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Blacks and Jews were allies once, can they be again?
The Rekindle graduates laugh, clap their hands, and twirl to “Hava Nagila.” They are Black and white, Jewish, Christian, and agnostic.
It’s the sort of scene that Matt Fieldman, a white Jew, and Charmaine Rice, a Black Christian, envisioned when they launched Rekindle in Cleveland in 2021. The organization, now with 20 chapters nationally and six more in development, aims to revitalize Black-Jewish relations in the U.S. and help rebuild the groups’ historic connections.
Other initiatives share similar goals. Exodus Leadership Forum from CNN commentator Van Jones brings together Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish leaders over dinner in multiple cities for “nights of deep conversation” and “a space to share history, confront hard truths and imagine a shared future,” according to a promotional video. The organization anticipates holding more than 300 dinners this year in partnership with community groups, Jones told the Forward.
Hillel International, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund) are hosting Unity Dinners with speakers and dialogue for students on college campuses in 14 cities. Additional efforts include local groups for teens or adults, such as Challah and Soul in Los Angeles and the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance in North Carolina.
For some, nothing less than democracy is at stake. “I think the most powerful alliance for good in the history of Western civilization is Blacks and Jews together,” said Jones, who is Black.
Advocates point to rising rates of antisemitism and more than 3,000 hate crimes committed against African Americans in 2024. Blacks and Jews were effective allies for social change during the civil rights era and can be again, the thinking goes, even amid such painful obstacles as the turmoil in Gaza.
“There were relationships that were hurt as a result of the war, but we still have to continue to work as hard as we can to heal them,” said Rabbi Judy Schindler, executive director of Spill the Honey, which creates films, educational curricula for students, and workshops to help “the Black-Jewish alliance today” fight antisemitism and racism. “There’s just too much work to do right here,” said Schindler, who is white.
How bridges are being rebuilt
Movement leaders point to the need for education as a foundation for reconnection and action today. Jews were among the NAACP’s founders in 1909. Soon after, Julius Rosenwald joined Booker T. Washington to build thousands of schools for Black students. During World War II, Black soldiers fought Nazism, while Black colleges and universities offered faculty positions to Jewish academics fleeing Europe. In the civil rights era, “the room where it happened” was in the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, where leaders drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Black and Jewish people have an historic alliance, said Shonda Isom Walkovitz, the Black Jewish co-founder of Challah and Soul. “It’s in both our DNAs what we have experienced, not only across Europe but in the United States. It was no ‘Blacks, no Jews, no dogs,’” she said.
Still, historical understanding is just a start, those involved in this work agree. Renewing the alliance requires opportunities for moderated, honest conversations to see where the groups’ current values, experiences and priorities intersect locally and nationally.
People need to build relationships and trust, said Fieldman, before allyship can happen. The five-session Rekindle curriculum, with an optional sixth session on Israel, is designed to deepen knowledge of each community while providing a place for questions and dialogue. Among the topics: Who benefits from the Black and Jewish communities not getting along?
“People are hungry for a space to have meaningful conversations,” Fieldman said. “They want to get off social media, and they want to have a space where they can’t be canceled or have negative ramifications of asking a question or talking honestly about their opinions.”
Jones has seen the same need at the Exodus dinners, where people enter cautiously but once “you break the seal and let people speak about their own personal experiences, not politics, not geopolitical events, but our own experiences as Jewish people, as Black people, as people who might be both Black and Jewish, the heart opens up,” he said.
Meaningful experiences are key. Rekindle participants can join each other for Shabbat dinners, church services, arts and cultural events, and holiday celebrations, including Juneteenth. Friendships have led to joint projects, such as joining a community clean-up hosted by local churches.
In Los Angeles, Challah and Soul hosted a Soulful Seder last year which attracted 150 guests. Organizers and audience members wrote a Haggadah at the Seder together that incorporated the Black American story of enslavement. This year, they will add part of the Latino experience into the same Haggadah.
The Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance honored the 60th anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing in Selma, Alabama by recreating the journey from Atlanta to Selma. The group visited museums on Black history, along with synagogues and Black churches that supported protestors.
“The questions and discussions that happened on the bus – it was eye-opening,” said Ty Green, a Black Christian leader of the group. “We unfolded and opened up about our feelings about what we saw.”
Experiences like these can allow each group to see that the other is not a monolith. “Some of the bias and stereotypes of both communities exist because they’ve really never talked to anyone who was from the other community,” said Harriette Watford Lowenthal, a Black Jewish woman who has led Rekindle cohorts and trained with Exodus Leadership Forum.
She believes the voices of Jews of color are essential to this work. “In my experience, the Black community isn’t very well educated about Jews of color,” she said. Knowing there are Jews from a variety of backgrounds can boost African Americans’ connection with the Jewish community. Those perspectives may be especially important among younger people. One 2024 study found that 18-year-old registered voters are five times more likely to have an unfavorable opinion of Jewish people than 65-year-olds.
Attempts to “bring the band back together,” as Jacques Berlinerblau puts it, have their skeptics. Berlinerblau, professor in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, wishes these organizations well but doesn’t believe the juggernaut from 60 years ago can be revived. “For the overwhelming majority of the Black community, the relationship has never been central or particularly important,” said Berlinerblau, co-author with Terrance L. Johnson of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue.
“I think the most powerful alliance for good in the history of Western civilization is Blacks and Jews together.”
Van JonesCNN commentator and founder of Exodus Leadership Forum
Jones acknowledges that interest in reuniting is higher in the Jewish community than the Black community. “Black people have so many of our own problems that have been accelerated in the past couple of years and feel quite isolated,” he said, pointing to the collapse of job opportunities in the public sector, the end of DEI initiatives, and other challenges. “It’s something of a revelation to Black leaders sometimes that our help would be needed or appreciated in the Jewish community.”
Still, there are signs of momentum. In post-fellowship surveys, 93% of Rekindle graduates report they feel “empowered to address hatred of the other community that I see in my own community” and 80% have “advocated for the other community” six months after graduation.
Exodus Leadership Forum, Spill the Honey, and other leaders are planning to collaborate this spring on a combined national strategy for advancing the Black-Jewish partnership. Collaborations could include students from historically Black colleges and universities traveling to Tel Aviv to study its tech industry, or Black residents accompanying Jews at synagogue for support, Jones said.
The work is crucial during the country’s 250th anniversary, according to Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr., chairman of Spill the Honey and North Carolina youth coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr., in the early 1960s.
“This is a pivotal year in terms of what defines an American,” Chavis said. “Where are we going? What is the ethos? Can pluralism work, and can we be mutually supportive of one another as brothers and sisters?”
The post Blacks and Jews were allies once, can they be again? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah Pays Steep Price in Battle to Reverse Its Fortunes
Workers remove a coffin with a body from temporary graves and prepare for transport for a funeral ceremony of four Hezbollah fighters and two civilians, amid a temporary ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, April 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Marko Djurica/File Photo
Hezbollah has paid a heavy price for going to war with Israel on March 2: Israel has occupied a chunk of southern Lebanon, displaced hundreds of thousands of its Shi’ite Muslim constituents and killed as many as several thousand of its fighters, according to previously unreported casualty estimates from within the group.
The move has brought severe political consequences, too. In Beirut, opposition has hardened to its status as an armed group, which domestic rivals see as exposing Lebanon to repeated wars with Israel.
In April, Lebanon’s government held face-to-face talks with Israel for the first time in decades, a decision Hezbollah firmly opposed.
However, more than a dozen Hezbollah officials told Reuters they see a chance to reverse deteriorating fortunes by aligning with Tehran in its war with Israel and the United States. The group, founded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982, opened fire two days into the conflict, which began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.
The group’s calculations are based on the assessment that its participation would force Lebanon onto the agenda of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, and that Iranian pressure can secure a more robust ceasefire than one that took effect in November 2024 following a conflict sparked by the war in Gaza, the officials said.
Hezbollah was mauled in the last war, which killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with some 5,000 fighters, and weakened its long-dominant hold over the Lebanese state.
Rearmed with Iranian help, it has used new tactics and drones, surprising many with its capabilities after a fragile 15-month truce during which Hezbollah held fire, even as Israel continued to kill its members.
Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim al-Moussawi denied the group was acting on Iran’s behalf when it resumed hostilities, as alleged by opponents. He told Reuters Hezbollah saw a window to “break this vicious cycle … where the Israelis can target, assassinate, bombard, kill, without any revenge.”
He acknowledged losses and damage in southern Lebanon but said “you don’t go into making calculations of how many are going to be killed” when “pride and sovereignty and independence” are at stake.
Hezbollah’s media office said the figure of several thousand fighters killed in the present war was false.
While a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect on April 16 has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in the south, where Israel maintains troops in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said Hezbollah had “shown more resilience than many thought possible, but that was not a strategic gain in itself.”
“The only thing that will contain Israel is a comprehensive US-Iran deal,” he said. “Without a deal, there’s going to be a lot of pain for everyone. At best, a hurting stalemate.”
GRAVES FRESHLY DUG, AND QUICKLY FILLED
More than 2,600 people have been killed since March 2, around a fifth of them women, children and medics, Lebanon’s health ministry has reported. Its toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Three sources, two of them Hezbollah officials, said the ministry’s figures do not include many of the group’s casualties. They said several thousand Hezbollah fighters have been killed, though the group does not have the full picture yet.
In a statement to Reuters, Hezbollah’s media office denied the figures cited by the sources, and that the numbers published by Lebanon’s health ministry included its members killed in Israeli strikes.
One source, a Hezbollah commander, said scores of fighters had gone to the frontline towns of Bint Jbeil and Khiyam intending to fight to the death. Their bodies have yet to be recovered.
In the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, more than two dozen freshly dug graves were quickly filled with fighters’ bodies in the days after the ceasefire took hold. Simple marble tombstones identify some as commanders, others as fighters.
In one southern village alone, Yater, the council recorded the deaths of 34 Hezbollah fighters.
Lebanon’s Shi’ite Muslim community has borne the brunt of Israel’s attacks, forced to flee into Christian, Druze and other areas, where many blame Hezbollah for starting the war.
Israel has been entrenching its hold over a security zone stretching as far as 10 km (6 miles) into Lebanon and demolishing villages, saying it aims to shield northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah militants embedded in civilian areas.
An Israeli government official said Hezbollah had abrogated the November 2024 ceasefire by firing on Israeli citizens on March 2. The threat to northern Israel would be eradicated, the official said, adding thousands of Hezbollah militants had been killed, and Israel was steadily destroying the group’s infrastructure.
The Israeli military says Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel since March 2. Israel has announced 17 soldiers killed in southern Lebanon, along with two civilians in northern Israel.
Citing ongoing Israeli strikes, Hezbollah has called the April ceasefire meaningless and continued to attack.
IRAN ‘WILL NOT SELL’ THEIR FRIENDS
A diplomat who has contact with Hezbollah described its decision to enter the war as a big gamble and a survival strategy, saying it felt it needed to be part of the problem so it could be part of an eventual regional solution.
It has yet to be seen if the gamble will pay off.
Tehran has demanded that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah be included in any deal on the wider war. But US President Donald Trump said last month that any deal Washington reaches with Tehran “is in no way subject to Lebanon.”
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Tahir Andrabi, referred Reuters to an April 16 statement in which he said peace in Lebanon was essential to the talks it is mediating between the U.S. and Iran.
A Western official said they saw a possibility the US and Iran might eventually reach a settlement that does not address the war in Lebanon.
Asked about this, the US State Department, Iran’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva and Lebanon’s government did not immediately comment.
Hezbollah’s Moussawi said a ceasefire in Lebanon continues to be a top priority for Iran, adding Tehran shares Lebanon’s objectives, including that Israel halt attacks and withdraw from Lebanon. Hezbollah has “full trust in Iran – that the Iranians will not sell their own friends”, he said.
The State Department referred Reuters to an April 27 interview Secretary of State Marco Rubio did with Fox News, in which he said Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah’s attacks, and that he didn’t think Israel wanted to maintain its buffer zone in Lebanon indefinitely.
The United States has urged Israel “to make sure their responses are proportional and targeted,” he said.
When the April 16 ceasefire was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah’s disarmament would be a fundamental demand in peace talks with Lebanon.
Hezbollah has ruled out disarmament, saying the matter of its weapons is a topic for a national dialogue. Any move by Lebanon to disarm the group by force would risk igniting conflict in a country shattered by civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have sought Hezbollah’s peaceful disarmament since last year. On March 2, the government banned the group’s military activities.
Hezbollah has demanded the government cancel that decision and end its direct talks with Israel.
Lebanese officials have told Reuters they believe direct talks with Israel under the auspices of the US are the best way to secure a lasting ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops, as only Washington has enough leverage with Israel to achieve those aims.
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US President Trump Tells Israeli Media: ‘I Studied Iran’s New Proposal, It Is Not Acceptable to Me’
US President Donald Trump arrives to award the medal of honor to Master Sgt. Roderick ‘Roddie’ W. Edmonds, Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Terry P. Richardson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 02 March 2026.
US President Donald Trump said he has reviewed Iran’s latest proposal and described it as “unacceptable” in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan News on Sunday. Trump added that ongoing efforts related to the conflict are “progressing very well,” without providing further details. He also renewed his call for clemency for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that Israel needs a leader focused on wartime priorities rather than legal matters.
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Israel Court Extends Detention of Gaza Flotilla Activists
Activist Saif Abu Keshek, a member of the Global Sumud Flotilla detained by Israel, sits at a magistrate’s court for a detention extension hearing in Ashkelon, southern Israel, May 3, 2026. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
An Israeli court has extended by two days the detention of two activists arrested aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla that was intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters near Greece, their lawyer said on Sunday.
Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish national, and Brazilian Thiago Avila were detained by Israeli authorities late on Wednesday and brought to Israel, while more than 100 other pro-Palestinian activists aboard the boats were taken to the Greek island of Crete.
A court spokesperson confirmed that their remand had been extended until May 5.
The governments of Spain and Brazil issued a joint statement on Friday calling their detention illegal.
The activists were part of a second Global Sumud flotilla, launched in an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza by delivering humanitarian assistance. The ships had set sail from Barcelona on April 12.
Israeli authorities requested a four-day extension of their arrest on suspicion of offenses that include assisting the enemy during wartime, contact with a foreign agent, membership in and providing services to a terrorist organization, and the transfer of property for a terrorist organization, said rights group Adalah, which is assisting in the activists’ defense.
Hadeel Abu Salih, the men’s attorney, said that the two deny the allegations. Their arrest was unlawful due to a lack of jurisdiction, she told Reuters at the Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court after the hearing, adding that the mission was meant to provide aid to civilians in Gaza, not to any militant group.
Abu Salih said that Abu Keshek and Avila were subjected to violence en route to Israel and kept handcuffed and blindfolded until Thursday morning.
Asked for comment, the Israeli military referred Reuters to the Israeli foreign ministry, which said that staff were compelled to act to stop what it described as violent physical obstruction by Abu Keshek and Avila. All measures taken were lawful, it said.