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What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
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For the Jews of Venice, an uneasy history of scapegoating and grudging tolerance
The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism
By Alexander Lee
Basic Books, 432 pages, $34
When one thinks of Venice and the Jews, the first figure that probably comes to mind is Shylock, literary history’s famous Jewish villain, a moneylender who demands a “pound of flesh” from the titular character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
In Alexander Lee’s new book, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, Shylock is mentioned just twice, both times in the introduction, but his ghost hovers over the pages of the book. Much of Lee’s historical account of Jewish life in Venice is devoted to Jewish moneylenders, and the key role they played in keeping Venice’s economy afloat.
The First Ghetto centers on the uneasy and guarded relationship that the Venetian government and its Christian people — first as the Venetian Republic and later as part of the Italian nation — always had with its Jewish population. According to Lee’s account, Venice didn’t want the Jews, but it needed them, largely for their ability to provide credit.
As he tracks the rise and fall of the Venetian Ghetto across more than six centuries, from Venice’s first Jewish visitor in 1315 through the fateful deportation of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust, Lee’s focus is so narrowly limited to the fluctuations of finance that he very nearly makes the word “Jew” synonymous with “moneylender” or “pawnbroker.”
That’s a pity, because readers can be left with the impression that the primary role Jews played in the life of the city nicknamed “La Serenissima” — the most serene place — was financial.
“More than once, the Ghetto’s Jews helped keep the Venetian economy from collapse,” writes Lee, an Italian Renaissance scholar at the University of Warwick who has previously published four books, including Machiavelli: His Life and Times. “They founded no fewer than eight glittering synagogues, each a masterpiece of its kind, founded innumerable charities, and administered their own affairs with democratic probity.”
There is, of course, validity to the argument that the Venetian brand of capitalism that emerged in the late Middle Ages and sustained the city through the 20th century was reliant on Jewish labor. Since the mid-12th century, the Catholic Church had prohibited usury, loans offered with interest. But this rule only applied to Christians lending to Christians. They could, however, take out interest-bearing loans from Jewish moneylenders, who were permitted to lend and borrow without, apparently, incurring sin.
The precarious arrangement proved, over time, to be mutually beneficial for the Venetians and the Jews. As long as they were supporting the city’s financial needs, Jews were tolerated — even as they were isolated, overtaxed and frequently attacked. When the Venetians had less of a need for Jewish resources, cruelty against them spiked. They were blamed for most of the city’s woes, including the Black Death, the loss of wars, and various forms of spiritual corruption.
Even if Jews’ contributions were valued by some, the majority of Venice’s Christians “still harbored a horror of moneylending in Venice itself — and almost all regarded Jews with unconcealed hostility,” Lee writes. To balance this necessity against their antipathy, Jews were permitted to live in Venice, as long as they remained apart. Thus the Venice Ghetto was born.
Beginning in 1516, they were segregated to an island of their own on the dilapidated site of a former municipal cannon foundry, Ghetto Nuovo, surrounded by high walls and an iron gate. They were constrained in cramped conditions, and allowed to associate with Christian residents only for business purposes, in daytime. They were marked as outsiders wherever they traveled within the city by a yellow circular patch on their clothing, and an oddly shaped yellow hat.
“The Ghetto was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing,” writes Lee, “while keeping the spiritual ‘risks’ [of associating with Jews] to a minimum.”
Although Jews had been segregated and harassed in other settings for centuries, Venice’s Ghetto was a precursor of the many Jewish ghettos that would later be created throughout Europe. The word ghetto, borrowed from Venice, later “shed its purely Jewish connotations,” Lee writes, and became “shorthand for vulnerability, poverty and powerlessness,” in the living conditions of any minority group.
The first 150 pages of The First Ghetto track the vicissitudes of the explotive financial partnership between Venice and its largely captive population of a couple thousand Jewish residents. The periods of time when Jewish life could be conducted with some sense of security and ease were offset by periods of blame, harassment, and threats of expulsion. But, as Lee argues, the story of Venice’s Jews is one of resilience and survival.
Shakespeare penned The Merchant of Venice between 1596 and 1598, in a period that Lee describes as the Ghetto’s “Golden Age, 1589-1630.” Yet precisely why the character of Shylock emerged in England in this period or how the play related to the true conditions of moneylending and commerce are unfortunately never discussed.
Culture and humanity are strikingly absent from Lee’s account of the history of the Venice Ghetto. Lee notes that the inhabitants of the Ghetto were “poets and scientists, musicians and philosophers; they put on plays and held festivals; and they transformed Venice into the greatest center for Hebrew printing in the world.”
But, apart from a detailed account of the genesis of the book trade, Lee offers little description of these poets and scientists or philosophers, nor does he provide much insight into the daily life experienced in the Venice Ghetto. I yearned for a more vivid sense of how the Ghetto’s people passed their time, what they ate, how they socialized or practiced religious observance — and how they responded to the discrimination they faced.
The book’s subtitle, Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, suggests that Lee might dive into the genesis of antisemitic tropes or ideas — why did Christian Venetians believe that Jews ate babies, for example? — but this kind of analysis isn’t provided. Instead, Lee seems to regard antisemitism as a given, a force of nature that merely fluctuates depending on the conditions of the time.
“By 1630,” writes Lee, “Venice was the best place in the world to be a Jew.” And, “Anyone could see that the Ghetto was indispensable to Venice.” The bright moment didn’t last long, however, as that same year, the city was hit by a plague that took about a third of its population. Because they were still relatively isolated, the Jewish community lost only about 15% of its residents, but the larger city’s “glory days were now numbered,” Lee writes. “There would be no recovery — only a gradual slide into irrelevance.”
In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte marched into Venice and forced its leaders to abdicate, effectively ending the Venetian Republic, and declared all its residents equal. The walls of Venice’s Ghetto were finally torn down; its gates were carried to the town square, smashed to bits, and burned. A member of the national guard, Raffaele Vivante, jumped up and gave a speech. “Here you have toppled the terrible doors which held our Nation as if locked up in a prison,” he cried, and then, as Lee writes, “The dancing went on till dawn.”
In the 1930s and 40s, under Mussolini’s fascist reign, the Venetians’ long-simmering hatred of its Jews rose to a boil. As the Jewish community was still small and somewhat contained, in spite of early 20th-century integration, it was easy to identify and decimate. The emptying of the Ghetto, handled here in about ten pages, resulted in the removal of around 2,100 people in 1943 and 1944, of whom hundreds were murdered.
In the 21st century, while the waves of antisemitism have once again crested, the notion that to be Jewish is to be linked to moneylending, banking, and usury has, sadly, gained new currency. Although this is not the only issue Lee touches upon, I wondered while reading the book if it was truly useful to hammer home this connection once again.
As I read Lee’s history, waiting for a better sense of the dimensions of humanity in the Ghetto, a line from the Merchant of Venice kept popping into my mind: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” I would have liked to have seen a slightly more sanguine touch on these pages.
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British Museum postpones a Jewish Culture Month lecture, citing ‘disruption’ concerns
(JTA) — The British Museum has canceled a lecture titled ‘‘Ancient Israel and Judah” that was scheduled to take place today on its premises.
In a statement on Wednesday, the museum said the decision was made because it was informed in recent days that “a significant proportion of registered attendees were individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event.”
The event was supposed to be jointly led by members of the museum’s senior curatorial team alongside organizers from Jewish Culture Month, with the lecture presented by Dr. Paul Collins, the museum’s Keeper of the Department of the Middle East.
Jewish Culture Month is the first event of its kind in the United Kingdom, organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The festivities opened on May 15 and run through June 16, and include more than 100 events celebrating Jewish heritage, creativity and culture across the U.K.
Major British institutions including the British Library, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum and the BBC are participating.
The British Museum said it was only postponing and not canceling the event, stating the decision was a joint one “made following conversations with organisers and security partners.” The museum added that the decision was made “to protect the event — not diminish it.”
British Museum Assistant Press Officer Lucy McDonald told JTA that the museum could not comment on “operational or security arrangements” and referred to the statement saying that the event would be rescheduled “to a later date when it can take place in an environment that properly safeguards both the audience experience and the integrity of the programme itself.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews responded with a statement saying, “It is highly regrettable that individuals have sought to deliberately disrupt a Jewish Culture Month event celebrating Jewish cultural heritage at the British Museum.” A spokesperson for the Board told JTA they could not comment further.
At the launch earlier this month, Board of Deputies Acting President Adrian Cohen said the events were designed for Jewish and non-Jewish community members alike because “British Jewish culture is not something that exists in isolation.”
Board of Deputies Director of Culture, Education and Communities Liat Rosenthal added, “Jewish culture has never been something sealed behind glass. It is a living culture. An argumentative culture. A hospitable culture. A culture of memory and reinvention. Of stories carried across borders and generations, then remade anew.”
The museum’s postponement of the event is a blow to London’s Jewish community, which has weathered rising antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Shimon Cohen, the campaign director for Shechita UK, an organization that advocates for the Jewish ritual of kosher animal slaughter, told JTA in a statement, “Why has our country descended into mob rule? Why are we signaling that intimidation, vitriolic abuse, and violence against Jews works?”
“The British Museum can ‘celebrate the contribution of our communities’ except the Jewish community,” said Cohen. “Instead, their message is clear: let them cower, be cancelled, and be exposed, through the cowardice of our passivity, to ever more hatred, and why? Simply because Jews don’t count!”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Miami, rekindling the Black-Jewish alliance that Clarence Jones insisted never died
The day before the March on Washington in 1963, a man who embodied much of what that civil rights action was all about left this world. The march went on, and changed history, in dedication to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois. During it, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins told the crowd, of Du Bois, that “his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.”
A similar scenario is unfolding in Miami today with the start of a major convening of groups committed to the Black-Jewish alliance. It comes in the shadow of the death of Clarence B. Jones, a lawyer and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr., who embodied that alliance and its cause for much of his life. He died last Friday at 95.
Chairman emeritus of the Black-Jewish alliance group Spill the Honey, and long cemented in history as the legal mind behind King’s protest strategies who also contributed passages to the “I Have a Dream” speech, Jones would vociferously argue that despite endless fissures, the alliance never ended.
That is a position I too have long maintained, particularly because a major part of the alliance is acknowledging the existence and power of Black Jews. As I and so many others tirelessly repeat, the two groups are not mutually exclusive. It’s a misnomer to say “Blacks” and “Jews” when each group overlaps with the other.
And if the alliance did die sometime during the last 30 or 40 years, did my existence and that of every other Black Jew not get the memo?
Our reality hasn’t stopped others from restarting the alliance with all the patentability of reinventing the wheel. I’ve lost count over the years of how many times a new Blacks-and-Jews group — again, usually ignoring Black Jews — would form as if it alone had the answer to whatever discord was then going on, from disputes over affirmative action after the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision to the latest over Israel’s horrific actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
That led me and Bruce Haynes, author of The Soul of Judaism and an African American professor who recently discovered his Jewish ancestry, to wonder last February if it was time to form an umbrella organization for all the organizations so dedicated.
While we discussed it, others were mobilizing.
An influential — and funded — group was already working on exactly that, calling for the National Convening of the Black-Jewish Alliance in Miami this week. Organizers include the Redstone Family Foundation and the EXODUS Leadership Forum, founded by CNN commentator Van Jones.
At 95, Clarence Jones would not have made the trip. But Spill The Honey, the organization he recently chaired and for which Haynes and I both serve as board members, is also among coalition partners.
Nearly 100 Black, Jewish, and Black Jewish leaders (this time, we’re being heard) will gather in what will be a show of unity merely in all of us being together, even if we don’t agree on everything. No coalition does, and those that do succeed (think of the not-always-comfortable bedfellows of the civil rights and labor groups that pulled off the March On Washington) do so despite their differences. What’s important is that we’ll be in the room together.
Will it work? Who knows. The alliance has always been rocky, even if it has also always survived.
And don’t count Clarence Jones out yet. His spirit will definitely be with us, which he foreshadowed in a conversation we had in the Forward three years ago.
“When I die, I’m coming back Jewish,” he said.
“But still Black?” I asked.
“Absolutely!”
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