Updated

Updated · Fox News · Aug 7

Wilberforce, Touro Students Complete 2-Country Poland Program to Bridge Campus Divides

Updated

Updated · Fox News · Aug 7

Wilberforce, Touro Students Complete 2-Country Poland Program to Bridge Campus Divides

Q: When a racist encounter struck in Warsaw, how did an unprecedented alliance between Black and Jewish students change the outcome?

The racist incident in Warsaw was defused and transformed by immediate solidarity: when a Polish clerk refused to place change into a Wilberforce student’s hand, the Black and Jewish students closed ranks around her and remained together for the rest of the trip. That response changed the moment from one of isolation to one of protection and shared witness. Instead of the student facing the insult alone, her peers made clear that an attack on one member of the group would be met collectively. The alliance gave the encounter emotional and practical force, turning a routine act of prejudice into a lived lesson in mutual defense. It also validated the purpose of the exchange. The trip had been designed to move beyond abstract campus messaging by putting students with different historical burdens into direct relationship. In Warsaw, that relationship became tangible in real time. Jewish students who had been reflecting on antisemitism and the Holocaust stood beside Black classmates confronting racism in the present. Students and university leaders said the experience deepened trust and empathy. At Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, Black students said the Holocaust became personal, while Jewish students listened to the enduring legacy of slavery and the erasure of African histories. The Warsaw incident showed that this was not only an educational tour about past hatred, but a test of whether shared experience could produce real solidarity. In that moment, it did.

1 articles · Updated · Fox News · Aug 7

Students from Wilberforce University and Touro University finished a joint June program in New York and Poland aimed at countering campus division through shared historical experience rather than statements or training.
In Warsaw, a clerk’s refusal to place change in a Wilberforce student’s hand became a defining moment, prompting Black and Jewish students to close ranks and move through the rest of the trip as one group.
The RISE Leadership Initiative took students from Brooklyn meetings with Holocaust survivors to Warsaw, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where participants linked Jewish Holocaust memory with Black experiences of erasure and slavery.
University leaders said the weeklong exchange showed how direct encounters can cut through rising antisemitism, persistent racism and self-segregation on U.S. campuses more effectively than costly crisis-management structures.
The next phase will send the same students to Ghana to study the transatlantic slave trade, making reciprocity central to a model the organizers want other universities to replicate.