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January 12, 2001/Tevet 17, 5761, Vol. 53, No.15
Black, Jewish students make MLK's ideals a reality in L.A.
JANE ULMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
ENCINO, Calif. - Although only 23 miles apart, Milken Community High School in Los Angeles' Bel Air hills and Jordan High School in South Central Los Angeles exist in different worlds.
Milken, part of the Stephen S. Wise Temple and the largest non-Orthodox Jewish high school in the United States, was founded in 1990.
Eight years later, the school moved into a new $32 million state-of-the-art building, which now houses 500 students, all Jewish, in grades nine through 12.
Jordan High School is home to almost 2,300 students, nearly all Hispanic or black, in grades nine through 12.
The high school, the first to be built in Watts, dates back to 1925. Protected by a high fence and barred windows, the school sits next door to the Jordan Downs Housing Project.
But through a program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League's World of Difference Institute, students from both schools are learning that they share more similarities than differences. They are learning that people should be judged, as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed on the steps of the Washington Monument in 1963, not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
The students chosen for this program, 20 from each school, begin with a trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance. The Milken students then travel to Jordan where once they warily pass the gated and guarded entrance, they find that it doesn't fit their image of a gang-infested and graffiti-covered inner-city school, that it hosts an honors program and college-bound students. The Jordan students also spend a day at Milken.
"Students learn their own reactions to prejudice and stereotyping. It's one thing to study in the abstract, another to experience firsthand," says Nancy Schneider, a psychology teacher at Milken.
She, along with Milken history teacher Fran Lapides and Jordan drama and English teacher Mattie Harris, all ADL-trained coordinators, engage the students in a series of exercises from the group's anti-bias teaching guide.
The students talk about times they have been hurt by name-calling.
By sharing these experiences in small groups, by talking about times they have said something hurtful or times they didn't intervene, the students learn that they have all experienced pain, prejudice and powerlessness.
They also talk about the biases at their own schools, the conflicts between the blacks and Hispanics at Jordan and among the blacks, Russians, Persians and Israelis at Milken.
During the social interludes, they discuss music and clothes, television and movies. They complain about homework, overly strict parents and annoying siblings.
And they discover, as they chip away at the overlay of learned prejudices and stereotypes, that they are all teenagers, full of normal doubts, anger and stress. They discover, as King once pointed out, that "most hate is rooted in fear, suspicion, ignorance and pride."
And in honor of Martin Luther King Day, all 500 Milken students traveled on buses this week to Jordan High School, where they were addressed by Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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