- The picture that a lot of white Americans get in our heads of what it means to be a Jew, what it looks like to be a Jew, is really just a fraction of the Jewish community, both in the United States and especially around the world.

(gentle music) Being Jewish has always been about being part of a group.

It's an extended kinship network.

That's always who Jews have been.

The idea that the world should be good for the people who live here, and that we should do what we can to make it a better place.

I think that you will find that as a basic piece of Jewish identity for many, many Jews.

White American Jews, I think, got involved in the American civil rights movement out of proportion to our numbers in the population.

The African American community was able to welcome folks who came to work with them.

I think things changed culturally after that.

You know, we keep finding each other and losing each other in parts of each community.

Looking back on it, I don't think that the involvement of white Jews in the civil rights movement came so much out of shared experience, but that commitment that I was talking about before, that commitment to justice, that commitment to, the phrase in Hebrew is the idea that every human being is created "b'tzelem elohim," that's from the first chapter of Genesis, "in God's image."

Every human being has that spark of whatever it is that makes us human equally to every other.

Ultimately, Judaism is the lens that I look at the world through.

But the values are human values, the needs are human needs, the hopes are human hopes.

We just have a particular vocabulary or a particular set of stories.

And every culture has those for itself, but I think the values are the same.

(gentle music)