Nearly 500 guests filled The Temple in Atlanta on April 25 to hear Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard, and Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of UNCF, work through the question that has been hanging over American civil rights for two generations: whether the Black-Jewish coalition built at Selma and the March on Washington can be rebuilt by an institution rather than a generation.
The Fireside Chat at the oldest synagogue in Atlanta was the public face of a larger experiment. The Tikkun Olam Initiative, a partnership launched in 2024 by UNCF, Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, and Hillel International, reached more than 600 students in 2025 and is on track to engage 2,100 in 2026, a 250% jump in volume across one academic year.
The Gates-Lomax Stage at The Temple
Lisa Rayam, host and senior producer at Atlanta public radio station WABE, moderated. Students from Clark Atlanta University, Georgia State, Emory, Spelman, Morehouse and Kennesaw State filled the pews and stayed for the question session. The evening included an abbreviated viewing of Gates’ new PBS documentary, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which examines the parallel and intersecting histories of the two communities from the antebellum period to the present. A full account of the April 25 Fireside Chat is on the UNCF news page.
Lomax put the stakes plainly. “For me, the most powerful foundation for real allyship is the ability to work together for a common purpose,” he told the room. The line landed because the audience knew the implied counter-claim: the alliance has not been working together at the scale either community needs.
John H. Eaves, the program director of the Tikkun Olam Initiative and a former chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners from 2007 to 2017, opened the evening and introduced Associate Rabbi Lydia Medwin. Eaves founded the Black and Jewish Leaders of Tomorrow program before joining UNCF and is a member of The Temple himself, which gave the venue choice a personal logic that a press release would not have caught. He told the room the evening was one of the proudest moments of his life as someone who is both African American and Jewish.
After the chat, more than 50 students who identify as Black, Jewish, or both sat down at a kosher Unity Dinner in an adjoining hall. That dinner runs as the operational template the program uses in every city it visits.
From 600 to 2,100 Students in One Academic Year
The arithmetic behind the program is the part most coverage of the Atlanta event skipped. Kraft seeded the initiative with $1 million to UNCF in April 2024. That gift funded the first cohort of campus dinners, the curriculum, and the staffing that lets a partnership across three national organizations operate without each side subsidizing the other.
The scale has moved year over year, and the Tikkun Olam Initiative program details spell out the trajectory.
| Program Year | Students Engaged | Campuses | Anchor Event |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 launch | About 100 | Pilot cohort | Founding summit at Xavier University of Louisiana |
| 2025 | More than 600 | Multi-city pilot | First city-by-city Unity Dinner series |
| 2025 to 2026 | On track for 2,100+ | 80 colleges | 21 dinners across 14 cities |
Two Unity Summits anchor the 2026 calendar. The first ran in San Francisco on February 6 during Super Bowl week. The second followed in Los Angeles from February 13 to 15, timed to NBA All-Star Weekend. Both pairings are deliberate. Kraft’s pitch since the 2023 “Stand Up to Jewish Hate” Super Bowl ad has been that professional sports is the cultural surface where this coalition has to be visible if the broader public is going to track it.
The 14-City Map and What It Looks Like on Campus
The 14-city tour deliberately maps onto the geographies where historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Jewish student populations both exist. The three partners published the full 14-city Unity Dinners tour in September 2025.
- New Orleans, September 15
- Baltimore, September 17
- Philadelphia, September 28
- Washington, D.C., November 4
- New York City, November 12
- Atlanta, November 17
- Charlotte, Houston, Los Angeles, Memphis, Montgomery, Raleigh, Richmond, and Tallahassee on dates rolling through the spring semester
Each dinner targets roughly 100 students.
The mix is intentional. Black students from HBCUs are paired with Jewish students from Hillel chapters at predominantly white institutions in the same metro. Most of the pairs would not otherwise share a dining hall, much less a structured curriculum on anti-Black racism and antisemitism.
Each dinner runs as a facilitated dialogue rather than a banquet with a podium. There is a curriculum, a set of opening questions, and a closing prompt that asks each participant to commit to a follow-on action on their own campus.
Participants who finish a dinner can apply for $1,000 micro-grants to host follow-on events, with the requirement that any funded event be student-led and co-organized by at least one student from each side of the partnership. That grant rule is what pushes the program past the calendar event and into a campus organizing pipeline.
The Heschel-King Template Being Rebuilt
The historical reference point that Eaves and Lomax kept returning to is not abstract. It is the 1958 American Jewish Congress convention, where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the alliance in language that has not been improved on since:
My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.
King’s framing rested on the personal relationships behind it. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King at Selma in 1965, called the walk “praying with my legs.” That sentence captures the model. The alliance ran on a small number of senior leaders who could pick up the phone to one another. It was not a pipeline that produced its next cohort the way a campus fellowship does, and once those leaders aged out the institutional memory thinned faster than the political need for it. The Tikkun Olam Initiative is the corrective bet. It does not assume the next Heschel or King will appear unaided; it builds a structured pathway from a freshman dinner to a summit to a micro-grant to a campus follow-on event. Whether the resulting cohort carries the same depth of relationship is the open empirical question this experiment is asking.
The Gaza Test and the Surveys Behind the Hope
The reason a programmatic version of the alliance has a market in 2026 is that the personal version has been under pressure for years. The Gaza war that began in October 2023 produced sharp divisions on American campuses, with protest encampments, congressional hearings about antisemitism at elite universities, and a measurable cooling between Black student organizations and Jewish student organizations on shared agendas. The campus-climate research has tracked the fracture in real time, and the funders behind Unity Dinners began commissioning their own polling once it became clear public data was lagging.
Survey data on Unity Dinner attendees, summarized on Blue Square Alliance’s Unity Dinners participant page, is one of the few quantitative windows on what is bringing students to the table. 44% of participants said they attended because of the current state of racism and antisemitism in the United States. Almost all reported having at least one meaningful conversation with someone of a different race they had not previously met.
Adam Katz, president of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, described the campus context bluntly when announcing the 14-city tour. “We’re watching what people are saying and hearing on social media, and you can see a significant rise and normalization of tropes and hate speech,” he told Axios. Adam Lehman, president and chief executive of Hillel International, has described the series as a highlight of his organization’s cross-community work this year.
The survey numbers carry both an optimistic and a worrying signal. They suggest the dinners are reaching students who already feel the temperature on campus has risen, which is the audience the program needs. They also suggest the program is not yet recruiting students who are skeptical of the project itself, which is the audience the long-run coalition has to convert.
What Happens After the Dinners End
The hard part of any movement-building program is the gap between the closing toast and the next semester. Civil rights coalitions that ran on charisma and crisis collapsed when the charisma left the room and the crisis moved on. The program is betting that the combination of micro-grants, a recurring summit schedule, and an 80-campus footprint will outlive any single news cycle on campus.
The summit cadence is the most testable piece. The Los Angeles event in February drew Black and Jewish college students alongside current and former professional athletes, the cross-pollination the program has pushed since the 2023 Super Bowl ad. A third annual summit is implicit in the 2026 to 2027 planning, though no date has been announced.
If the pipeline holds, the next decade of Black-Jewish civic leadership will have been seeded in 14 cities across one academic year. If it does not, the same room at The Temple will host another version of the same conversation in 2027, and the surveys will still show 44% of attendees were drawn in by hate they could not escape.
