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• 1 2019-12-09T22:44:57-05:00 The Flo Kennedy Show with Rabbi Yahvah 14 plain 2020-03-18T00:12:36-04:00

  Florynce Kennedy (1916 - 2000) was a Black feminist, lawyer, and activist who fought for a range of rights. Her battles ranged from abortion rights to defending leaders of Black Power. She fought for rights and equality for many different types of marginalized people. Kennedy, who loved the theatrics and entertainment of politics, often made her activism performative. In the later part of her life, she hosted a television show aired on Manhattan Cable Television called The Flo Kennedy Show. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Florynce Kennedy hosted a talk show on which she interviewed various activists and friends.

  In the March 8, 1989 episode, Flo Kennedy hosted Rabbi Yahvah, a Black male rabbi who proselytized Judaism primarily New York City. Throughout the interview, Flo Kennedy asked him about his activism, which focused on helping the homeless, and on the specific form of Judaism that Rabbi Yahvah practiced. Flo Kennedy devoted many of the questions that she addressed to understanding Rabbi Yahvah’s Judaism in differentiating it from European Judaism in an interview that focused on themes of economics and religion in liberation.

  In their discussion of a Black Judaism as distinct from a European Judaism, Flo Kennedy and Rabbi Yahvah invoke ideas from Richard Wright’s White Man Listen, published in 1957. Wright writes “Today many of the scholars of Asia and Africa (a minority, to be sure...) are beginning to feel a lessening of distance between themselves and the Western world” (681), which is exactly the opposite of the differences Flo tries to draw out of Rabbi Yahvah. She tries in her questioning to articulating a Black Judaism distinct from a white, European Judaism.

  Similarly, their discussion of how large corporations can help in homeless liberation, Flo and Rabbi Yahvah plans resonate with those of George Jackson. They talk of boycotting rich people and advertisers until they donate to the homesless , as well as disdaining the concept of a homeless hotel for the way it allows the already profitable to profit. In this discussion, we see George Jackson put into practice. George Jackson believes “It was the profit motive that built the tenement house and the city project. Profit and loss prevents repairs and maintenance” (236). By targeting the capitalist structure that enforces the living conditions of homeless people, Flo Kennedy and Rabbi Yahvah channel George Jackson’s criticism of capitalism and embodiy his proposed concepts of socialism.

  This conversation is a great display of the confounding impact of religion and economics on theories of liberation and activism.