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Be part of the solution

Jewish and African American social justice activists have a long history of working with each other, not against each other. We can support both groups, starting here in Philadelphia:

Support Philadelphians working to bridge race relations, like POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower & Rebuild), an interfaith, interracial group working to lift up the lives of poor communities of color, or Movement Alliance Project (formerly Media Mobilizing Project).

Support Black businesses like these bookstoresthese restaurants (get delivery through Black & Mobile), and these shops and boutiques. Or support organizations that work with Black businesses and nonprofits, like The Enterprise CenterThe GreenLight Fund, Bread & Roses Community Fund and IF Lab.

Support local advocacy groups run by people of color, like the ACLU of PennsylvaniaFrontline DadsBlack and Brown Workers CooperativeWomanist Working CollectivePhiladelphia Fight, or Black Lives Matter.

Visit and support the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation.

Support Jewish Federation‘s efforts to help Philadelphians in need.

Find some other ideas here:

 

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Read James Baldwin's essay

"Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White"

From the New York Times

When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them. We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats–all questions of life and death for the poor, and especially for those with children–we had to cope with all of these as best we could. Our parents were lashed to futureless jobs, in order to pay the outrageous rent. We knew that the landlord treated us this way only because we were colored, and he knew that we could not move out.

The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew–perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish–at least many of them were; I don’t know if Grant’s or Woolworth’s are Jewish names–and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.

Not all of these white people were cruel–on the contrary, I remember some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed–but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.

But we also hated the welfare workers, of whom some were white, some colored, some Jewish, and some not. We hated the policemen, not all of whom were Jewish, and some of whom were black. The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason so, and God knows we didn’t. “If you must call a cop,” we said in those days, “for God’s sake, make sure it’s a white one.” We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder–on your head–to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.

We hated many of our teacher at school because they so clearly despised us and treated us like dirty, ignorant savages. Not all of these teachers were Jewish. Some of them, alas, were black. I used to carry my father’s union dues downtown for him sometimes. I hated everyone in that den of thieves, especially the man who took the envelope from me, the envelope which contained my father’s hard-earned money, that envelope which contained bread for his children. “Thieves,” I thought, “every one of you!” And I know I was right about that, and I have not changed my mind. But whether or not all these people were Jewish, I really do not know.

The Army may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don’t know and I don’t care. I know that when I worked for the Army I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me. I don’t know if the post office is Jewish but I would certainly dread working for it again. I don’t know if Wanamaker’s was Jewish, but I didn’t like running their elevator and I didn’t like any of their customers. I don’t know if Nabisco is Jewish, but I didn’t like clearing their basement. I don’t know if Riker’s is Jewish, but I didn’t like scrubbing their floors. I don’t know if the big, white bruiser who thought it was fun to call me “Shine” was Jewish, but I know I tried to kill him–and he stopped calling me “Shine.” I don’t know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he’d break his neck before he got home. And I don’t think that General Electric or General Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobil Oil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hollywood or Broadway or television—or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany or Washington—are controlled by Jews. I think they are controlled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Negroes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to confirm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian.

The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples–all over the globe–to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto’s most blasted and embittered inhabitants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Christians. But it is a fact, and it will not ameliorated–in fact, it can only be aggravated–by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian vices.

Of course, it is true, and I am not so naíve as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, even as their Aryan brothers do.) It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots–or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.

One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.

For one thing, the American Jew’s endeavor, whatever it is, has managed to purchase a relative safety for his children, and a relative future for them. This is more than your father’s endeavor was able to do for you, and more than your endeavor has been able to do for your children. There are days when it can be exceedingly trying to deal with certain white musical or theatrical celebrities who may or may not be Jewish–what, in show business, is a name?–but whose preposterous incomes cause one to think bitterly of the fates of such people as Beside Smith or King Oliver or Ethel Waters. Furthermore, the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering.

The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor so the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.

But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers. But the bottom reason is that it contradicts the American dream to suggest that any gratuitous, unregenerate horror can happen here. We make our mistakes, we like to think, but we are getting better all the time.

Well, to state it mildly, this is a point of view which any sane or honest Negro will have some difficulty holding. Very few Americans, and this includes very few Jews, wish to believe that the American Negro situation is as desperate and dangerous as it is. Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream and boast is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen. And this is not merely a matter of bad faith on the part of Americans. Bad faith, God knows, abounds, but there is something in the American dream sadder and more wistful than that.

No one, I suppose, would dream of accusing the late Moss Hart of bad faith. Near the end of his autobiography, “Act One,” just after he has become a successful playwright, and is riding home to Brooklyn for the first time in a cab, he reflects:

“I started through the taxi window at a pinch-faced 10-year-old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the streets on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much the same as this one. My mind jumped backward in time and then whirled forward, like a many-faceted prism–flashing our old neighborhood in front of me, the house, the steps, the candy store–and then shifted to the skyline I had just passed by, the opening last night, and the notices I still hugged tightly under my arm. It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy–for any of its millions–to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank, or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.”

But this is not true for the Negro, and not even the most successful or fatuous Negro can really feel this way. His journey will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement–unless he is very rare and lucky–from other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for every Negro boy who achieves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but because the Republic despises their dreams.

Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can’t but look on the American state and the American people as one’s oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have.

One does not wish to believe that the American Negro can feel this way, but that is because the Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power.

For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe. Their suffering occurred in silence. This suffering was not indignantly reported in the Western press, as the suffering of white men would have been. The suffering of this native was considered necessary, alas, for European, Christian dominance. And, since the world at large knew virtually nothing concerning the suffering of this native, when he rose he was not hailed as a hero fighting for his land, but condemned as a savage, hungry for white flesh. The Christian world considered Belgium to be a civilized country; but there was not only no reason for the Congolese to feel that way about Belgium; there was no possibility that they could.

What will the Christian world, which is so uneasily silent now, say on that day which is coming when the black native of South Africa begins to massacre the masters who have massacred him so long? It is true that two wrongs don’t make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn’t. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.

For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.

When an African is mistreated here, for example, he has recourse to his embassy. The American Negro who is, let us say, falsely arrested, will find it nearly impossible to bring his case to court. And this means that because he is a native of this country—”one of your niggers”—he has, effectively, no recourse and no place to go, either within the country or without. He is a pariah in his own country and a stranger in the world. This is what it means to have one’s history and one’s ties to one’s ancestral homeland totally destroyed.

This is not what happened to the Jew and, therefore, he has allies in the world. That is one of the reasons no one has ever seriously suggested that the Jew be nonviolent. There was no need for him to be nonviolent. On the contrary, the Jewish battle for Israel was saluted as the most tremendous heroism. How can the Negro fail to suspect that the Jew is really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough? It is doubtful that the Jews could have won their battle had the Western powers been opposed to them. But such allies as the Negro may have are themselves struggling for their freedom against tenacious and tremendous Western opposition.

This leaves the American Negro, who technically represents the Western nations, in a cruelly ambiguous position. In this situation, it is not the American Jew who can either instruct him or console him. On the contrary, the American Jew knows just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.

Finally, what the American Negro interprets the Jew as saying is that one must take the historical, the impersonal point of view concerning one’s life and concerning the lives of one’s kinsmen and children. “We suffered, too,” one is told, “but we came through, and so will you. In time.”

In whose time? One has only one life. One may become reconciled to the ruin of one’s children’s lives is not reconciliation. It is the sickness unto death. And one knows that such counselors are not present on these shores by following this advice. They arrived here out of the same effort the American Negro is making: they wanted to live, and not tomorrow, but today. Now, since the Jew is living here, like all the other white men living here, he wants the Negro to wait. And the Jew sometimes—often—does this in the name of his Jewishness, which is a terrible mistake. He has absolutely no relevance in this context as a Jew. His only relevance is that he is white and values his color and uses it.

He is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn’t. His major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom, which has so successfully victimized both Negroes and Jews. And he is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.

No more than the good white people of the South, who are really responsible for the bombings and lynchings, are ever present at these events, do the people who really own Harlem ever appear at the door to collect the rent. One risks libel by trying to spell this out too precisely, but Harlem is really owned by a curious coalition which includes some churches, some universities, some Christians, some Jews, and some Negroes. The capital of New York is Albany, which is not a Jewish state, and the Moses they sent us, whatever his ancestry, certainly failed to get the captive children free.

A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value. But the aspirations of the country are wretchedly middle-class and the middle class can never afford candor.

What is really at question is the American way of life. What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. For example, the Irish who march on St. Patrick’s Day, do not, after all, have any desire to go back to Ireland. They do not intend to go back to live there, though they may dream of going back there to die. Their lives, in the meanwhile, are here, but they cling, at the same time, to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have. These credentials are the abandoned history of Europe—the abandoned and romanticized history of Europe. The Russian Jews here have no desire to return to Russia either, and they have not departed in great clouds for Israel. But they have the authority of knowing it is there. The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital.

That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who created it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else?

The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that that Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough—for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.

All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.

If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.

Answering Rodney

What last week's meeting between Black and Jewish leaders tells us, now that the local head of the NAACP has been jettisoned for an anti-Semitic posting

Answering Rodney

What last week's meeting between Black and Jewish leaders tells us, now that the local head of the NAACP has been jettisoned for an anti-Semitic posting

VideoLast week, the day after the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Jewish leaders convened at Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ for a moving dialogue about Black and Jewish relations in the wake of the anti-Semitic postings of Minister Rodney Muhammad, national NAACP leadership finally voted to dissolve its Philadelphia chapter, effectively ending Muhammad’s six years at its helm. Within weeks, the national board will appoint an interim administrator.

So…crisis averted, right? Despite the delay between infraction and the imposition of accountability, in the end, justice was served, no?

Well, only in the most superficial of ways. Yes, action was taken and Muhammad was jettisoned. But does the playing out of that most familiar script actually constitute civic progress? Was there any true dialogue or engagement here, or have we just gone through another one-two step of outrage followed by banishment, as has become cancel culture’s norm?

Before getting into it, let’s review the facts.

On social media, Muhammad posted a cartoon of a large-nosed Jew pressing his hand down upon a darkened, huddled mass of faceless people. Next to it was a quote attributed to a French philosopher that was really mouthed by an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist who, just to complete the ignominious trifecta, is also a convicted child pornographer: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

Muhammad’s post ran alongside photos of three pop culture figures who had uttered similarly anti-Semitic sentiments: Eagle DeSean Jackson, rapper Ice Cube and TV host Nick Cannon.

Muhammad’s message harkened back to Protocol of the Elders of Zion bile from the early part of the 20th century, which advanced the myth of a nefarious Jewish plan for global domination in an attempt to focus blame for Russia’s economic woes on Jews, rather than on its Tzarist regime. It’s a false meme that has time and again refused to die through the years; its promulgators have ranged from Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan.

Do SomethingFor over a month, Muhammad refused to apologize for his posting. In short order, the dispute centered around issues of apology and firing; what was missing was any discussion of the substance of what Muhammad had posted.

Now, as a First Amendment absolutist, you’ll rarely find me calling for anyone to be cancelled for expressing a thought, no matter how odious. But Muhammad disqualified himself from leading the NAACP long before his toxic post, and not because of what he said so much as what he did: Seeming to sell out his own constituency.

Back when then-Mayor Michael Nutter tried and ultimately failed to institute a soda tax, Muhammad’s NAACP stood in opposition, arguing that it was a regressive tax disproportionately affecting African Americans.

When Kenney proposed virtually the same tax, the NAACP surprisingly flipped; in short order, it came to light that Kenney’s Political Action Committee had paid one Rodney Campbell $45,000 in 2017.

Turns out, Campbell was Muhammad’s name before his conversion to Islam. (All told, Kenney’s PAC has paid Muhammad, née Campbell, a reported $95,000 through the years, which may have something to do with Kenney’s original reticence in calling for Muhammad’s resignation after the anti-Semitic posting.)

Muhammad lost the ethical standing to lead a storied brand like the NAACP the moment he appeared to be hiding payments from Kenney’s PAC by accepting them in his former name; nothing illegal, mind you, but the secrecy hinted at consciousness of moral guilt.

So, for me, the issue of Muhammad’s continued employment is besides the point. Muhammad is now gone from Philadelphia’s public stage, but the ideology he’s put out there has long been proven to have legs.

The emphasis ought to have been not on firing Muhammad, but answering him.

Last week’s summit between Black and Jewish leaders had the potential to do just that. It began in inspiring fashion, with Bishop Louis Felton, pastor of Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ and vice president of the local NAACP, addressing what he called the elephant in the room.

“If no one else says I’m sorry, then I’ll say it,” Felton said. “I’m sorry that there was no immediate action taken between respective organizations. I’m here in pain, because I know my brothers and sisters are hurting.”

Felton’s moving comments amounted to an act of stirring civic leadership, but in his, and virtually everyone else’s, understandable rush to move beyond the pain caused by Muhammad, the dialogue morphed into a series of vague generalities rather than much-needed uncomfortable engagement.

There is, after all, a fissure between Blacks and Jews, two groups once aligned together on the front lines of the civil rights movement. And, in the dialogue last week, there were ample opportunities to lay it all out on the problem-solving table.

For example, Rev. Cleveland Edwards, second vice president of the NAACP, observed that he’d gone to Overbrook High School back in the day, when it was “60-percent Jewish…we got to understand each other.”

That prompted Rabbi Eric Yanoff of Merion’s Adath Israel: “Pastor, I bet you went to high school with several people who are now a part of my synagogue because we joined together with another synagogue about 12 years ago which was in the heart of Overbrook and so we have people in common, we all have people in common, that’s what it means to be family.”

It was a sweetly smiling exchange and a feel-good moment, but it was devoid of any attempt to reckon with the very history it raised. Those congregants now on the other side of City Line? They were there largely thanks to white flight, which was fueled most prominently by the excursion of Har Zion Synagogue from Wynnefield to Penn Valley.

Among Blacks of the hip-hop generation, those old tropes about Jewish “globalism” and power seem to be taking on new currency, in part because of the extrapolation of the personal to the cultural—if you grew up with Jewish landlords who lived in the suburbs, you might be predisposed to tales of Jew as economic oppressor—and in part because we just don’t know that much about anything, anymore.

So let’s try and answer Rodney with some facts, shall we?

First, every story that points to a crack in Black and Jewish relations regurgitates the old standbys, as I have done in the past: That was, after all, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel linked arm-in-arm on that Selma bridge with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose first among equals social justice soulmate wasn’t Andrew Young or Rev. Ralph Abernathy, but Stanley Levison.

Henry Moscowitz co-founded the NAACP with W.E.B. DuBois, and Kivie Kaplan of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations was its president from 1966 to 1975. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald underwrote more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 Black colleges in the middle part of the 20th century; particularly in the South, the “Rosenwald schools” played a key role in educating Black Americans.

But over time the alliance has frayed. There were differences over affirmative action and, especially, over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. And there were personal slights that made common ground harder to find, like contentious interactions between Jewish landlords and Black tenants, Jesse Jackson referring to New York as “Hymietown,” and Louis Farrakhan’s hateful rhetoric, which has included calling Jews “termites.”

And now, thanks to social media and a widespread lack of knowledge of our own history, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories suggesting Jews actually orchestrate Black oppression suck in the likes of influential Black leaders like Muhammad, Jackson, and Ice Cube, who recently posted this horrible meme:

All We Have to Do Is Stand Up Meme

But it’s also true that, even now, more than any other group, American Jews have had the backs of African Americans in the pursuit of justice. It was 25 Jewish members of Congress last December calling for the dismissal of Trump whisperer Stephen Miller, when his white supremacist emails came to light. And it is the reform movement of American Jewry—by far the biggest contingent of American Jews—that has endorsed reparations for the descendants of slavery.

Real dialogue will start once African Americans acknowledge these and other Jewish contributions to social justice, while Jews cop to where they’ve come up short: White flight, opposing Affirmative Action, tacit acceptance of subjecting Palestinians to the modern equivalent of passbooks.

Most of all, the two groups need to come to a meeting of the mind (and heart) on the notion that Jews disproportionately wield economic power to the detriment of African Americans. Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement, a report from Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, contains some eye-opening data on this point.

Let’s Take a Look at Those Numbers

First, worldwide, there are only 14 million Jews, which includes roughly 1 million Jews of color. In the States, there are 5.3 million Jews, all of 2.2. percent of the population.

Today, most Jews identify as and are seen to be white, and they benefit from white privilege, as Rabbi Annie Lewis of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel acknowledged in passing during last week’s discussion in Mt. Airy. But as Charlottesville showed—“Jews will not replace us!”—one important group most emphatically doesn’t consider Jews to be white: white supremacists. Shouldn’t the old Middle East adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” pertain to race relations in the States, as well?

“There is also great class diversity among Jews,” reads the JFREJ report. “The very wealthiest individuals on the planet are predominantly Christian according to non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth. In 2015, their study found that more than half of the world’s millionaires identified as Christian and that there are more Hindu and Muslim millionaires than Jewish ones. Of the 13.1 million people in the world who are millionaires, 56.2 percent were Christian, while 6.5 percent were Muslim, 3.9 percent are Hindu and 1.7 percent are Jewish.”

Yes, the report outlines, Jews in the U.S. earn higher incomes than most other religious and ethnic groups; about 25 percent report household income over $150,000, compared to 8 percent of the overall population. But, given how few Jews there are in the States, the same statistics lead to an inconvenient fact if you’re Muhammad, et al: The vast majority of high income people in the U.S. are non-Jews.

And keep in mind, income level doesn’t necessarily imply wealth. “Since the majority of U.S. Jews were poor and working-class immigrants only a few generations ago, looking at inherited wealth would likely reveal an even greater concentration of resources in the hands of elite, white, non-Jewish families,” writes the JFREJ.

Read MoreMoreover, the report cites a study by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty that finds 45 percent of all children in New York Jewish households living below or near the poverty line. Turns out, the number of poor and working-class Jewish communities are actually on the rise, a far cry from the all-powerful cabal Muhammad would have us blame for Black oppression.

All that said, it’s not difficult to understand why Jewish conspiracy theories have a history of catching on among some in the Black community. The roots of Black distrust go way back, spurred by Jewish assimilation.

One of my literary heroes, James Baldwin, brilliantly explained the phenomenon in a 1967 New York Times Magazine essay, headlined “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”:

In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian.

The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.

That’s the part of Baldwin’s essay that is most quoted, often in the context of explaining or even justifying Black anti-Semitism. But leave it to ol’ Jimmy to actually come full circle. By the end of his 53-year-old piece, Baldwin pivots:

The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that the Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness

All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads.

One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy. If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quiet breathtaking claim for oneself.

I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.

How about that appeal to common humanity? It conjures Rabbi Heschel’s observation at the most perilous moment of the civil rights movement: “The redeeming quality of man lies in his ability to sense his kinship with all men.”

Custom HaloAs Baldwin and Heschel long ago reminded us, there is much to bind Blacks and Jews. Both diaspora peoples, both suffering the loss of homelands, both subject to tragic persecution, both committed to social justice. “There is a sense in which Black and Jewish folk are almost stuck together, either at each other’s throats or embracing each other, but that is still a kind of family fight,” Cornell West once wrote.

Last week’s discussion at that Mt. Airy church touched on all that history, but way too tentatively. Here’s hoping it was the first in a series of talks that drop the politeness and gets real, like one of those “no holds barred” family fights that you dread, but that you emerge from, more united and in love than ever.

Header photo: Rodney Muhammad speaks at a press conference following the unjust arrests of two Black men at a Center City Starbucks | Photo by Jared Piper / PHLCouncil

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