Directed by Brad Rothschild for Menemsha Films, Rabbi on the Block is an engaging and heartwarming documentary about Tamar Manasseh, a stereotype-busting rabbi and community activist from the south side of Chicago. As a woman who is both Black and Jewish, Rabbi Manasseh aims to make a difference by bridging two communities that have not always seen eye to eye in recent years: African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews.

In making this powerful film, which was shown this week at the New York Jewish Film Festival, Rothschild chose not to delve much into the historical accounts of Jewish-Black encounters over the past century or so. He instead opted to focus on the here-and-now daily struggles of his protagonist, a roll-up-your-sleeves “rabbi on the block,” as she works to heal the pains of her congregants in dealing with issues of the day, especially gun violence.

For the most part, this approach is entirely satisfactory: the story of Rabbi Manasseh doing her jov is in itself worthy enough to attract attention and captivate our interest. But for those unaware of the backstory, a quick history lesson might be in order to contextualize Rabbi Manassah’s story.

Over the years, American Blacks and Jews have often found themselves allied over a shared sense of feeling marginalized and persecuted in the larger society. It’s a little known fact today that one of the founders and mainstays of the NAACP was Joel Elias Spingarn, a Jewish educator and activist. The two communities arguably achieved their greatest cohesion during the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s when many Jews, with fresh memories of the Holocaust, were active players in the movement. Perhaps the most visible of these were Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a close friend of Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Also notable in this effort were Harry Golden, the North Carolina journalist, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two of three civil-rights workers slain in Mississippi in 1962 alongside James Cheney, who was Black.

But in the years that followed, the two communities seemed to drift apart. Some Black Nationalists faulted Jews for their involvement in the slave trade, while others expressed solidarity with the plight of Palestinians. In urban areas, like the South Side of Chicago and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, tensions ran high over crime and access to housing.

To his credit, Rothschild chose a cinema-verite approach that focused on character instead of referring to these historical accounts, however valuable. Watching this intrepid rabbi in action “on the block” tells us all we need to know about the struggles and conflicts between the two groups. Perhaps the most significant benefit of this film is debunking the notion that there are no Black Jews in America.

Rabbi Manasseh was ordained in 2021 to serve the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. She graduated from a Hebrew day school before entering the Israelite Academy, where she excelled as a Torah scholar. In 2015, she founded a community watch group called “Mothers Against Senseless Killings” (MASK), whose day-to-day activities are amply illustrated in this film. (Rothschild, by the way, had made an earlier film about her work, a 2020 documentary entitled They Ain’t Ready for Me, the title of Rabbi Manasseh’s autobiography.)

Rabbi on the Block is a sensitive. engaging portrayal about an extraordinary human being who brings her three identities to bear—as a woman, an African American, and a Jew—in helping to repair the world, to use a familiar Jewish trope. But there’s more: both Rothschild and Rabbi Manasseh told a receptive audience at the Jewish Film Festival this week of their plans to help open community centers in the South Side of Chicago that would give Black and Jewish youth a safe space to interact in a supportive environment. Mazel tov and Amen.

Rating: A

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Here’s the trailer of the film.