This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we might profitably rethink relations between the African American community and Jews – especially following the Israel-Gaza war, which has strained these relationships as never before. At stake are two competing narratives.
The “official” narrative begins with Jewish opposition to slavery: Rabbi David Einhorn, for example, who denounced slavery from his Baltimore pulpit and had to flee for his life as a result. From the Civil-Rights Era, it highlights people like Rabbi James Wax of Memphis who led 250 clergy, black and white, in denouncing the city’s segregationist mayor for the conditions that eventuated in King’s assassination. Two of the three civil rights workers (Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman) who were murdered by the KKK in 1964 were Jewish. The NAACP itself was indebted to Jewish support, Kivie Kaplan in particular, who even served as that organization’s first president. Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the office of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center.
The counter narrative highlights Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, the Jewish financier and plantation owner who enslaved 140 people himself, then bankrolled the southern cause during the Civil War, served as the south’s Secretary of State, and even had his picture displayed on the Confederate two-dollar bill. In the Jim-Crow 20th century, a “Great Migration” of African Americans left the rural and oppressive south for cities in the north. Because they settled in areas where the last big immigrant group, the Jews, were living, Jews became a visible part of the white flight out; the new black settlers still depended on white shopkeepers, many of whom were Jewish. As conditions deteriorated, Jews who owned tenements where the new residents lived became slum landlords.
This counter narrative became embedded in various segments of the African American community. Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, called Jews a “devil race.” Louis Farrakhan labelled pedophilia and sex trafficking “the work of the Jews.”[I] In 1998 the Anti-Defamation League reported, “Black Americans (34%) are nearly four times as likely as whites (9%) to fall into the most anti-Semitic category.” But equally, it has taken a long time for Jews to give up referring to African Americans as the Yiddish “schvartzes,” literally just “Blacks,” but with distinctly negative connotations.
Over time, the official Jewish narrative coalesced with the more enlightened African American view of Jews as friends and allies. The two peoples voted as liberals, and marched together against racial injustice. Even now, synagogues and Black churches exchange pulpits; they celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day together.
But, in the view of many, that alliance has unraveled with October 7 and the Israel/Gaza War. In February 2024, for example, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church called for the end of American support to Israel because of Israel’s policy of “mass genocide.[ii] A more balanced statement from the NAACP affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, but nonetheless, urged Washington to cut off all military aid to Israel.[iii]Al Jazeera news quoted Hatem Abudayyeh, chair of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) advocacy group, as calling the statement “unsurprising, given historical ties between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements.”[iv]
And from the Jewish side, the Jewish People’s Policy Institute announced, “The slogans of transnational “Black Lives Matter” and “From Ferguson to Palestine” have perhaps come to outweigh the importance of solidarity with Jewish groups…. The NAACP of yesteryear is gone.”[v]
It would be a mistake, however, for Jews to jump to altogether negative conclusions.
To begin with, reasoned critiques of Israel’s wartime policy are not in and of themselves anti-Semitic. To be sure, they can be; but “can be” and “must be” are two very different things. To be sure also, evidence of anti-Semitism within the African American community is not hard to find. But that hardly warrants the conclusion that “Black America” at large is anti-Semitic.
In 1932, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr published an influential book entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society. Individuals, he said, tend to strive for goodness. But societal institutions offset that tendency because they require “morale” in order to retain their supporters, and morale is created by “dogmas, symbols, and emotionally potent oversimplifications.”[vi] It is this institutional thinking that paints all of Israel, and even “all Jews,” so negatively; and similarly, it is what makes Jewish organizations skip so readily from critiques of Israeli governmental policy to anti-Semitism writ large; and from individual anti-Semites to assumptions about all African Americans.
In early January, along with some 20 HUC students (recipients of a Tisch Fellowship), I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to see the Legacy Museum, a painfully horrific reconstruction of the history of black people on these shores: the cruelty of enslavement, the degradation of Jim Crow, the brutality of regularized lynching. While standing in front of a wall of tears, an entire wall of falling water, I passed a young African American man serving as a museum guard, not the armed and menacing sort, just a sentry whose presence reminded visitors to treat the museum’s offerings with respect.
I thanked him for his work. He thanked me for visiting. “I am a rabbi,” I said, “part of a whole group of Jewish seminarians visiting from New York.”
“A rabbi,” he repeated gently, and then added, “Do you know the Holocaust Museum in DC? I’d like to visit that someday.”
There you have it: two descendants of peoples who share histories of persecution and want to know each other’s stories. In that simple human bonding, both he and I looked beyond the “oversimplifications” to which institutions are prone; and ahead to the continued possibility of our two peoples upholding one another and building a better world together.
[i] Cited in https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minister-louis-farrakhan-in-his-own-words
[ii] https://www.starofzion.org/stories/statement-of-the-ame-zion-church-board-of-bishops-on-the-hamas-attacks-and-the-war-in-israel-
[iii] https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-urges-biden-harris-administration-stop-shipments-weapons-targeting-civilians-israel
[iv] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/6/historic-naacp-urges-biden-to-end-weapons-shipments-to-israel#:~:text=The%20NAACP%2C%20one%20of%20the,the%20Israeli%20war%20on%20Gaza.
[v] https://jppi.org.il/en/the-israel-hamas-war-could-signal-the-end-of-the-black-jewish-alliance/
[vi] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics (1932), Introduction.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 