African American–Jewish relations

The relationship has also featured conflicts and controversies which are related to such topics as the Black Power movement, Zionism, affirmative action, and the antisemitic trope concerning the alleged dominant role of American and Caribbean-based Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.

For instance, a Jewish editor named Jacob N. Cardozo explained that "the reason the Almighty had made the colored black" was to mark him as inferior, providing an obvious, God-given approval of slavery.

So, although Jews were often considered "other" and separate from European Christians, the Naturalization Act of 1790 classed them as "free White persons" and thus full citizens, unlike Native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, and non-White Asians.

Jews made substantial financial contributions to many civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

[15][16] During this period, notable Northern Jewish leaders invested time, influence and economic resources into Black endeavors, supporting civil rights, philanthropy, social service, and organizing.

[17] Julius Rosenwald was a Northern Jewish philanthropist who donated a large part of his fortune to supporting Black education in the South by providing matching funds for construction of schools in rural areas.

"[22] Though many historians since the late 20th century have concluded that Conley did murder Phagan,[23][24][full citation needed] most Southern Jews were quite racist towards Blacks at the time and took advantage of their higher social status.

As an example of this hatred, in one year alone, from November 1957 to October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal gatherings were bombed and desecrated in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia.

[58] Prominent Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Jack Greenberg marched alongside figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and contributed significantly to landmark legal victories.

To commemorate this moment, 20 years later, representatives from the Coalition of Conscience, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (now the ADL) and the Atlanta Board of Education marched together again.

[citation needed] In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., said, How could there be anti-Semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice.

Political scientist Andrew Hacker wrote about the disparity between Jewish and Black experiences of the civil rights movement: It is more than a little revealing that Whites who travelled south in 1964 referred to their sojourn as their 'Mississippi summer'.

[82]Hacker also quoted author Julius Lester, who was an African-American convert to Judaism, as writing: Jews tend to be a little self-righteous about their liberal record, ... we realize that they were pitying us and wanted our gratitude, not the realization of the principles of justice and humanity...

Upon his arrival in Atlanta (after living in Pittsburgh for most of his life), Rabbi Rothschild was disturbed by the depth of the racial injustice which he witnessed and he resolved to make civil rights a focal point of his rabbinical career.

He first broached the topic of civil rights in his 1947 Rosh Hashanah sermon but he remained mindful of his status as an outsider and during his first few years in Atlanta, he proceeded with caution in order to avoid alienating his supporters.

By 1954, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision, which called for the desegregation of public schools, race relations had become a recurring theme of his sermons, and Temple members had grown accustomed to his support of civil rights.

In the years after King's death, Rothschild's opposition to the more militant measures which were adopted by younger Black activists cost him much of the support which he once received from his African American counterparts in the civil rights movement.

Despite his diminished stature in the Black community, Rothschild continued to candidly speak about social justice and civil rights on a regular basis until he died, after he suffered a heart attack, on December 31, 1973.

The JLC, which had local offices in a number of communities in North America, helped found the United Farm Workers and campaigned for the passage of California's Fair Employment Practices Act, and provided staffing and support for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

[83] As this activism spread to the North, many liberal Jews also began to move out of areas with increasing Black populations, due to what Greenberg describes as the perceived "deterioration of their schools and neighborhoods", sometimes also citing civil rights protests as a motivator.

[163] Dutch-American historian of the Atlantic world Wim Klooster notes that "[i]n no period did Jews play a leading role as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades.

In his Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker, Robert Caro accused Moses of building low bridges across his parkways in order to make them inaccessible to public transit buses, thereby restricting "the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families" who did not own cars.

[179] In response to the biography, Moses defended the displacement of poor and minority communities as an inevitable part of urban revitalization: "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.

In 1896, an editorial in the newspaper The Jewish South observed that "Twenty-five years of education resulted in making the colored women more immoral and the men more trifling... Negroes are intellectually, morally and physically an inferior race- a fact none can deny."

[12][196] Gil Ribak argues that when Jewish immigrants began arriving in large numbers from Eastern Europe, they brought with them prejudices about Gentile peasants, which they transferred to African Americans.

[11] Because of the role of many Jewish immigrants as "storeowners, tavern keepers, peddlers, and landlords" to Black people, this reinforced those attitudes and "African Americans were frequently seen as the new country’s reincarnation of peasant folk" or the poyerim/muzhikes.

"[11] The President of the Zionist Council of Greater New York, Abraham H. Fromenson, who served as co-editor of the Yidishes Tageblat (Jewish Daily News), wrote that children would be moved to "a street infested with the dirtiest rabble, the scum of the colored race.

"[11] Fromenson would later defend Booker T. Washington from a racist attack in a Jewish weekly newspaper from St. Louis, The Modern View, though he said in the same defense, "if [the Black man] manifests evil inclinations we should not wonder at it, seeing the many years of slavery his race has gone through.

As a result, many progressive and college-educated Whites in the city (including Atlanta's largest daily newspaper) publicly endorsed Jackson, which caused Massell to lose his re-election campaign.

[123][209] Shanker also personally cut chapters on Malcolm X and a quote from Frederick Douglass ("power concedes nothing without a demand") from the proposed course Lesson Plans on African-American History, which he deemed too "radical".