The most amazing thing about the Jewish commitment to civil rights is how it has endured despite the growing indifference of others to the civil rights of Jews.
That fact was brought home once again as African American leaders gathered this week in Washington to endorse a new drive for economic and racial justice put together by leaders widely considered hostile to Jews. For all their talk about justice, the mainstream black leaders who endorsed the event seem curiously uninterested in justice for Jews.
That poses a continuing dilemma for Jewish groups that have a lot in common with the black community on domestic issues and for Jewish liberals in particular who continue to be among the most vigorous supporters of civil rights for blacks — but who keep getting kicked in the teeth by many black leaders.
At a news conference, planners officially unveiled their Millions More Movement event planned for early October — a commemoration of the Million Man March that brought a huge crowd to the Capitol about 10 years ago to protest racism and economic injustice.
The goals of the march are ones most Jews can agree with, including an end to police brutality and racial profiling and a solution to the nation’s health care crisis. A strong majority of Jews undoubtedly agree with the Rev. Jesse Jackson who, at the press event, warned about the widening economic, health and education gaps between whites and blacks.
The dilemma for the Jewish community is this: The Millions More Movement, like the march it commemorates, is the brainchild of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam and, according to groups like the Anti-Defamation league, one of the nation’s foremost anti-Semites.
Another major sponsor is Malik Zulu Shabazz, the president of the New Black Panther Party, who, according to the ADL, blamed Jews for the Sept. 11 terror attacks and once led a Howard University audience in a twisted pep-rally cheer blaming Jews for killing Nat Turner and controlling the Federal Reserve Bank, the media and “our entertainers … and our athletes.”
The views of Farrakhan and Shabazz are hardly news. What is disturbing is that so many respected African American leaders can’t see that supporting an event planned by bigots, however laudable its other goals, just confers unwarranted legitimacy on the haters and enhances their ability to promote their virulent views.
The march has been endorsed by Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, the Rev. Floyd Flake and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-District of Columbia), among others — leaders who have long been in the forefront of the fight for civil rights.
This week the Anti-Defamation League wrote to 30 endorsers, asking them to reconsider.
“When will someone in the African American community stand up and say that the Million Man March had a positive message, but the pied piper is a racist and anti-Semite?” asked Abraham Foxman, the group’s director.
The question is a legitimate one.
It’s hard to picture any Jewish leader endorsing an event organized by the racist David Duke, even if it was ostensibly for a good cause. But by endorsing Farrakhan’s event and appearing with him at a news conference, black leaders are being just as insensitive and just as destructive to interethnic relations.
With leadership like that, it’s hardly a surprise that the black community displays more anti-Semitic attitudes than any other major segment of American society, according to a recent ADL survey.
It’s not just the black leadership that seems wedded to a double standard when it comes to anti-Semitism. At its events, the antiwar left continues to consider blatant anti-Semitism a matter of free speech, while prohibiting anything smacking of bigotry against blacks, Hispanics, women, gays or a long list of others.
You can still go to antiwar rallies and find copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; imagine the outrage if white supremacist screeds ever appeared on a literature table.
Some liberals complain that Jews unfairly label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. That charge is accurate in some cases — but it doesn’t begin to address the issue of why respectable liberal and black leaders tolerate the likes of Farrakhan.
The danger here isn’t of an epidemic of Jew hating. Anti-Semitism is up in some segments of American society, but overall, the hatred is down.
But the continuing tolerance of intolerance in some political circles and some minorities alienates Jews from their natural coalition partners; it disrupts the relationships that are an important element in Jewish security and in the drive for a more just society that always featured a strong Jewish component.
A strong majority of Jews continue to identify with liberal causes, as several surveys in the past year indicated; an overwhelming majority continue to mirror the partisan preferences of the African American community.
African Americans and Jews continue to have a lot in common — and continue to be torn apart by African American leaders who don’t understand that the fight against bigotry has to be absolute, and not something that can be put aside in the interests of other concerns.
James D. Besser is a Washington correspondent for Jewish newspapers across the country.