Published: 9 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
PERHAPS THE FINEST MOMENT of American Jewish history is captured in the photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walking with the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King on the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
Jews have been “shepping nachas” from this image for two generations. Heschel embodied the ancient injunction not to oppress the stranger, with its deep historical echo, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. The Jewish place is always on the side of the underdog, and that continues to mean at the side of American Blacks.
But today, as US cities explode in protest following the killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd, the Jewish relationship with the Black community is much less concordant.
If 1965 was the high point of Black-Jewish solidarity, the low point may have been in 2016, when the Movement for Black Lives released a wide-ranging platform, which included aligning the movement with the Palestinian cause in extreme and inflammatory language. The platform condemned Israel as an “apartheid state” that perpetrates “genocide” against the Palestinian people, and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Some Jews found the 2016 platform so offensive they swore off any further support of Black Lives Matter, the campaign that began as a protest against police killings but became a wider anti-racism movement. The attack on Israel and, in particular, the unsubstantiated accusation of genocide, a word coined to describe the Holocaust, left Jews feeling the communal relationship had been violated.
Many Jews feel an instinctive connection to the anti-racism cause because we too feel ourselves to be outsiders. But we need to understand why our sense of ourselves as allies may not be fully welcome.
The horrific murder of George Floyd and the current resulting anti-racism protests require that Jewish people re-examine our consciences and declare where we stand. More than anyone, Jews share the compulsion to seek justice and to protest racism. The attack on Israel is hurtful but it doesn’t get us off the hook on the substantive issue.
Many Jews feel an instinctive connection to the anti-racism cause because we too feel ourselves to be outsiders and because we think we know – with our deep historical consciousness if not personally - what it is like to be oppressed. Progressive political activity has deep roots in the Jewish community, particularly in the US and in the Reform movement.
But we need to understand why our sense of ourselves as allies may not be fully welcome and why our moral instinct towards solidarity with Black causes – in the US and globally – will not mean they embrace us whole-heartedly or share our perspectives on Israel.
READ MORE
‘We have to be there’: 5 Jews on taking part in the George Floyd protests (Jerusalem Post)
‘It’s on us.’ 21 rabbi-allies weigh in on the role of Jews in the George Floyd protests (Forward)
I am a rabbi who attended George Floyd’s memorial service. This is what I witnessed (JTA)
For NYC’s Orthodox Jews, protests inspire solidarity – but also raise first amendment concerns (Haaretz)
Black Jews, he says, ‘get traumatized twice.’ To cope, he painted their experience (Forward)
Ben & Jerry’s tops its official anti-racism statement with an actual four-step plan (Times of Israel)
Mark Dollinger, author of Black Power, Jewish Politics, argues that the Black-Jewish alliance is largely a Jewish fantasy, a connection that collapsed soon after 1965, when the legal battles were won and Jews moved on to other causes, such as feminism, Israel and Soviet Jewry, while Blacks continued to battle more insidious institutional racism.
At the same time, a generation of affluent American-born Jews moved out into the suburbs joining the “White Flight” that left blacks to the decaying inner cities. Well-intentioned liberals blithely proclaimed themselves “colour-blind” but they knew few, if any, black people and were mostly just blind to the systemic inequality that left Blacks socially and economically disadvantaged. The same institutionalised racism exists across the world, not least in Australia.
Few blacks see Jews as natural allies. As a group, we are now largely privileged, well-educated, and financially successful – part of the problem, not the solution. The Jews whom American blacks meet in daily life are the rich folks who employ them as cleaners, the teachers and doctors who can leave Black problems at the office door, and – deeply significantly - the wealthy landlords who collect rent which poor blacks can ill afford to pay.
Jews might not feel “white” but no one stops us on the street out of suspicion because of the colour of our skin. Our battles against discrimination are largely won – and if certain country clubs and law firms still don’t want us, it doesn’t matter. We have our own and they are every bit as powerful.
To blacks, we have the power and the privilege of the White and our claims to shared victimhood ring hollow. The sense that Jews are now powerful has been advanced by the rise of Israel.
To blacks, we have the power and the privilege of the White and our claims to shared victimhood ring hollow.
The sense that Jews are now powerful has been advanced by the rise of Israel. While Jews see Israel through the lens of our own history as a tiny and necessary defence against 2,000 years of hatred, blacks see Israel as a powerful, affluent country which is yet another manifestation of White Privilege. They identify with Palestinians, whom they define as an oppressed Indigenous group.
Jews find it hard to see this analogy: it falters on our sense of our own vulnerability. But social media expresses it with typical starkness: in a meme comparing the killing of Eyad Hallaq, an unarmed disabled Palestinian man in Jerusalem, to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis five days earlier.
There are differences, as well as tragic similarities, in the two cases but the details miss the point.
The sad truth is that your chance of violent death, poverty, or prison if you are a black man in the US or a Palestinian in Israel is much greater than if you are born Jewish in either place. Until the deep structural problems that cause this reality are addressed, those who are disadvantaged will feel their solidarity and will identify the privileged as the enemy.
Jews have the right to enjoy success that is the fruit of honest hard work and to speak out when we feel Jewish issues – including Israel – are misunderstood or maligned.
But we also need to understand that we are not the victims here and our obligation is to support those who are. It shouldn’t need saying but it does. Black Lives Matter.
Photo: Rabbi Bradd Boxman of Congregation Kol Tikvah in Parkland with his daughter Ashira Boxman at a rally in Coral Springs, Florida (Ashira Boxman/Courtesy)
