The two of us come together each year at the midway point between Easter and Passover to watch DreamWorks’ 1998 film The Prince of Egypt. Having met in Des Moines, Iowa, as two young organizers on Vice-President Kamala Harris’s 2019 presidential campaign, we quickly uncovered this overlap in childhood memory – spending our drives through pastures and cornfields singing along to the adaptation of the Exodus parable. While our introductions to the film came through different avenues – children’s services at a Black Baptist church in suburban Atlanta and Passover seders in San Diego – we’d both been taught as children a common message of commitment to justice and freedom for oppressed people.
It’s a value that steered our door-knocking and phone-banking to beat Donald Trump in 2020. A value that forged our friendship – bonded across differences and yet, through common dreams. And it’s the same message that we carry with us in this current moment, Black and Jewish, respectively, arms interlocked together in organizing on behalf of Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza for the last 11 months. Our two communities working together on behalf of Palestinian freedom could not be more critical and should not be more obvious.
