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Civil rights movement

Jewish participation in the civil rights movement often correlated with their branch of Judaism: Reform Jews participated more heavily than Orthodox Jews, because many Reform Jews were guided by values reflected in the Reform branch's Pittsburgh Platform, which urged Jews to "participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society".

Religious leaders, such as rabbis and Baptist ministers, often played key roles in the civil rights movement, including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Selma civil rights march. Sixteen Jewish leaders were arrested while heeding a call from King in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964, where the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place at the Monson Motor Lodge. Rabbi Marc Schneier, President of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, authored "Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Community" about the historic relationship between African and Jewish Americans as way to encourage a return to strong ties following years of animosity that reached its apex during the Crown Heights riot.

Northern Jews often supported integration in their communities and schools, even at the risk of diluting their close-knit Jewish communities, which often were a critical component of Jewish life.

Murder of Jewish civil rights activists

Andrew Goodman

The summer of 1964 was designated the Freedom Summer, and many northern Jews traveled south to participate in a concentrated voter registration effort. Two Jewish activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and one black activist, James Chaney, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi, as a result of their participation. Their deaths were considered martyrdom by some, and temporarily strengthened black-Jewish relations.

Questioning the "golden age"

Some recent scholarship suggests that the "golden age" (1955–1966) of the black–Jewish relationship was not as ideal as often portrayed.

Philosopher and activist Cornel West asserts that there was no golden age in which "blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction". West says that this period of black–Jewish cooperation is often downplayed by blacks and romanticized by Jews: "It is downplayed by blacks because they focus on the astonishingly rapid entry of most Jews into the middle and upper middle classes during this brief period—an entry that has spawned... resentment from a quickly growing black impoverished class. Jews, on the other hand, tend to romanticize this period because their present status as upper middle dogs and some top dogs in American society unsettles their historic self-image as progressives with a compassion for the underdog."

Historian Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz points out that the number of northern Jews that went to the southern states numbered only a few hundred, and that the "relationship was frequently out of touch, periodically at odds, with both sides failing to understand each other's point of view."

Political scientist Andrew Hacker wrote: "It is more than a little revealing that whites who travelled south in 1964 referred to their sojourn as their 'Mississippi summer'. It is as if all the efforts of the local blacks for voter registration and the desegregation of public facilities had not even existed until white help arrived... Of course, this was done with benign intentions, as if to say 'we have come in answer to your calls for assistance'. The problem was... the condescending tone... For Jewish liberals, the great memory of that summer has been the deaths of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and—almost as an afterthought—James Chaney. Indeed, Chaney's name tends to be listed last, as if the life he lost was worth only three fifths of the others."  

Juifs du Sud des États-Unis dans le mouvement des droits civils

La grande majorité des Juifs impliqués dans le mouvement des droits civils étaient originaires des États du Nord. Il n'y a eu en revanche qu'une très faible participation des Juifs du Sud à ce type de mouvements. Ce manque d'implication posait question aux Juifs du Nord en raison de l'incapacité des dirigeants juifs du Nord à persevoir que les Juifs... n'étaient généralement pas des victimes dans le Sud et que le système racial du Sud leur donnait une place favo étaient perçus favorablement  

The vast majority of civil rights activism by American Jews was undertaken by Jews from the northern states. Jews from the southern states engaged in virtually no organized activity on behalf of civil rights. This lack of participation was puzzling to some northern Jews, due to the "inability of the northern Jewish leaders to see that Jews ... were not generally victims in the South and that the racial caste system in the south situated Jews favorably in the Southern mind, or 'whitened' them." However, there were some southern Jews that participated in civil rights activity as individuals.

Recent decades have shown a greater trend for southern Jews to speak out on civil rights issues, as shown by the 1987 marches in Forsyth County, Georgia.

Labor movement

Herbert Hill (third from left), labor director of NAACP, wth Thurgood Marshall (second from left)

The labor movement was another area of the relationship that flourished before WW II, but ended in conflict after WW II. In the early 20th century, one important area of cooperation was attempts to increase minority representation in the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. In 1943, Jews and blacks joined to request the creation of a new department within the UAW dedicated to minorities, but that request was refused by UAW leaders.

In the immediate post-World War II period, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), which was founded in February 1934 to oppose the rise of Nazism in Germany, formed approximately two dozen local committees to combat racial intolerance in the U.S and Canada. The JLC, which had local offices in a number of communities in North America, helped found the United Farm Workers and campaigned for the passage California's Fair Employment Practices Act, and provided staffing and support for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

Beginning in early 1962, allegations were made by NAACP labor director Herbert Hill that during the 1940s and through to the 1960s, the JLC also defended anti-black discriminatory practices of unions in the garment industry and building industry. Hill claims that the JLC changed "a black white conflict into a Black-Jewish conflict". The JLC defended Jewish leaders of International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) against charges of anti-black racial discrimination, distored government reports about discrimination, failed to tell union members the truth, and when union members complained, the JLC labeled the members anti-semitic. ILGWU leaders denounced Black members for demanding equal treatment and access to leadership positions.

The New York City teacher's strike of 1968 also signaled the decline of black-Jewish relations: the Jewish president of the United Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker made statements that were seen by some as straining black-Jewish relations by accusing black teachers of anti-semitism.

Criticism of Zionism

After Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 Six-Day War, some American blacks supported the Palestinians and criticized Israel's actions, for example by publicly supporting Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Immediately after the war, the editor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) newsletter wrote an article criticizing Israel, and asserting that the war was an effort to regain Palestinian land and that during the 1948 war, "Zionists conquered the Arab homes and land through terror, force, and massacres". This article led to conflict between Jews and the SNCC, but black SNCC leaders treated the war as a "test of their willingness to demonstrate SNCC's break from its civil rights past".

The concerns of blacks continued, and in 1993, black philosopher Cornel West wrote in Race Matters: "Jews will not comprehend what the symbolic predicament and literal plight of Palestinians in Israel means to blacks.... Blacks often perceive the Jewish defense of the state of Israel as a second instance of naked group interest, and, again, an abandonment of substantive moral deliberation."

Zionists such as Menachem Begin have repeatedly promoted the idea that Jews built the Egyptian pyramids, an assertion which has no basis in history (if Jews were in ancient Egypt, it was hundreds of years after the pyramids were built), and makes a provocative claim on a central structure of African heritage.

The support of Palestinians is frequently due to the consideration of them as people of color—Andrew Hacker writes: "The presence of Israel in the Middle East is perceived as thwarting the rightful status of people of color. Some blacks view Israel as essentially a white and European power, supported from the outside, and occupying space that rightfully belongs to the original inhabitants of Palestine." Martin Luther King Jr. criticized this position at the 68th Annual Rabbinical Assembly for Conservative Judaism, "On the Middle East crisis, we have had various responses. The responses of the so-called young militants does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes. There are some who are color consumed and see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned. We do not follow that course in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and certainly most of the organizations in the civil rights movement do not follow that course." Martin Luther King Jr. notably condemned anti-Zionism as antisemitic.

Jews and the slave trade

Henry Gates, head of the department of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews "the bible of new anti-Semitism"

During the 1990s, much of the Jewish-black conflict centered on Jewish involvement with the slave trade. An early controversial comment on that topic was made by professor Leonard Jeffries in a 1991 speech in which he said that "rich Jews" financed the slave trade, citing the role of Jews in slave-trading centers Rhode Island, Brazil, the Caribbean, Curaçao, and Amsterdam. His comments drew widespread outrage and calls for his dismissal from his position.

One of the sources that Jeffries cited was The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam. That book alleges that Jews played a major role in the African slave trade, and it became the source of tremendous controversy, and resulted in several scholarly works rebutting its charges. Most mainstream scholars concluded that Jews had little major or continuing impact on the history of New World slavery, and possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean, and—except in Brazil, Suriname, and Curaçao—they did not play leading roles as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades.

Tony Martin of Wellesley College included The Secret relationship between Blacks and Jews in the reading list for his classes, leading to charges of anti-semitism in 1993.

Henry Gates, head of the department of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, called the book "the bible of new anti-Semitism" and added that "the book massively misinterprets the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotations of often reputable sources".

Jewish racism

The counterpoint to black antisemitism is Jewish anti-black racism. Some black customers and tenants felt that the Jewish shopkeepers and landlords treated them unfairly or were racist.

Political scientist Andrew Hacker documented an African-American author who said: "Jews tend to be a little self-righteous about their liberal record, ... we realize that they were pitying us and wanted our gratitude, not the realization of the principles of justice and humanity... Blacks consider [Jews] paternalistic. Black people have destroyed the previous relationship which they had with the Jewish community, in which we were the victims of a kind of paternalism, which is only a benevolent racism."

Historian Taylor Branch in his 1992 essay "Blacks and Jews: The Uncivil War", asserted that Jews have been "perpetrators of racial hate," citing the case of three thousand members of the "African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem", founded in 1966 in Chicago, Illinois, were denied citizenship as Jews when they moved en masse to Israel, claiming that they were returning to their ancestral homeland, claiming their right of citizenship as Jews under the Israeli law of return; Branch saw this as an example of what he described as anti-Black sentiment among Israeli Jews. Branch was criticized by Seth Forman, who said the claims seem baseless, particularly in light of Israel's airlift of thousands of black Ethiopian Jews in the early 1990s. A group of American civil rights activists led by Bayard Rustin investigated and concluded that racism was not the cause of the Black Hebrews' situation after they had emigrated from the U.S.

Historian Hasia Diner writes: "Never a relationship of equals, [many blacks] assert, Jews sat on the boards of black organizations and held power in black institutions but never allowed for the reverse. [Jews] gave money to civil rights organizations and demanded the right to make decisions by virtue of the power of their purses."

Notes

[[Catégorie:Droits civiques aux États-Unis]]