The relentless siege of Gaza in the past few months, which has most recently taken shape as a brutal attack on the civilians of Rafah, has influenced all manner of conversations about identity in the United States. Many of us have been forced to reconsider the meaning of kinship and solidarity as we watch the Israeli genocide of Palestinians unfold daily on our screens.
One major arena of kinship and solidarity that has come under scrutiny since the start of the Israel-Gaza war is the relationship that generally gets named “Black-Jewish relations” or “the Black-Jewish alliance”. For decades it has been an article of faith among certain elite members of US culture – disproportionately Jewish men – that the “Black-Jewish alliance” is a timeless, natural and durable socio-political relationship between two communities. A guiding assumption of the alliance is that African Americans owe a debt for Jewish advocacy during the civil rights movement. Another premise is that Black support for Jewish people means Black support for Israel.
