As has often happened around the world and throughout history, the U.S. is currently experiencing a surge of antisemitic rhetoric. Though stoked by right-wing politicians like former president Donald Trump, prominent Black voices like Ye and Kyrie Irving have pushed this anti-Jewish propaganda as well, and some Black people on social media have sided with these stars as they face backlash for their words.
With credible threats against Jewish people and places of worship rising, these words can have deadly consequences. That makes it important not only to battle against antisemitism but also to actively remember the long history of solidarity between Black and Jewish people as they’ve both battled against racism and white supremacy.
Jewish voices against slavery
The Jewish population in America was incredibly small until the 1840s and, contrary to what some people have accused, their impact on the slave trade was small. While some individuals did participate in the slave trade, others stood up against slavery.
Inspired by the Exodus story of the Jewish people being freed from slavery, people like Ernestine Rose — an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was born in Poland before she moved to America — and Rabbi David Einhorn faced threats of violence for their public outcries against slavery.
Support for Black rights and education
The decades between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement were very difficult for Black Americans, who faced Jim Crow and segregation in the South and discrimination in the North. During this time, leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Booker T. Washington each worked diligently toward racial justice, and a number of Jewish activists supported them in their causes.
Sears co-founder Julius Rosenwald was a close friend and large financial supporter of Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, and his Rosenwald Fund helped construct “over 5,300 schools, homes, and shops” across the South, according to BlackPast.org. Meanwhile, Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald and Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh were some of the Jewish activists who joined Du Bois, Wells and others in founding the NAACP in 1909.
W.E.B. Du Bois warned us about Nazi Germany
Speaking of Du Bois, the famed academic spent time studying in Germany in his younger days and returned to visit the country in the 1930s. At a time when much of the world was acquiescing to Hitler’s growing power and white supremacist agenda, Du Bois spoke out forcefully against the increasingly vicious antisemitism he observed there — while also calling out American hypocrisy for those who lamented the fate of Jewish people in Germany but not Black people in America.
However, Du Bois’ overwhelming concern for Black people did not drown out his sympathy for Jewish victims of the Nazis. When Du Bois visited Germany in 1936, Jews had already been stripped of citizenship and targeted by the Nazis. He called the Nazi anti-Jewish policies “an attack on civilization comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African American slave trade.”
Jewish allyship during the Civil Rights Movement
Some escapees of Nazi oppression and the Holocaust would eventually find their way to America and number themselves among the Jewish individuals and organizations actively participating in the Civil Rights Movement. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — who fled Europe but lost several family members in WWII — held arms with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Selma in 1965.
The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism served as the site where groundbreaking legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was written. A large number of young Jewish volunteers participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, registering Black voters and operating Freedom Schools in Mississippi. Three volunteers were murdered in Mississippi that summer: local Black activist James Chaney and Jewish volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who had both come to Mississippi from New York.
Black Lives Matter — “freedom and safety of all of us”
Similar to the support of the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish involvement in the Black Lives Matter Movement has grown over time. BLM co-founder Alicia Garza identifies as Jewish, having been raised in a religiously Jewish household, and over 600 Jewish organizations and synagogues publicly supported Black Lives Matter in 2020. In a joint statement, these organizations declared, “We know that freedom and safety for any of us depends on the freedom and safety of all of us.”
These instances of Black-Jewish solidarity are just the highlights of a long history of cooperation and mutual support. As the forces of discrimination and white supremacy again attempt to gain ground, it is important for everyone, including Black and Jewish leaders and communities, to continue to band together to fight injustice and oppression wherever and however they occur.
