by The cover of that edition of the SNCC newsletter drew attention to police killings of black men, with the headline: “Cops Go Crazy. Where will they attack next?” Black and Palestinian resistance to repression were united. The same was true of the Black Panther Party, whose leader, Huey P. Newton, announced in 1970: “We support 100 percent the just struggle of the Palestinians for liberation.” As the Black Power Movement gained momentum, the black-Jewish alliance crumbled.
Over the next few decades, the further disintegration was marked by the sermons of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who railed against “the synagogue of Satan” and emphasized Jewish power and manipulation. “We have been deceived,” he said on a Washington radio station in 2010, “into thinking that Jews have been our allies” in the fight for civil rights. “Is there a rapper in the house?” he has asked the flock of him. “You can rap, there’s nothing wrong with that, but at the top are those who control the industry.”
In the fall of 2022, apparently inspired by a long list of black accusations against Jewish power, rapper and fashion designer Ye (formerly Kanye West) told his 31 million followers on Twitter: “I’m going to death with 3 about the JEWISH PEOPLE,” and added: “You have played with me and tried to criticize anyone who opposes your agenda.” Also that fall, NBA star Kyrie Irving recommended to his 4.5 million followers the film “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” which aims to demonstrate the theology of the Black Hebrew Israelites, or, as some members of the group prefer, religious movement, simply the Hebrew Israelites. Theology claims that Jews have perpetrated an immense fraud against blacks. He maintains that blacks are the true sons of Jacob and, therefore, the true race chosen by God. The film cites The International Jew, a series of pamphlets published by anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford in the early 1920s about what he describes as an insidious and pervasive Jewish influence. The theology appears to have inspired a 2019 shooting at a Jersey City kosher grocery store by a Black couple, who murdered four before dying in a shootout with police.
However, in recent years a new bond has emerged between black and Jewish activists, catalyzed, in part, by the confluence of civil rights protests and attention to the Palestinian plight. The alliance is “growing and exciting,” Nyle Fort, a black activist and assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia, told me. Fort’s activism began in 2011 with the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer, although she maintains her innocence. She continued in Ferguson, which in turn led to a trip to the West Bank. The trip was organized by Dream Defenders, a group whose causes range from mass incarceration in the United States to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. In the West Bank, Fort met a Palestinian father, recently released after three years in an Israeli prison, who reminded him of his nephew, who is currently imprisoned. Instead of discussing her nephew’s accusation, Fort emphasized that his “10-year sentence reflects hundreds of years of racial slavery” and that the common theme between her nephew and the Palestinian father was subjugation. The Palestinian was locked up for resisting the Israeli occupation, Fort’s nephew “essentially,” Fort said when we spoke over Zoom, “being young, black and poor.” Fort told me about the partnership between groups from the Movement for Black Lives and IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace on progressive domestic issues and on Israel and the Palestinians. They are in “constant communication,” strategizing political careers, planning campaigns to shape public opinion, and mobilizing people to pay attention to the actions of others.
Beyond collaboration, there is a convergence and mutual amplification of outrage. Three days before the November protest in Washington, author Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared at a lecture of sorts in front of a packed chapel at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, with hundreds more watching in overflow rooms and another 2,200 via livestream. . (The next morning, he delivered his message again on the progressive news program “Democracy Now!”, which has 1.9 million subscribers on YouTube.) Coates spoke about a recent trip to Israel, his first, with visits to the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron. Both places have sacred histories dating back to Abraham; The competing demands of Muslims and Jews have led to riots and massacres carried out by fanatics on each side. But Coates told his audience that he was surprised by the lack of moral complexity in what he found. Israeli soldiers carried “the biggest weapons he’s ever seen” and “our taxes are effectively subsidizing,” he said, “a Jim Crow regime.” Later, Morgan Bassichis, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, took the lectern and identified himself as “one of many Jews across the country and around the world who, with all our being, reject Zionism as the racist and colonial ideology.” what is it.”
