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Black Power, Jewish Politics Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

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Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power–inspired ethnic nationalism.

Image courtesy of interviewee. February 22, 2024

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The speaker reflects on their upbringing in the 1970s during a Jewish ethnic and religious revival, which initiated a journey of self-discovery and research into Jewish identity and politics. Initially titled “Turning Inward American Jews in the 1970s,” the work evolved to explore connections between Jewish identity and broader sociopolitical movements, particularly in relation to black power and civil rights.

The speaker discusses how the question "Is it good for the Jews?" was commonly contemplated among Jewish communities while exploration of Jewish identity became more public. They encountered surprising archival documents, including support from Jewish organizations for the Nation of Islam despite its anti-Semitic stance, leading them to question historical narratives and ethical implications of these findings.

They analyzed rabbinic sermons from the era, noting that many rabbis defended black power and expressed solidarity, challenging the dominant historical memory of Jews as consistent champions of civil rights. The speaker argues that the relationship between Jewish and black communities during the civil rights movement was complex, characterized by moments of unity and subsequent divergence, particularly post-1965.

Using a Y-shaped model to symbolize collaboration during the civil rights era, the speaker shifts to an X model to depict the split post-1965, eventually proposing a Z model to illustrate parallel paths influenced by black power on Jewish political activism, noting that Jewish movements like Soviet Jewry advocacy borrowed strategies from black activism.

The speaker highlights significant shifts in Jewish communal identity, linking Jewish nationalism to parallel sentiments within the African American community, while also critiquing a simplistic view of Jews as solely progressive actors. They call for an understanding of the nuanced relationship between racial privilege and the shared experiences of minority communities in striving for social justice. Ultimately, the speaker advocates for a layered comprehension of Jews' role in social justice movements, acknowledging both their progressive contributions and the complexities of their historical involvement.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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I was, raised in the 1970s,

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and this was a time of sort of a Jewish ethnic

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and religious revival, and I wanted to learn about it.

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Uh, it was in many ways a journey of self-discovery.

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And in fact, my first working title of the book

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was Turning Inward American Jews in the 1970s.

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And then as soon as I sort of got into the,

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into the research, I realized that it's not

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so much a book just about the 1970s,

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because it's sort of pulling me back to the sixties.

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And, there's this question, is it good for the Jews?

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And, when I was growing up, you know,

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around the dinner table, folks would always

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ask if a political issue

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or a candidate was good for the Jews.

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Um, but they never said it in public

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because you never wanted to let the public know

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that you were showing your, your Jewish identity.

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But I was finding that starting, like in, in the mid

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to late sixties, this question was,

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was all over the published literature.

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And Jews were not shy at all about putting their Jewish

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identities in the public forefront of political debate.

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Um, and then the more I dug deeper, I got to black power.

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And the words black power were just showing up everywhere in

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the sources, which I found, really surprising.

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And then ultimately, the book title we went with,

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reflected that moment.

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So there's two main archives in American Jewish history.

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Um, one on the campus

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of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati,

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and one at the Center for Jewish History in Lower Manhattan.

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So I sat there and I just pulled up every

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box and archive.

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I could find archival material that had to do with any

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of the themes or subjects, you know, I had on my long list

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of things, that I needed to see.

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And then I start reading them.

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And as I'm sitting there sort of reading

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through the documents, I'm finding stuff that is

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shocking, in terms of the historiography.

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'cause, you know, as an academic, when we're sitting in the

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archives and, for example, I found a memo written

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by a senior leader of the Anti-Defamation League, the a DL,

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the nation's leading organization fighting antisemitism,

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sent to the heads of the regional offices across the

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country, supporting Elijah Muhammad

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and the Nation of Islam in the 1950s.

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Elijah Muhammad and the Nation

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of Islam were a pure antisemitic organization.

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The A DL should be the first group to be condemning.

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And then there was a stamp on the top of the document, not

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for publication confidential.

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As a scholar, I'm like, no, what, what do you do?

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I actually, I, I called my doctoral advisor from years

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before I said, I said, what are the ethics here?

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Uh, this is a really important document.

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He said, well, you go to the archive

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and you ask if there's any restriction that was

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Placed on that collection when it came to the archive,

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if there was no restriction placed you, and there was none.

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So in the, in the book,

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in the Black Power Jewish politics books, I say,

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on a document cited confidential, do not publish, comma,

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you know, and then I gave the quote, histo graphically,

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you know, that it just, it upended me.

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Um, I had to figure out, how on earth

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that document could have been created.

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Um, in that moment I started reading Rabbi sermons.

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Um, a lot of the rabbis put their sermons in the archives.

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Some of them were actually published,

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you know, they published 'em in books.

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And I'm finding like high holiday sermons

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where rabbi white male, middle-aged

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or older rabbis of

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big synagogues are defending black power to begin with.

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And then even encouraging Jews to emulate black power.

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And I'll tell you, in my scholarship,

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and in my growing up years,

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I have never either heard rabbis defending a group,

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which is largely anti-Zionist, and oftentimes anti-Semitic.

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Uh, and I thought, historic graphically, there, there,

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there is something going on.

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So I began in the archives, I started going backwards.

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I was supposed to be on the seventies.

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I'm already now in the sixties.

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And I, I said, just keep going back to the fifties.

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And now I find white male, senior leaders

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of national Jewish organizations publicly stating things

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like, there are essential differences between white Jews

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and black Americans on racial privilege.

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It may seem in public, like

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with all these marches in the black Jewish Alliance

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that we're getting along, but there will come a day when

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this is gonna end and it's not gonna be pretty.

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And a lot of heat's gonna come on Jews,

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they didn't say white Jews, but that,

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that, that was the implication.

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And I'm like, holy cow, in terms of historical memory

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and historiography, they, they are publicly announcing

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what scholars in the previous

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generations of writing on this.

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It's like these documents are not hard to find.

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They, they were there. Um,

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and that gets into the question of historical memory,

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which is, what are we as scholars

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and what are we as readers, remembering

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and what are we forgetting?

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And, what are the implications of that

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for the visual learners amongst us?

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And I am one of the visual learners.

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Um, I offer the historiography of this topic, with,

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actually three letters of the alphabet.

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So if we can visualize the letter Y here for a moment,

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we can have white Jews up here

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and, African Americans black community here.

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And they're apart. They're separate.

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But in the civil rights movement, they come together,

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the middle of the Y and then they march together.

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Like Heshel and King, the first histo graphic generation

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of books were all that.

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Why, whether it was a local or national or memoir or,

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or biography, they all talked about two different groups,

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blacks and Jews who came together in

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The Civil rights movement

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and then arm in arm fought together for racial justice.

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And, and in the historical memory, this is the most favored.

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So, earlier in, in my research,

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I argued against this

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and I said, okay, let, let's not use a Y let's use an X.

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'cause if we're gonna be honest with the sources,

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white Jews here and blacks here, they do come together

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for about 10 years from 1954, brown decision,

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Montgomery Bus boycott, until

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1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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When the legal protections were put in, a whole lot of,

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you know, white Jews declared victory and went home.

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And for African Americans, institutional racism

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and white supremacy, of course, had not been addressed.

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So they went and split, I'll do it this way.

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So today, blacks

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and Jews have split in, are separate again, like, like an X.

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Um, what black power Jewish politics, does,

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is moves us to a third letter.

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And since we had X and Y, I figured, let's go for z blacks

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and Jews at the top marching together.

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Oh, great. Isn't this wonderful? Oh, no.

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Mid sixties, there's that big split and they break off.

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But now, because of black power informing Jewish politics,

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we have blacks and Jews on a parallel path on

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the top and bottom of the Z.

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Even though they split in the middle,

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they're actually doing the same thing apart in the 1970s

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when I was growing up, you know,

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and like, you're gonna be a good Jewish activist,

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you fought for the Soviet Jewry movement.

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Um, it was a national movement. It was quite successful.

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Um, we had cases where thousands

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and sometimes 10,000,

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Jewish people would be marching in the streets.

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They'd be going to the Soviet embassy

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or Soviet consulates around the country

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and protesting Jews were getting on airplanes

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and getting flights to Moscow

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and secretly meeting with the Refuseniks

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to bring them religious articles.

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Um, there were, it's, senatorial action

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to bring the US government through the Cold War,

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to support Jewish efforts,

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because anything that makes the communist look bad,

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you know, is good for America.

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And in my life.

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And growing up, I internalized that

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as an extraordinary expression of Jewish solidarity.

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And then I started researching

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for the Black Power Jewish Politics book,

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and I began to see, how much of the thinking

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of Soviet Jewry activism was born in the ideology

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and tactics of black power, which is,

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you can't sit back and be passive.

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You've gotta speak your mind.

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You've got to center your own ethnic,

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religious racial identity,

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and you gotta go into the streets to get it done.

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Jews, who in the 1950s and

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before were bashful, that is a good for the Jews

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Question about being public in their Jewishness.

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Watch the 1960s go by now.

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Black, you know, black nationalists

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weren't the only ones in the streets.

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You know, women in the new wave feminist movement in the

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early 1970s, Asian Americans,

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indigenous peoples took over Alcatraz Island.

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All these ethnic racial gender groups were out there

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with identity politics and, the Black Power movement.

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Um, they were in the vanguard

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and they were the ones who originated it.

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So I argue in Soviet Jewry were not for black power,

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Jews would not have been able to or had the confidence

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or the understanding on on that.

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Another example, I have a chapter dedicated

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to American Zionism.

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So black power,

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black black power is connected to black nationalism.

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And this notion of

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how could you be a black person in America

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and ever achieve equality

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and sort of what are the responses gonna be?

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Well, that's Zionism.

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How can Jews living in the diaspora ever be fully secure

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and fully realized as Jews,

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if they're living in a majority non-Jewish country?

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So after the 19 67, 6 day war especially,

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there was a huge increase of enthusiasm on American shores

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for American Zionism college students going

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to do their junior year abroad.

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In Israel, public opinion polls showed 97%

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of American Jews supported Israel.

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You're not gonna get those kind of numbers today

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by any stretch of the imagination.

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And,

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and this enthusiasm for Jewish nationalism, I argue,

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and through the evidence, is, is

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that blacks were enthusiastic about black nationalism.

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I call it Rabbi Dove PERTs Elkins.

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And in a sermon he said, black power,

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and he's using the terminology of the era.

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I just wanna say that black power is nothing more

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and nothing less than Negro Zionism.

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Rabbi Roland Gitelson, temple Israel of Boston,

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this is like old white man

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and one of the biggest, you know, reform movement,

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synagogues of Boston, the black power

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advocate is the Negroes.

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Zionist Africa is his Israel.

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If black is beautiful, Jewish is beautiful too.

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And blacks and Jews share a diaspora experience about living

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as minorities wanting to gain a sense of,

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if not national sovereignty, at least an idea that each

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of these two communities can have greater agency in their

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lived experiences.

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Um, so I argue that American Zionism ironically would,

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would not have been as strong, were not

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for the anti-Zionist black power

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movement, you know, to see that.

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Um, and I also wanted to say

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that it's not just on the political left.

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Uh, the neo-conservative movement of,

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of Jews in the late 1960s who were rejecting liberalism

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were actually embracing a lot of black power tactics that

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probably the most famous or even infamous is

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Mayor Kahani, the racist, bigoted founder

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of the right wing, militant Jewish Defense League.

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And when he created armed Jewish,

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groups going through inner city neighborhoods that used

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to be predominantly Jewish and now we're black

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and brown to, to protect the Jews who were there,

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he wrote that this was following the Black Panthers in

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Oakland, California, who armed themselves

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to protect black citizens from police violence.

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So when you have a right wing racist Jew arming Jews

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to protect Jews following the Black Panther Party in

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Oakland, and they famously brought their guns into city

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hall, I'm sorry, to state capital in Sacramento.

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Um, because as long as your gun was not

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loaded, you were allowed to do that.

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Um, to me was just remarkable

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and untold in the historiography.

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I I also think untold in, in the public intellectual world,

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it was just sort of synagogues and JCCs

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and the, the general Jewish reading public, a new sense

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of Jewish historical memory.

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And that is this idea that what I grew up

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with in the seventies and eighties

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and what I think is really sort of the dominant memory

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of blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Alliance and race

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and, and whiteness, is, is is part of the story.

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You know, there is, there is a part of the historiography

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that of course is accurate

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because j white Jews were, Jews were the, the,

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the most liberal and progressive white group in America.

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And in many cases, the majority of the civil,

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the white civil rights activists were Jews.

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Um, they also tended to be on the political left

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and not associated with Jewish organizations, you know,

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which is a little problematic.

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Um, I'd love them to take away with the idea

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that racial difference matters,

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that racial difference has always mattered,

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and that even middle-aged white men in Jewish leadership

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knew it and understood it, even though we have sort

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of conveniently, forgotten, forgotten it.

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Um, I want them to know

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that even the rabbis praise black power,

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and especially now in a time of such great division,

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when everyone's sort of going to their lanes and,

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and, you know, trying to protect themselves,

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that we actually have a precedent that even in another time

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of anti-Zionism and even antisemitism,

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we have mainstream Jewish religious leaders,

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finding ways to make, connections,

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which ultimately goes, I guess to the biggest thing I like

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to have people take, which is a, a more layered

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and complicated understanding of Jews and social justice.

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On the one hand, Jews were in the vanguard of white America.

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And on the other hand, not all of us were Rabbi Hessel.

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And how is it that we mediate

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and understand the interaction

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between enjoying racial privilege,

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while also being the white group that is the one most aware

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of racial injustice.

00:00 - I was, raised in the 1970s, and this was a time of sort of a Jewish ethnic and religious revival, and I wanted to learn about it. it was in many ways a journey of self-discovery. And in fact, my first working title of the book was Turning Inward American Jews in the 1970s.

00:22 - And then as soon as I sort of got into the, into the research, I realized that it's not so much a book just about the 1970s, because it's sort of pulling me back to the sixties. And, there's this question, is it good for the Jews? And, when I was growing up, you know, around the dinner table, folks would always ask if a political issue or a candidate was good for the Jews. but they never said it in public

00:50 - because you never wanted to let the public know that you were showing your, your Jewish identity. But I was finding that starting, like in, in the mid to late sixties, this question was, was all over the published literature. And Jews were not shy at all about putting their Jewish identities in the public forefront of political debate. and then the more I dug deeper, I got to black power. And the words black power were just showing up everywhere in the sources, which I found, really surprising.

01:22 - And then ultimately, the book title we went with, reflected that moment. So there's two main archives in American Jewish history. one on the campus of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and one at the Center for Jewish History in Lower Manhattan. So I sat there and I just pulled up every box and archive. I could find archival material that had to do with any of the themes or subjects, you know, I had on my long list

01:49 - of things, that I needed to see. And then I start reading them. And as I'm sitting there sort of reading through the documents, I'm finding stuff that is shocking, in terms of the historiography. 'cause, you know, as an academic, when we're sitting in the archives and, for example, I found a memo written by a senior leader of the Anti-Defamation League, the a DL, the nation's leading organization fighting antisemitism, sent to the heads of the regional offices across the

02:20 - country, supporting Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam in the 1950s. Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam were a pure antisemitic organization. The A DL should be the first group to be condemning. And then there was a stamp on the top of the document, not for publication confidential. As a scholar, I'm like, no, what, what do you do? I actually, I, I called my doctoral advisor from years before I said, I said, what are the ethics here?

02:52 - this is a really important document. He said, well, you go to the archive and you ask if there's any restriction that was Placed on that collection when it came to the archive, if there was no restriction placed you, and there was none. So in the, in the book, in the Black Power Jewish politics books, I say, on a document cited confidential, do not publish, comma, you know, and then I gave the quote, histo graphically, you know, that it just, it upended me.

03:19 - I had to figure out, how on earth that document could have been created. in that moment I started reading Rabbi sermons. a lot of the rabbis put their sermons in the archives. Some of them were actually published, you know, they published 'em in books. And I'm finding like high holiday sermons where rabbi white male, middle-aged or older rabbis of big synagogues are defending black power to begin with.

03:47 - And then even encouraging Jews to emulate black power. And I'll tell you, in my scholarship, and in my growing up years, I have never either heard rabbis defending a group, which is largely anti-Zionist, and oftentimes anti-Semitic. and I thought, historic graphically, there, there, there is something going on. So I began in the archives, I started going backwards. I was supposed to be on the seventies. I'm already now in the sixties.

04:14 - And I, I said, just keep going back to the fifties. And now I find white male, senior leaders of national Jewish organizations publicly stating things like, there are essential differences between white Jews and black Americans on racial privilege. It may seem in public, like with all these marches in the black Jewish Alliance that we're getting along, but there will come a day when this is gonna end and it's not gonna be pretty. And a lot of heat's gonna come on Jews,

04:44 - they didn't say white Jews, but that, that, that was the implication. And I'm like, holy cow, in terms of historical memory and historiography, they, they are publicly announcing what scholars in the previous generations of writing on this. It's like these documents are not hard to find. They, they were there. and that gets into the question of historical memory, which is, what are we as scholars

05:06 - and what are we as readers, remembering and what are we forgetting? And, what are the implications of that for the visual learners amongst us? And I am one of the visual learners. I offer the historiography of this topic, with, actually three letters of the alphabet. So if we can visualize the letter Y here for a moment, we can have white Jews up here and, African Americans black community here.

05:33 - And they're apart. They're separate. But in the civil rights movement, they come together, the middle of the Y and then they march together. Like Heshel and King, the first histo graphic generation of books were all that. Why, whether it was a local or national or memoir or, or biography, they all talked about two different groups, blacks and Jews who came together in The Civil rights movement and then arm in arm fought together for racial justice.

06:01 - And, and in the historical memory, this is the most favored. So, earlier in, in my research, I argued against this and I said, okay, let, let's not use a Y let's use an X. 'cause if we're gonna be honest with the sources, white Jews here and blacks here, they do come together for about 10 years from 1954, brown decision, Montgomery Bus boycott, until 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act. When the legal protections were put in, a whole lot of,

06:36 - you know, white Jews declared victory and went home. And for African Americans, institutional racism and white supremacy, of course, had not been addressed. So they went and split, I'll do it this way. So today, blacks and Jews have split in, are separate again, like, like an X. what black power Jewish politics, does, is moves us to a third letter. And since we had X and Y, I figured, let's go for z blacks and Jews at the top marching together.

07:06 - great. Isn't this wonderful? no. Mid sixties, there's that big split and they break off. But now, because of black power informing Jewish politics, we have blacks and Jews on a parallel path on the top and bottom of the Z. Even though they split in the middle, they're actually doing the same thing apart in the 1970s when I was growing up, you know, and like, you're gonna be a good Jewish activist, you fought for the Soviet Jewry movement.

07:33 - it was a national movement. It was quite successful. we had cases where thousands and sometimes 10,000, Jewish people would be marching in the streets. They'd be going to the Soviet embassy or Soviet consulates around the country and protesting Jews were getting on airplanes and getting flights to Moscow and secretly meeting with the Refuseniks to bring them religious articles.

07:57 - there were, it's, senatorial action to bring the US government through the Cold War, to support Jewish efforts, because anything that makes the communist look bad, you know, is good for America. And in my life. And growing up, I internalized that as an extraordinary expression of Jewish solidarity. And then I started researching for the Black Power Jewish Politics book,

08:23 - and I began to see, how much of the thinking of Soviet Jewry activism was born in the ideology and tactics of black power, which is, you can't sit back and be passive. You've gotta speak your mind. You've got to center your own ethnic, religious racial identity, and you gotta go into the streets to get it done. Jews, who in the 1950s and before were bashful, that is a good for the Jews

08:55 - Question about being public in their Jewishness. Watch the 1960s go by now. Black, you know, black nationalists weren't the only ones in the streets. You know, women in the new wave feminist movement in the early 1970s, Asian Americans, indigenous peoples took over Alcatraz Island. All these ethnic racial gender groups were out there with identity politics and, the Black Power movement. they were in the vanguard

09:19 - and they were the ones who originated it. So I argue in Soviet Jewry were not for black power, Jews would not have been able to or had the confidence or the understanding on on that. Another example, I have a chapter dedicated to American Zionism. So black power, black black power is connected to black nationalism. And this notion of how could you be a black person in America

09:43 - and ever achieve equality and sort of what are the responses gonna be? Well, that's Zionism. How can Jews living in the diaspora ever be fully secure and fully realized as Jews, if they're living in a majority non-Jewish country? So after the 19 67, 6 day war especially, there was a huge increase of enthusiasm on American shores for American Zionism college students going to do their junior year abroad.

10:12 - In Israel, public opinion polls showed 97% of American Jews supported Israel. You're not gonna get those kind of numbers today by any stretch of the imagination. And, and this enthusiasm for Jewish nationalism, I argue, and through the evidence, is, is that blacks were enthusiastic about black nationalism. I call it Rabbi Dove PERTs Elkins. And in a sermon he said, black power,

10:41 - and he's using the terminology of the era. I just wanna say that black power is nothing more and nothing less than Negro Zionism. Rabbi Roland Gitelson, temple Israel of Boston, this is like old white man and one of the biggest, you know, reform movement, synagogues of Boston, the black power advocate is the Negroes. Zionist Africa is his Israel. If black is beautiful, Jewish is beautiful too.

11:09 - And blacks and Jews share a diaspora experience about living as minorities wanting to gain a sense of, if not national sovereignty, at least an idea that each of these two communities can have greater agency in their lived experiences. so I argue that American Zionism ironically would, would not have been as strong, were not for the anti-Zionist black power movement, you know, to see that. and I also wanted to say

11:36 - that it's not just on the political left. the neo-conservative movement of, of Jews in the late 1960s who were rejecting liberalism were actually embracing a lot of black power tactics that probably the most famous or even infamous is Mayor Kahani, the racist, bigoted founder of the right wing, militant Jewish Defense League. And when he created armed Jewish, groups going through inner city neighborhoods that used to be predominantly Jewish and now we're black

12:11 - and brown to, to protect the Jews who were there, he wrote that this was following the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, who armed themselves to protect black citizens from police violence. So when you have a right wing racist Jew arming Jews to protect Jews following the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and they famously brought their guns into city hall, I'm sorry, to state capital in Sacramento. because as long as your gun was not loaded, you were allowed to do that.

12:41 - to me was just remarkable and untold in the historiography. I I also think untold in, in the public intellectual world, it was just sort of synagogues and JCCs and the, the general Jewish reading public, a new sense of Jewish historical memory. And that is this idea that what I grew up with in the seventies and eighties and what I think is really sort of the dominant memory of blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Alliance and race

13:11 - and, and whiteness, is, is is part of the story. You know, there is, there is a part of the historiography that of course is accurate because j white Jews were, Jews were the, the, the most liberal and progressive white group in America. And in many cases, the majority of the civil, the white civil rights activists were Jews. they also tended to be on the political left and not associated with Jewish organizations, you know, which is a little problematic.

13:34 - I'd love them to take away with the idea that racial difference matters, that racial difference has always mattered, and that even middle-aged white men in Jewish leadership knew it and understood it, even though we have sort of conveniently, forgotten, forgotten it. I want them to know that even the rabbis praise black power, and especially now in a time of such great division, when everyone's sort of going to their lanes and,

14:01 - and, you know, trying to protect themselves, that we actually have a precedent that even in another time of anti-Zionism and even antisemitism, we have mainstream Jewish religious leaders, finding ways to make, connections, which ultimately goes, I guess to the biggest thing I like to have people take, which is a, a more layered and complicated understanding of Jews and social justice. On the one hand, Jews were in the vanguard of white America. And on the other hand, not all of us were Rabbi Hessel.

14:35 - And how is it that we mediate and understand the interaction between enjoying racial privilege, while also being the white group that is the one most aware of racial injustice.

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