Jewish Perspectives on Reparations:
How do we reckon with the ways our holy texts both limit and countenance slavery?
Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhD
A recurring concern in the United States is about reparations, or what is owed to the formerly enslaved, yet little Jewish scholarship has emerged on reparations.
Examine biblical and rabbinic sources that explicitly speak of reparations and engage with ethical analyses of those sources to generate openings to think about the (Jewish) ethics of reparations and their relevance to contemporary conversations in the United States.
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For More on This Topic
- The Case for Reparations – An article by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Torah Case for Reparations: A Jewish View – An article by Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein
- Our Country Was Built on a Stolen Beam – A sermon by Rabbi Sharon Brous
- The Stolen Beam Series: A Study of Reparations for Descendants of Enslaved Africans in the U.S. – A curriculum by the Jewish Community of Amherst, Massachusetts
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