More than 35 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke movingly of his dreams for a society free of the terrible curse of racism.
His words captured the spirit of black Americans, of course, but they also resonated passionately in the hearts and minds of Jewish Americans. Jews knew what meant to escape slavery — and to be excluded from the majority society. They poured their energies and sometimes their lives into his crusade for an integrated country, one where children would, in King’s memorable words, “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
It looked like the start of a beautiful friendship.
But then something happened.
As the overt anti-Semitism of earlier decades simply died away, Jews in America gained almost total acceptance at every level. While most still sympathized with African-American aspirations and many continued to work actively at social causes intended to help blacks move more fully into the mainstream, Jews found new interests.
As soon as they could afford to, American Jews fled the cities and urban schools. They began to pay more attention to the Holocaust, for example, and to worry about intermarriage — the most obvious fruit of their acceptance in the mainstream. Ironically, after winning exactly what King dreamt of, many wrapped themselves a cocoon of “Jewish identity” causes.
The path was different for African-Americans, most of whom remained trapped in ever-weakening and increasingly segregated city neighborhoods. The laws protected them from overt discrimination but couldn’t overcome the de facto geographic separation. And intellectually, many blacks sought and got distance from the dominant white culture. As they struggled to build a history of themselves that they would be proud to tell their children, many turned away from personal relationships with Jews. It didn’t help that they were often confronted by massive Jewish intellectual and economic success; their teachers were Jewish, as were their landlords, their bankers, their employers and the owners of the media that depicted their world.
Almost inevitably, the hand-in-hand bonds of the civil rights movement were broken. In place of King, black America found movement leaders like Al Sharpton or, more venomously, Louis Farrakhan. Black leaders could and do point to Israel’s snubbing of potential olim from Ethiopia, the Falash Mura, as evidence of a Jewish racism that they say is repeated in this country.
Simultaneously, many Jewish Americans resent what they see as an irresponsible black playing of the race card to explain away what are really failures of black leadership. Having ceased to be victims, American Jews speak dismissively of a black embrace of “victimhood,” mirroring the Palestinians’ unwillingness to leave their past behind and dooming another generation of blacks to fall behind the rest of the country in terms of intellectual and economic performance. Many Jews who would describe themselves as liberal humanists are angry over the anti-Semitism that lurks not far below the surface in many African-American homes.
It is not the role of a Jewish publication to tell black Americans how they might want to relate to Jewish America in the 21st century. We think that a lot of Jews still stand ready to help a responsible black leadership address the real problems of family instability, poverty, crime and violence.
And before Jews surrender to despondence about black America, they would do well to consider King’s word’s when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1964:
“I accept this award,” said King, “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.”
And, he concluded, “I still believe that we shall overcome.”