Russian Jews, African Americans

A meeting was called a couple of months ago at the not-for-profit Jewish agency where I’ve taught English as a second language (ESL) on and off for several years to recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The administrators of the agency’s ESL division had decided that the problem of racism among the immigrants should be addressed somehow. The nearly forty teachers on the evening shift were divided up into three groups according to the language level we were teaching. I en...