Why Can’t We Be Friends (Again)?

One could fill a small library with books about Black-Jewish relations, but I expect the ones written by Jews would take up the bulk of the collection. Many of these, at least until recently, have lauded Jewish support for Black causes, particularly civil rights, and lamented the rift between the groups that emerged in the late 1960s. By contrast, the books by Black authors that would be included in such a collection tend to express skepticism about that support and its reasons. That astute social psychologist Malcolm X claimed that Jews are the “most subjective” ethnic minority. By this I think he meant that Jews have been conditioned by their history to view all relationships in terms of antisemitism. Moreover, Malcolm wrote, American Jews know “that all of the bigotry and hatred focused upon the black man keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on him otherwise.”

Despite his preoccupation with Jews, Malcolm X is curiously absent from an extensive four-part PBS series on the history of Black-Jewish relations, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History. No doubt, that is because Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series creator and one of America’s leading public intellectuals, seems determined to present a radically different interpretation from Malcolm’s, one that views the Black-Jewish relationship as complex and imperfect but nevertheless admirable and profoundly consequential. Deep into the series, Gates offers a personal anecdote that may explain his larger intentions. In 1960, as a nine-year-old child growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia, a white Jewish woman named Mrs. Mamalin invited his mother, with whom she served on the board of the United Organizations, to tea at her home. Such a gesture, at that time and in that place, was a “big deal,” as Gates describes:

The fact that she was Jewish was remarked upon by both my mother and my father, and that resonated with me. There was a liberal alliance between Jews and Black people in the civil rights movement, and I began to realize that, yes, Jews were white, but there were different kinds of white people, and that maybe the reason that Mrs. Mamalin invited Mrs. Gates over for that symbolic gesture had to do with the fact that it was an expression of sympathy about shared oppression, and that struck me deeply.

This realization shaped Gates permanently, endowing him with a lifelong passion for social comity as well as a deep appreciation of the lengths to which American Jews have often gone on behalf of his own people. As appreciative as he is of the part played by this country’s Jews in the history of Black civil rights and Black life more generally, he doesn’t gloss over the tensions that have arisen in the past and persist into the present. But he also clearly hopes that his documentary can ease these tensions and help make them go away.

The narrative of Black and Jewish America is interspersed with commentary from a cast of experts. In established PBS documentary fashion, Gates’s academic talking heads offer up information and insight while mostly avoiding the editorializing that might tip the delicate balance Gates seems determined to achieve. The experts are more or less equally divided between Black and white scholars, which is, no doubt, deliberate. Gates seems intent on showing that African Americans are—or at least should be—as invested as Jews in uncovering the history of their relationship.

After recounting the formation of civil rights organizations like the NAACP, in which Jewish activists played an outsized role, and the efforts of the Jewish philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald to endow Black schools in the South and hospitals in the North, Gates, who is a distinguished literary scholar, turns his attention to cultural collaboration. The second episode of the documentary borrows its title from “Strange Fruit,” the song immortalized by Billie Holiday, and one that also has Jewish fingerprints all over it. The lyric, a harrowing exposé of a Southern lynching (“Southern trees bear a strange fruit”), was penned by a Jewish schoolteacher and poet, Abel Meeropol. It debuted in a venue owned by a committed Jewish integrationist, Barney Josephson, and was recorded by the Jewish head of a small independent label, Milt Gabler, after Columbia, Holiday’s label, turned it down. For Gates, it exemplifies what was best in the creative partnership of Black and Jewish people. As Gabler’s nephew, the comedian Billy Crystal, intones:

A white Jewish producer and the greatest Black jazz singer of all time, and an all-Black band working together to produce art. Isn’t that the metaphor for what we should be?

Although Gates agrees, he also knows that’s only a part of the story. The “Strange Fruit” episode proceeds to explore a series of tensions between collaboration and conflict, interpretation and exploitation, and respect versus cultural appropriation. It discusses Jewish business management of Black performers, such as former boxer and nightclub owner Joe Glaser’s stewardship of Louis Armstrong, and Jewish artistic renderings of Black life, the prime example being George and Ira Gershwin’s stunning but caricature-laden “folk opera” Porgy and Bess. Still, Gates’s essential verdict is that partnership between the two groups functioned on the cultural plane as much as on the political.

So much of the familiar narrative of a “Black-Jewish alliance” focused on famous figures such as Armstrong and Gershwin or elites like Rosenwald and Du Bois. But one of the series’s great strengths lies in showing that “it was also built by ordinary people just reaching out to each other in small gestures,” as Gates puts it. He presents the remarkable example of Esther Swirk Brown of Merriam, Kansas, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who learned through a conversation with her Black housekeeper, Helen Swann, about the dilapidated and unsanitary conditions of the local school for Black children in nearby South Park. She lobbied the school board to improve conditions and received violent threats for her efforts. So Brown joined forces with a local Black couple, the Webbs, to launch a new branch of the NAACP. Their efforts resulted in a legal case, Webb v. School District No. 90, that succeeded at the Kansas State Supreme Court. And although the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was about a different plaintiff named Brown, Esther’s was one of the cases bundled by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal team to successfully overturn the “separate but equal” provision of Plessy v. Ferguson. That team, it should be noted, was composed almost entirely of Black and Jewish attorneys.

This story opens the way for Gates to explore the more familiar narrative of the struggle against legal segregation and the “golden age” of the civil rights movement—the bombings of Southern synagogues, rabbinic support for the protest marches of Martin Luther King Jr., and the outsized participation of white Jewish youth in the freedom rides, culminating in the June 1964 Klan murder of Jewish and Black activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Here, as always, Gates is careful to highlight the imbalance in the oppression of Jewish and Black people, speculating that if James Chaney alone had disappeared, the case likely would not have drawn national attention. Even so, the series’s characterization of Jewish contributions to civil rights (though unfortunately without offering comparative analysis of the roles of other ethnic minorities) conveys the essential message that Jews were different. And even when the focus shifts to the emergence in 1966 of the Black Power movement, whose efforts to liberate civil rights from what militants depicted as white (read Jewish) control, “blindsided” Jewish allies, the documentary takes pains to explain why this was perhaps a necessary if painful step rather than a betrayal.

These demands for “Black control” emerged almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Six-Day War. Radical leaders like Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) increasingly conflated perceived Jewish domination of Black American institutions with Israeli oppression of Palestinians. In this connection, the image in a SNCC-published pamphlet of a hand tattooed with a star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the necks of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Black boxer Muhammed Ali is presented as evidence of trouble on the horizon, but its meaning is not adequately explained. Black antisemitism, of which little had been heard in previous episodes, is likewise acknowledged but not really investigated. Gates’s desire to balance an honest historical accounting with a positive future prognosis at times strains his laudable intentions.

The final episode of the series centers on a string of conflicts between Black and Jewish people from the late 1960s until nearly the present that have battered the alliance but, Gates hopes, do not preclude its future revival. These include Brooklyn’s 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute, which pitted the Jewish-dominated United Federation of Teachers against Black parent groups seeking community control of schools; arguments over affirmative action; and the horrific tragedies of 1991 in Crown Heights, when a car that had been part of a Lubavitch cemetery procession accidentally veered onto a sidewalk, killing a Black child named Gavin Cato and severely injuring another. The next day a group of Black rioters beat and stabbed to death a visiting young Australian Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum. The list goes on to include Jesse Jackson’s 1984 “Hymietown” remark, followed by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitic rantings and finally a pseudoscholarly multivolume book published by the same organization in 1991 on the Secret Relationship of Blacks and Jews that purported to show how Jews had historically controlled the African slave trade. At the time, to his great credit, Gates himself wrote a stinging refutation of the work, here calling it “total rubbish.”

Though they make for a compelling litany of controversies, it is not entirely clear that all or most of these episodes share much in common. Some were neighborhood turf wars, some conflicts over access to institutional power, others grotesque conspiratorial slurs echoing hoary antisemitic themes. It’s worth noting that not one of the incidents mentioned describes an actual or clear-cut case of Jewish anti-Black racism, although such racism certainly existed. Yet the effect of all this seems mostly to put Jews on the defensive—in essence, it seems, for being too defensive!

Which brings us back to Israel. The series doesn’t fail to note that individual Black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Bayard Rustin, as well as Black organizations like the NAACP, provided the fledgling Jewish state with moral and diplomatic support. But its larger focus lies in detailing the many occasions, beginning in the late 1960s, when Israel, or Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, metamorphosed into yet another eruption of Black-Jewish conflict in the US. Israel emerges as the main bone of contention that more than any other has threatened to contaminate the post–civil rights era relationship between American Black and Jewish people.

In 1979, United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young’s secret (and unauthorized) meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization outraged Jewish leaders, who forced his resignation. In response, Jesse Jackson flew to Beirut to meet with Yasser Arafat himself and was photographed hugging the terrorist leader. The actions of Jackson and Young, both of whom had risen to prominence working as aides to King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, suggested to many Jews that the Black-Jewish alliance was over. Even Operation Moses, when Israel covertly evacuated eight thousand Ethiopian Jewish refugees from famine-plagued Sudan in 1984 and 1985, becomes an occasion for criticism after the country’s Orthodox rabbinate insisted the Ethiopians undergo a symbolic conversion rite to win full Jewish recognition, a demand the historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg labels “racism.”

Unfortunately, not once in the documentary is the question broached as to why Black Americans, or at least many of their leaders, should identify so viscerally with the Palestinian cause as opposed to the Israeli one. There seems to be a presumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict infects Black-Jewish relations in America when it is entirely possible that Black-Jewish relations are actually what is being projected onto Israel-Palestine. Similarly, it is assumed as a self-evident principle that all people of color, no matter how varied their histories and situations, share a natural bond of colonial victimization. And thus it is also presented as self-evident and hardly worth questioning that Israel’s deadly military response to the Hamas massacre of October 7 should provoke a far greater outcry from Black activists (among many others) than did the Hamas attack itself.

Of course, American Jews themselves are divided over Israel’s prosecution of that war, and the documentary concludes with a scene featuring the UCLA Jewish historian David N. Myers presiding over a session called “Dialogue across Difference,” in which students from various backgrounds and ideologies seek to air their feelings if not settle their grievances. But one can’t help wondering, grievances over what? Why exactly are these American Black and American Jewish people fighting over the perceived rights and wrongs of Israel-Palestine? The conflation of two distinct sets of relationships and conflicts is vexing, if simply because the sheer strangeness of the underlying premise is never pointed out.

I think I understand why Gates decided to conclude his ambitious series on this note. He doesn’t really need to persuade the liberal Jewish PBS audience of their historic devotion to Black causes. Rather, it is the more skeptical African American viewers who need to be made aware of its impressive history and reassured that Jews wish to establish dialogue and not just talk to themselves about their virtuous past. In this effort, Israel, especially in the wake of October 7, is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Showing American Jews handwringing about Israel might supply some of that reassurance.

Deeply impressed at a young age by the potential of American Jewish and Black people to forge a common cause, Gates genuinely (and rightly) believes that anti-Black racism and antisemitism still feed one another and must therefore be fought jointly. However, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be subsumed into a Black-Jewish framework, even if it cannot be entirely removed from it either. Israel is no more an extension of the American Jewish imagination than Palestine is of the Black American one. Until representatives of the two groups can meet each other on common rather than foreign ground, a renewal of their historic alliance will remain elusive, despite the best intentions of this admirable series.