Two Together for a New Understanding : Cultures: One is black and Christian; the other, white and Jewish. Cornel West and Michael Lerner share a message of commonality, healing and caring.

Jewish, black and neither, hopeful and merely curious, they snaked one April evening into a Romanesque meeting house on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The hall itself set a spiritual tone. An introduction by Charlie Rose, public TV’s highest-brow talk jockey, provided the intellectual imprimatur.

Then Cornel West and Michael Lerner, men of faith and politics, started riffing on the rift between blacks and Jews.

It was opening night of their national tour, West and Lerner delivering tag-team sermons in support of their new book, “Jews & Blacks: Let the healing begin” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). The next sessions will take place Wednesday--electronically via America Online in the afternoon, then in the flesh at the House of Blues in West Hollywood at 7 p.m.

Their live presentation is simply West and Lerner talking. So is “Jews & Blacks”--nearly 300 pages of transcribed conversation. The two friends began taping their talk back in 1990.

They make something of an odd couple.

West--tall, elegant, hip in bearing and word--is a popular, very public academic. A professor of Afro-American studies and religion, he recently moved from Princeton to Harvard. His book, “Race Matters” (Beacon Press, 1993) was a national bestseller.

Lerner--a plump, rumpled free-lance thinker--edits a journal of Jewish religion and liberal politics called Tikkun (Hebrew for to mend). His name blipped across media radar in 1993 when Hillary Rodham Clinton borrowed his mantra, “the politics of meaning,” in speeches, then invited him for a White House visit.

Theirs is the latest in a flurry of books on the subject. In a recent phone interview, West explained that “Jews & Blacks” has a different purpose from the other books and his earlier essays.

“What we wanted to do, just at the level of sheer example, was to show what it means for a black person and a Jewish person to take one another seriously, to express a certain care on the one hand, but critical engagement on the other.”

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Like many discussions, the book is at times chatty, at times stilted. Now off-the-cuff, now apocalyptic. Here infuriating, there involving.

Lerner and West hash out interpretations of black and Jewish history. They trade stories of their childhoods. They debate the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nation of Islam, homophobia and the sexual psychodynamics of black-Jewish relations.

Mostly, they share a confidence that Jews and blacks are natural allies. Lerner defines racial justice as the critical moral test for a Jewish community that has, in his view, turned from religious ideals to secular materialism. West maintains that black poverty and despair continue a legacy of pain that most whites--Jews included--refuse to acknowledge. But he sees Jews’ history of suffering as grounds for joint action.

The topic at hand can contain neither author’s passion. Lerner keeps returning to his politics-of-meaning precept: that all Americans suffer under a spiritually stifling culture of selfishness. At one point, he talks for nearly seven pages about the Clintons’ abandonment of his principle.

West sees friction with Jews as a side issue for African Americans, compared with concrete concerns like housing, jobs and education, not to mention endemic problems: white dominance and what he calls the “market culture.”

Such fundamental flaws call for fundamental change, he argues. In the recent interview, he elaborated: “There needs to be some significant public conversation about how wealth is produced, power is distributed, status is accrued.”

Interviewed in his Manhattan apartment, Lerner concurred. “Jews have to recognize that they have a common interest with African Americans in this society,” he said. “That common interest is in dismantling a system of oppression that generates anger and hatred and will seek a focus. Number one, because that will eventually extend to Jews as well. And number two, because it’s wrong.”

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Once ideas start to flow, West and Lerner seem made for each other.

In “Jews & Blacks” and elsewhere, Lerner writes of a Jewish ethic of transformation and healing. West, calling himself a prophetic Christian, writes of speaking truth to power with love. Both refer regularly to psychological concepts like worth, hope, despair and distrust. And just as Lerner writes of a politics of meaning, West, in “Race Matters,” writes of a politics of conversion.

They differ most in how each relates to other leaders of his own community. West huddles with African Americans of all views. Last June, Lerner rebuked him for not bowing out of the NAACP’s black leadership summit when Louis Farrakhan was invited.

Farrakhan has a constituency, West explained: “You’ve got to fight for the hearts and minds of those folk. And so that means you’ve got to engage him. . . . I think it’s a strategic difference between Lerner and myself.”

Indeed, Lerner has no qualms about standing apart. Nor is he afraid to pick a fight.

Said West, “Part of it is he’s been burned so much by either establishmentarian Jews or liberal Jews who disagree with him or secular progressives who think that his talk about spirituality is ephemeral. And part of it is a matter of personality. Brother Lerner is just a cantankerous brother.”

Take black anti-Semitism. Lerner says blacks have not adequately addressed the problem. But some Jews use it as an excuse to turn their backs on the poor, he adds, while others use it to raise funds.

Lerner is an outsider, too, to the wider world of ideas. He publishes his own magazine and, until last year, his own books. Occasionally he is cited in the press. Occasionally he is ribbed there.

West, on the other hand, has swum mostly in the mainstream. Before last month, when a New Republic piece by Leon Wieseltier kicked at his pedestal, he was virtually unimpeached, a rising star in the Ivy League, praised to the point where some black critics called him a creation of the white media. Since the Wieseltier attack, other commentators have reproached him. Like many critics of Lerner, they charge West with thinking too much of himself.

“Brother Leon’s piece gave people a certain permission to let their own critical, if not downright negative, views be aired--which is probably a good thing,” West said.

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West and Lerner have been very visible this month, modeling the behaviors and plugging the book they hope can kindle new understanding between their respective communities.

“Too many black folk know very, very little about American Jews,” West said. “They have no grasp of the deep sense of vulnerability that Jews have, no matter what their socioeconomic state is. What you’d get in the black world is, ‘These are successful folk, for the most part. How can they be vulnerable?’ ”

Lerner says Jews similarly misunderstand blacks: “Jewish response (to black anger) is, ‘Wait a second! We weren’t even here when slavery got started, even when it was eliminated. And we’ve been helping fight against the oppression of blacks. Why in the world would you be angry at us?’

“What Jews don’t realize is that a lot of that anger is directed at Jews seen as part of white society, benefiting economically from a system that uproots the chances of blacks’ economic survival.”

They hope their conversations, in print and in person, can help Jews and blacks work together. They plan to follow up later this year with a national conference on black-Jewish relations.

“We have a common message that we can bring to the larger society,” Lerner said. “And why we? Because we’re the two communities that in many ways are most rooted in a biblical message--that a caring society based on justice and love is possible.”

There was no argument from the autograph-seekers waiting in line after Lerner and West spoke in New York. They dropped off fan letters and proposals for political projects. As Lerner inscribed one book, “Let’s build healing together,” a woman offered to throw her husband out of bed if West would take his place and simply talk.

Hailu Paris--born in Ethiopia, raised in Harlem--looked on, clutching a copy of the Jewish weekly, the Forward.

“You got to keep hope alive,” he said. “The reality is rough. It’s going to take more than these two to do it,” concluded the Jewish African American.

Where, When, How Much

* Cornel West and Michael Lerner will lead a symposium at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the House of Blues, 8439 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Tickets are $22.50 plus service charge at Ticketmaster outlets or at the box office; (213) 650-0246.

* They will also host a cyber-chat from 4:15 to 5 p.m. Wednesday via America Online. Keyword: CENTER STAGE.