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.
Recent articles in the mainstream press have lamented the possible dissolution of this so-called alliance, in response to the support of Palestine and calls for a ceasefire from Black activists and leaders. This hand-wringing, which reached a fever pitch in the 1990s with such books as What Went Wrong? and Broken Alliance, relies on the idea that once upon a time African Americans and Jews lived in a paradise of cross-community cooperation and that the relationship had somehow been warped.
But the “Black-Jewish alliance” as it’s commonly imagined is not, or at least is not reliably, an actual thing. The narrative is more of an aspirational idea of how the two groups should coexist in the US. It suggests that because of some crucial moments of collaboration in American history, the two communities have and will always be in complete political alignment. This has never been the case.
As a conceptual framework, the “Black-Jewish alliance” tends to get revived, dissected and worried over mostly in moments when there seems to be special pressure on whatever allegedly natural relationship the two groups have had. (Of course, saying “two groups” itself is misleading, since there are all kinds of Jews, Black people, and, of course, plenty of Black Jewish people.) The Israel-Gaza war has laid bare the idea that many Americans don’t believe in unconditional support for Israel, which is likely buoyed by the fact that more than a third of Americans think the country is committing genocide against Palestinians. The war especially highlights that when it comes to US policy in the Middle East, African American and Jewish communities are not operating within any narrow definition of an “alliance”.
The disconnect between the myth and reality of Black-Jewish socio-political relations has led to excessive levels of disappointment and recrimination. Shortly after 7 October, for instance, a Wall Street Journal column equated Black Lives Matter activists’ support for Palestine with antisemitism: “The antisemitism of the BLM movement isn’t a quirk. The social-media posts and manifestos aren’t coming from a few ‘intemperate voices’ who can safely be ignored to advance some greater good. For BLM activists, the greater good is scapegoating Jews, destroying Israel and exploiting racial division.” African American politicians and activists have regularly been attacked as antisemitic since the 1960s – sometimes because they demonstrably were, but too often because of their affiliation with the cause of Palestinian liberation.
As an American Jew with relatives who died in the Nazi genocide, I have long understood that my anti-Zionism would estrange me from other American Jews who understand Israel as “home”. And as a scholar of Black-Jewish relations, I have studied enough to know that it will be hard to break through decades of powerful mythology on this “alliance”.
But currently, our ability to navigate the choppy waters of our political landscape is compromised. Rather than try to recreate some golden age that never really existed, it might be more productive to determine what historical realities have made complete accord between Black and Jewish communities so uncommon. Most saliently, we’d benefit from discerning where the interests of the two cohorts actually intersect: in this complex post-7 October moment, the “Black-Jewish alliance” could more accurately describe the meeting of Black and Jewish grassroots activists doing Palestine justice work than any, more traditional, domestic civil-rights activity.
To be clear, since at least the 1930s, African American and Jewish leaders have found good reason to make political and social common cause on civil rights issues. These efforts have energized some truly historic wins – not least the social and legal work culminating in the school desegregration decision Brown v Board of Education.
Black people and Jews in the US have interacted in more quotidian ways as well: in the music business, as tenants and landlords, as domestic servants and their employers – but these moments of contact have often been shaped by stark differences in economic and social status.
And though both communities have found resonances in their shared histories of diaspora – African Americans, for instance, found in biblical Jews a model of resistance and liberation, and wove that sense of affiliation into their music and broader articulations of liberation theology and politics – a sense of parallel historical suffering has not translated into a unified political worldview on any consistent basis.
The fact that African Americans sanctified “Israelites” in song did not mean that later generations of Black people in the US would embrace the Israel forged through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. In the post-second world war era, many African Americans began to equate their situation in the US with colonized people around the world, including, crucially, Palestinians.
Since at least the 1920s most Jews in the US have lived as white people, and the class mobility of Jews has, in the modern era, far outpaced that of African Americans. Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of Jewish “white flight” to the suburbs (often from the very neighborhoods that once brought them into regular contact with African Americans), it has been misleading to insist on some notion of simple likeness between the two groups.
A key moment of crisis for the so-called Black-Jewish alliance came in 1968, when a battle about “community control” of some public schools in Brooklyn pitted a largely Black parent group against a teachers’ union with Jewish leadership. This acrimony between working-class Black parents and middle-class Jewish teachers was just one sign that the larger mythological tale of Black-Jewish likeness could no longer bear the weight it was asked to carry.
The Crown Heights riots of 1991 in Brooklyn, which ensued after a seven-year-old Guyanese American child was struck and killed by the motorcade of a Hasidic rabbi, was another such sign. What was so strange about this moment is that neither the Hasidic Jewish nor Caribbean migrant communities that clashed in the riots had been implicated in the original version of the Black-Jewish chronicles. But they were still made to stand in for what had gone wrong in the “broken alliance”.
A year before the Ocean Hill-Brownsville parent-teacher debacle, it became clear that the idealized Black-Jewish alliance narrative was also being challenged by events outside of the US. The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 served as a punctuation mark on the journey many African Americans had been making toward the colonized (the Palestinians understood also as fellow people of color) and away from the colonizer (the Zionist government of Israel, increasingly seen as a client of white western powers).
Black people’s evolving anti-Zionism was purposefully confused with antisemitism by American Zionists, further upsetting the applecart of the “alliance”. The Anti-Defamation League, which has morphed into a Zionist lobbying group in recent decades, has been at the forefront of attacking Palestine justice activists – which is ironic given how many of these activists are also Jewish.
Now partnering with evangelical (and often antisemitic) Christian Zionists, the ADL and other Jewish groups have begun to apply remarkably punitive “with us or against us” litmus tests to their fellow Jews. These loyalty oaths must seem familiar to African Americans, who have been put through such rituals of disavowal and fealty for decades in the interest of sustaining the mythologies of the “Black-Jewish alliance” – while their Jewish counterparts are rarely asked for similar performances. The fact that “Black antisemitism” is such a familiar phrase in this era, but “Jewish racism” is not, itself tells a very profound and skewed tale.
The “Black-Jewish alliance” has always focused on a relatively narrow field of cultural activity and has had very little to do with the actual lived experiences of the people it purports to represent. It’s true that parallel experiences of historical suffering have led to positive cross-community engagement, and have helped energize some deeply consequential political work. But subscribing to the antiquated myth of the “Black-Jewish alliance” – especially its assumption that the relationship is rooted in unconditional support for Israel rather than in the social justice ethos of the Old Testament – prevents any real understanding of the more relevant alliance among Jews and Black people that has grown since 7 October.
Jeff Melnick is a professor of American studies at UMass Boston
