Bringing Atlanta Home: Rabbi Jeremy Barras and the Miami Test of the Black-Jewish Alliance

In August, Rabbi Jeremy Barras flew to Atlanta with a Black pastor from Miami. The two men left the county to have a conversation they could have had a short drive from either of their buildings.

That was the part Barras kept turning over on the way back. Three days at Ebenezer Baptist Church with rabbis and pastors from around the country, and the question he carried home was what happens on Monday, at home, where nobody is watching.

The Arithmetic of Black and Jewish Miami

Barras and every other attendee left Atlanta with the same assignment. Go back to your city, gather the rabbis and the Black pastors, and build it locally. The group reconvenes next year.

For Rabbi Jeremy Barras, Miami is a harder assignment than it sounds.

The Greater Miami Jewish Federation’s 2024 community study counted 130,100 Jews in Miami-Dade, a 7% increase over the decade, with the number of Jewish children up 13%. The Census Bureau puts the county’s Black population at 15.3% of roughly 2.8 million residents, somewhere north of 400,000 people.

Together that lands within a rounding error of 20% of the county, almost exactly the national figure the Atlanta group talks about: Black Americans and Jewish Americans as a combined bloc large enough to make politicians think twice.

In Miami the same number means something else. Miami-Dade is 70.6% Hispanic, and Hispanic identity cuts across race, so a real share of the county’s Black residents are also Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican. Jews are under 5%. Two minorities inside somebody else’s majority, with one of them overlapping the majority in ways the national template never has to account for.

Barras treats that as a feature. A Black-Jewish partnership in Miami that behaves like a voting bloc will fail and deserve to, in his view. One that behaves like two communities who need each other, in a city where neither sets the terms, has a chance.

Why the Black-Jewish Alliance Frayed, and Why Miami Is Its Own Case

Crown Heights is the rupture most people name first, and the fight over affirmative action did as much damage over a longer stretch. Neither began in Miami and neither ended there.

Miami’s version is complicated by a geography most cities do not have. The county’s Black population includes deep-rooted African American families in Liberty City and Overtown alongside large Haitian, Jamaican, and Bahamian communities with their own churches, their own politics, and their own histories with both Israel and the American Jewish establishment. Miami has several Black communities rather than one, and they don’t always agree with each other.

The same holds on the Jewish side. A Cuban Jewish family in Kendall, a Modern Orthodox family in North Miami Beach, and a Reform family in Pinecrest aren’t one constituency with one view.

Any clergy leader promising to convene “the Black community and the Jewish community” in this county hasn’t spent much time in it.

The Miami Beach Rabbi Who Did This First

Miami has done a version of this before, and better than it remembers.

Rabbi Leon Kronish arrived at Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach in the mid-1940s and built it from 40 members into a congregation of more than 1,200 families. He spent those same years working to dismantle south Florida’s discriminatory laws, the ones written against Jews and the ones written against Black Floridians. Then he asked a Miami Beach that was overwhelmingly Jewish at the time to open its schools to Black children bused in from other parts of the county.

Consider what that asked of his congregants. He wanted a change to the schools their own children attended, in a town where they’d only recently been permitted to buy property themselves.

He did it anyway. Barras suspects most Jews in the county under 60 have never heard Kronish’s name.

That’s the standard the Atlanta assignment implies: not an interfaith friendship, but a rabbi spending his own standing on something concrete and local that costs his own people something.

How Rabbi Jeremy Barras Plans to Start a Miami Chapter

The starting point is the one two clergy can reach without anyone’s permission, which is their own pulpits.

The pastor who traveled to Atlanta with Barras is scheduled to preach at Temple Beth Am, and Barras will preach at his church. No dates have been set. Barras expects it to be uncomfortable for about 10 minutes and then not, which is how these things usually go.

That exchange is the door. The part that takes years comes after it: getting day school families and congregation families into the same rooms, showing up when the other community is attacked instead of issuing a statement three days later, and building enough trust that when the two sides disagree about Israel, and they will, the relationship survives it.

Two clergy and a pulpit swap don’t repair 50 years. The document the Atlanta room signed, Renewing the Black/Jewish Alliance: Our Sacred Covenant, is worth what people do about it on ordinary Tuesdays in their own cities.

What Barras has going for him is a recent demonstration of what happens when somebody simply asks. He called 50 rabbis last year to build a national group and 49 said yes, which told him the appetite had been sitting there the whole time waiting for someone to ask. He suspects the same is true of the pastors in this county, and intends to find out by calling them.

The larger case he makes about Miami is that almost everybody’s family came from somewhere else, usually within living memory, usually because staying was worse. Cubans, Haitians, Jews, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Bahamians. Sentiment aside, that’s the most practical asset the county has, and it means the conversation he had to fly to Atlanta to start should be among the easiest in America to continue at home.