Diego Portillo Mazal

DIEGO PORTILLO MAZAL: It's been amazing to find how quickly people got together, how quickly we became aware of the fact that these groups had a lot in common, and not only that but that they shared points of intersection. We're not entirely separate communities.

ALEISA FISHMAN: Diego Portillo Mazal was born in Argentina and lived all over the world before settling in Boston. As a founding member of the Latino-Jewish Roundtable, Portillo Mazal works to bring Jews and Latinos together to overcome prejudice and find common ground.

Welcome to Voices on Antisemitism, a podcast series from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum made possible by generous support from the Oliver and Elizabeth Stanton Foundation. I'm Aleisa Fishman. Every month, we invite a guest to reflect about the many ways that antisemitism and hatred influence our world today. From Boston, here's Diego Portillo Mazal.

DIEGO PORTILLO MAZAL: The Latino-Jewish Roundtable was an initiative started between the Latino Professional Network and the New England Chapter of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). We had been simultaneously worried about an escalation in anti-immigrant rhetoric and some other issues in the community. And we both believe that the best way to get over some of the misunderstandings and some of the things that breed hatred is precisely to have dialog. There's a huge group of Latin Americans and Latino immigrants to the United States who have absolutely no knowledge of the Jewish people. On the other side, I think that there is a group in the Jewish community who just do not understand what it means to be an immigrant today to the United States—most of the Jewish immigration having been earlier, coming here for some very similar reasons, but a lot of that has been forgotten or changed over time.

I grew up in a family that was part of the UN. I lived all over the world, grew up in Africa, in Latin America, and ended up in Boston for college. My parents were both non-religious. My mother's family is Jewish. My father's side of the family was Seventh Day Adventist. And I went to public school in Mozambique, which at the time was Communist and very anti-religious, then went to British schools that were Anglican. So my upbringing allowed me to see very many different cultures. My parents were very adamant that we didn't just live in countries, that you had to learn from the people of those countries.

I think what I've learned from the Roundtable is the amount of goodwill that you can find in people. We co-hosted with the ADL a community Seder this year. It was conducted in multiple languages. The Cantor, for example, was from Argentina and at the end of the Seder sang a song called Cancion con Todos. And the song speaks about all the hands clapping together and all the voices singing together. So it was very touching, because we started off with so many warnings that this Roundtable was going to be a tremendous challenge. And to find just how willing people were to open up and put their own prejudices on the table and to acknowledge them has been huge for me. It takes an incredible amount of bravery to go out there and admit some biases that you've been taught since childhood—that you might intellectually know are incorrect, but you've always held them—especially when you're addressing the very group of people who those prejudices are held against. But it's important that we continue to remind ourselves that this is a multi-faceted country, multi-colored, multi-religious, and that there's so many of those voices coming together to create a new American voice.

ALEISA FISHMAN: Voices on Antisemitism is a podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Join us every month to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our Web site,  www.ushmm.org