these students must contend are illuminated again and again in the opening scenes of the documentary. Television interviewers lay stress on the seamy sides of their backgrounds-over and over. "At first it was exciting...like, wow...we're going to be on television...but after a while it got boring," says one girl, "They were always in your face," implying, she added, that the students were potential criminals, and describing them as typical products of a dangerous neighborhood.

There are scenes, too, in which the Israeli teen-agers awaiting the Bed-Sty students' coming express concern. One boy says that he expects them to be very different because they come from a place of shooting and drug-dealing--"that's the world they know." (It is interesting that, in the retrospective scenes at the end of the film, this same boy implicitly denies having entertained such concerns himself and attributes such suspicious expectations to his elders.)

The black teen-agers entertain stereotypes of their own. They admit to knowing no Jews and expecting the people of the kibbutz to be like the Hasidim, "smelly, and wearing funny hats and clothes ." (One boy shows the "stash" with which he has provided against deprivation--candy bars and cookies hidden under a coverlet, and soft drinks stored in his locker--evidently brought all the way from home.) They expect the whole country of Israel to be a desert and are surprised and struck by the natural beauty surrounding the kibbutz-- Kibbutz Levahot-Habashan near the Golan Heights.

From the very first encounter the relationship between the students and the members of the kibbutz is heart-warming. The students, without exception, marvel at their unconditional acceptance. "It was never like--oh, he's black, you know," says one of them.