The Black-Jew Dialogues set to come to Wright State

It’s designed to be an “icebreaker”–or more precisely an “icemelter,” a way to ease Wright State University students, faculty and staff into a comfort zone that enables them to talk freely about racism, bigotry and diversity.

The Black-Jew Dialogues is a fast-paced, two-actor play that makes people laugh and then examine their own prejudices. It’s coming to campus Oct. 25.

“I see it as an opportunity to provide a voluntary event in which members of the campus community can come together, laugh about something and learn,” said Gary LeRoy, vice president of Multicultural Affairs. “My hope is that people will come out and be engaged by some of the dialogue. Then it will be time to get down to business and put who we are as a campus culture into action.”

LeRoy says the performance will pave the way for classroom discussions, town hall meetings, dinners and other forums for students, faculty and staff in order to hammer out how best to serve Wright State’s needs on diversity and inclusion.

The Dialogues, which are billed as an exhilarating and insightful look at the state of race and cultural relations in America, has won praise in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Actors Larry Jay Tish and Ron Jones use sketches, improvisations and multimedia to take audiences on a comical journey through three days they spent together in a hotel discussing their experiences and the history of their peoples.

The performance portrays everything from two rednecks on a joyride to a Jewish boy whose manhood is kick-started by cash generated from his bar mitzvah to grandmothers singing about the joys of soul food and Jewish comfort dishes.

The actors hope the show helps unite America’s black and Jewish communities, which share a history of pain, oppression, pride and a deep commitment to civil rights and justice. They say the performance is designed to provide insight to the true nature of prejudice and how people’s inability to face their own biases separates them.

The show premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in 2006 and is currently touring universities, high schools and theaters throughout the United States. The success of the show has led to the Black-Jew Dialogue Curriculum, which has been praised by educators.

LeRoy first saw the Dialogues at the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity conference in San Francisco that he attended in May. He was struck how it captured members of the audience with its lightheartedness and then got them thinking about racism, bigotry and bias.

“The reason people think it’s funny is that they buy into stereotypic notions,” LeRoy said. “So my thought was finding a way to move beyond laughing at it and to begin working with people of other races and cultures, with the goal of realizing we’re all alike.”

The Black-Jew Dialogues will be performed at 8 p.m. on Tues., Oct. 25, in the auditorium of the Medical Sciences Building. For more information, contact Gary LeRoy at 937-775-3319.