Article about Mr. Gossett, entitled:

Can values from a ’40s Jewish area help kids in ghettos? Actor Louis Gossett Jr. to give Shabbat sermon

Read the full text here.

Excerpt:

Gossett, 72, grew up in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn, N.Y., where many of his neighbors were Jews.

The warm relations with them and the sense of community they shared was “a beautiful thing,” he says.

“If my parents were late, I had the choice of [eating] gefilte fish or sauerbraten” at a neighbor’s house, said the actor, interviewed last week by phone from Kenya. He was slated to go on Safari the following day. (He began the interview by saying “boker tov,” Hebrew for good morning, and ended it with “erev tov,” good evening.)

Gossett credits his experiences as a youngster in Brooklyn as providing the “nurturing” that helped him succeed. And with his foundation — which he founded in 2006 to fight racism through education, programs that foster cultural diversity and anti-violence initiatives — he hopes to initiate programs for kids that will re-create the values he learned.

He wants to help kids in the most distressed areas to combat racism, sexism and violence. “I want to protect them [young people] against the evil of the streets,” he said.

He wants them to learn “self-respect, so they know where they come and what is expected of them, respect for the opposite sex, respect for their elders.”

This article was also picked up by:

• The Canadian Jewish News