On April 20, 1939, Billie Holiday recorded the song Strange Fruit. Written by a Jewish schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, it became an instant hit and to this day serves as a poignant protest song against injustice. It is also an example—along with images of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma—of one of the more celebrated characteristics of the peculiar African-American/Jewish-American relationship: that of two groups bonded by a history of persecution working together to fight injustice.

Unfortunately, the distance between Jews and blacks grew both in geography (suburbs vs. inner city) and class. As a result, the compassionate relationship was replaced to a certain degree by a Louis Farrakhan-influenced, more antagonistic one.

It is this enmity that The Black Jew Dialogues, written and acted by Ron Jones ("The Black") and Larry Jay Tish ("The Jew"), attempts to cure through a series of semi-improv'd skits, videos, monologues, and even a rap. Although envisioned as a comedy, the play is first and foremost a political production—with the "objective" being to address Jewish and Black "feareotypes" and fix them through open self-expression.

The skits range widely, jumping in and out of a central plot device—the two writers confronting their stereotypes in a hotel room and deciding to write a play about it—while moving from scenes that placed Jones and Tish as Hebrew slaves in Egypt, picnicking grannies (above), angry rednecks, and more.

Now, a political play is meant to use the creative medium of performing arts to achieve a political objective—we know that. And the inevitable problem is that as soon as a production works too much to succeed politically, the artistic aspect takes a hit. Such was the end result in Dialogues, where Chappelle-esque humor ("If Obama was any less scary, he'd be Canadian!") meshed inharmoniously with a lecture against prejudice that seemed like it was written for a high school assembly. (Jones and Tish do indeed offer "cultural sensitivity training," and a stereotype-busting curriculum on their website.)

Controversial humor can be a powerful tool, but it must be wielded cautiously. When effective, race-laced humor provides fresh perspective and often posits inventive (and sometimes even realistically constructive) social ideas. Dialogues did as much in one skit where Jones explains the imagined One Nigger Program, meant to place a small number of black people in all-white social enclaves in order to help white people become accustomed to blacks and realize that they're not so bad after all.

Too often, though, Dialogues undercuts its own objective by employing stereotypes to make the jokes that are supposed to destroy the stereotypes. Surely the persistent image of Jews as a guilt-ridden, food obsessed people who only speak in questions does not help the cause.

In that sense, Dialogues is an extension of the African-American/Jewish-American relationship itself: it is at once agreeable and uncomfortable, contentious and brutal.