Jewish-African American Relations
Jewish-African American relations have experienced a complex and evolving dynamic throughout history, particularly characterized by periods of both cooperation and conflict. Following World War II, Jewish and African American leaders established strong ties, often collaborating in civil rights efforts and advocating for social justice. Their shared experiences of marginalization and commitment to equality, especially during the Civil Rights Movement, fostered significant alliances, with notable Jewish involvement in organizations like the NAACP.
However, this camaraderie was not a given historically. Earlier interactions were limited, with tensions arising during economic hardships, such as the Great Depression, where competition over resources sometimes strained relationships. The rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s introduced new challenges, as some African American leaders adopted anti-white rhetoric that affected Jewish community sentiments. Events following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., created further rifts, particularly in urban areas where Jews faced losses during civil unrest.
In the subsequent decades, tensions persisted, highlighted by incidents like the Crown Heights riots of the early 1990s and controversial remarks from public figures that exacerbated divisions. Despite these challenges, both groups retained liberal political orientations and shared urban spaces, which continued to provide opportunities for dialogue and potential cooperation. As the late 20th century unfolded, the diverging political interests—driven by differing priorities and perceptions—reflected the ongoing complexity of Jewish-African American relations, underscoring a history rich with both collaboration and contention.
Jewish-African American relations
Significance: When relations between Jews and African Americans were good, both groups dramatically advanced the cause of civil rights. Their joint efforts helped bring about the end of legal segregation.
Although the leaders of the African American and Jewish communities enjoyed undeniably good relations in the thirty years after World War II, their friendship was not the historical norm. The periods before and after these years of closeness and cooperation were marked by ambivalence. The relationship between the two communities has varied across time, depending upon economic developments, geographical proximity, and the presence of other ethnic groups.
Early US History
Although both Africans and Jews came to North America early, their interaction was very limited. Most of the Africans were slaves on plantations; however, almost no Jews owned slaves or had reason to interact with them. Minimal contact began in the mid-nineteenth century in southern and border-state towns that had a population of freed slaves and a scattering of Jews from Central Europe. The Jews, many of whom opposed slavery, were among the few merchants willing to trade with the former slaves. Both groups shared a sense of being outsiders, a strong attachment to the Hebrew Bible and its message of freedom for the slaves, and support for Abraham Lincoln and the liberal Republican Party during the Civil War (1861–1865).
Turn of the Century
Large-scale Jewish immigration, largely from Eastern Europe, did not start until the mid-1880s. They came to the United States to escape legal discrimination, religious persecution, pogroms, and dire poverty. Very few of them had experienced any contact with blacks; however, they firmly believed in equality and the rights of the workers, the oppressed, and the poor. Therefore, they were sympathetic to the plight of the African Americans, many of whom had moved from the rural South to northern cities in which Jews lived to escape problems very similar to those from which the Jews had fled.
Depression and World War II
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Jewish and African American communities came into contact in large industrial cities, but relations were mixed. Both groups shared poverty, persecution and liberal Democratic affiliation. However, as some of the Jews began to prosper, conflict ensued. Many Jews went into business for themselves, partly because of prejudice against them in the workforce. Because they had limited resources, they opened small stores and later bought small apartment buildings in their urban neighborhoods. Normal shopkeeper-customer and landlord-tenant conflicts developed with African American neighbors, intensified by the racial and ethnic differences.
During World War II, the events in Germany provided a common enemy for Jews and African Americans, but that did not eliminate problems. Nazism was not a salient issue for most African Americans. One of the serious rifts between the two groups involved a charismatic member of the Nation of Islam, Sufi Abdul Hamid, who built a reputation for himself partly by insulting Jews and their religion.
Post-World War II
World War II and its aftermath provided opportunities for both groups. African Americans, still fleeing the South, moved into the neighborhoods evacuated by Jews. A decline in public anti-Semitism, combined with higher education, allowed Jews to move from blue-collar to white-collar jobs and to escape the inner-city ghettos. Many Jews who went to college were exposed to and apparently moved by the plight of African Americans.
Early in the twentieth century, Jews had formed a number of organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to protect their rights. Several Jews worked with African American leaders to help them bolster parallel institutions to protect black people’s rights, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had a significant Jewish presence both in funding and in legal staffing.
These civil rights organizations grew in number and in strength, especially after the sit-ins in the South during the early 1960s. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, later headed by Jack Greenberg, took the lead in prosecuting the civil rights cases that broke down the legal support for segregation. In the most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a number of Jewish defense organizations acted as supporting counsel and argued, along with Thurgood Marshall, before the US Supreme Court against the segregation laws. It was this cooperation at the top that led to the golden age of Jewish-African American relations.
Cooperation and support by Jews pervaded the Civil Rights movement. Jews offered much stronger support for racial equality than did other white Americans. Jews constituted more than one-third of all the northern Freedom Riders who went to the South to help organize and register African American citizens to vote. The 1964 murder of three civil rights activists—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were Jewish, and James Chaney, an African American—was one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights movement.
The Mid-1960s and Black Power
The bond between the Jews and African Americans began to unglue with the increasingly antiwhite and anti-Semitic rhetoric of young black radicals such as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Leaders of the nascent Black Power movement wanted complete control over their destiny; they wanted to run their own organizations and to live by their own cultural standards, not those of white Europeans. The role of Jews in these movements, therefore, began to diminish.
As the Black Power movement grew, several radical African Americans started attacking Israel, hastening the departure of most Jews. Many young secular Jews grew up with a strong affinity for civil rights but were ambivalent or had weak feelings toward Israel. However, because of the shrill anti-Israel rhetoric and the threat to Israel’s existence in 1967 by numerically larger Arab forces, American Jews started to become more supportive of the Israelis. As the younger generation of Jews left the Civil Rights movement in response to the rise of black power, they turned their attention to issues involving Israeli and Russian Jews, and their sense of themselves as an ethnic group increased.
Although Carmichael was critical of the Jewish people, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., had many friends among Jewish leaders. King was a hero not just to African Americans but also to Jews, in part because of his intolerance for anti-Semitism and his support for Israel. King’s death accelerated the split between African Americans and Jews. In the riots following his assassination, a disproportionate amount of loss was sustained by Jewish shopkeepers and landlords who had stayed in the ghetto because they could not afford to relocate. The remaining Jews left quickly.
At the end of the 1960s, a series of hostile confrontations occurred, many in New York, where unionized Jewish teachers battled local African American leaders. Disputes also arose over a proposed housing project in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood and among white-collar municipal employees over jobs and promotions. After the 1970s, many of these inner-city conflicts subsided as Jews moved to the suburbs. For example, in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, friction arose between African Americans and Koreans, not Jews. In other cities, conflicts involved African Americans and Latinos rather than Jews.
1980s and 1990s
Although friction between the two groups was more limited, it did not disappear. Black leader Jesse Jackson angered Jews during his 1984 bid for the presidency by referring to New York as “Hymietown” (“hymie” is a derogatory term used to describe Jews) and courting Arab leader Yasser Arafat. On college campuses, a conflict of opinion arose over affirmative action. Jews, who had suffered from quotas that limited their enrollment in higher education, tended to oppose affirmative action, although perhaps less strongly than many white Americans. In 1991, in the racially mixed community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a car driven by a Hasidic Jew hit and killed an African American boy and injured his companion. In the rioting that followed, a Hasidic Jew was killed.
An ongoing source of tension in the 1980s and 1990s was Louis Farrakhan, a dynamic and media-sensitive member of the Nation of Islam with a passionate hatred of Jews and Judaism, which he called a “gutter religion.” For many Jews, he was the devil incarnate; for many African Americans, he was an articulate spokesperson for black self-determinism and for self-respect and dignity.
The ties between the two groups were never completely severed, however. Both groups tended to be liberal and Democratic, so they had a common political predisposition. They typically lived in the same metropolitan areas and had a partial common history. Nonetheless, at the end of the twentieth century, their political interests diverged. African Americans were mainly focused on the large numbers of blacks in what seemed like a permanent American underclass; many Jews were worried about overseas Jews and their declining numbers due to widespread intermarriage and low birthrates. To many African Americans, Jews were just “white folks”; to many Jews, African Americans were ungrateful for the help that Jews had given in the past.
Bibliography
"Black-Jewish Relations." From Swastika to Jim Crow. PBS, WGBH, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
Brackman, Harold. "Black-Jewish Relations at a Crossroads." Jerusalem Post. JPost, 16 May 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
Diner, Hasia R. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1919-1935. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.
Friedman, Murray. What Went Wrong: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. New York: Free, 1995. Print.
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.