Sorry for the short diary. As some of you know, I have a lot going on in my life right now and most of it is not good.
But I have seen some history and speculation here that is lacking and I think leading people to the wrong conclusions.
Jews joined with African Americans in the Civil Rights movement but it started long before that.
Jews helped form the NAACP in 1909 (W.E.B. Dubois, Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Stephen Wise and Henry Malkewitz). The parallels between black oppression in this country and Jewish history were discussed, written about, and expounded upon by many including Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald who together formed the Urban League.
The lynching in Atlanta of Leo Frank a few years later solidified the alliance between two minority groups who had learned that change came from the bottom up and that hope was not just a dream, but a goal that would galvanize the actions necessary to see it realized.
Jewish professors taught at black colleges. The "Jew Stores" were legendary in the south from the turn of the century for doing business with "Negroes" and addressing them as "Mr." and "Mrs." Jews marched with blacks in Selma and Birmingham and as many as 90% of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish.
So what happened?
In May of 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (The New York City union representing 55,000 public school teachers) had struggled all year with a local school board in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district.
The local board (predominantly African-American) was insisting on, among other things, the right to hire and fire teachers and determine curriculum.
Fred Nauman, a German Jew whose parents had brought him to America on the eve of WWII, was chairman of the union and a tenured science teacher.
In an unheard of move, the local board fired Nauman. This set off a firestorm where, initially, the union saw a labor dispute and the board along with many black parents saw a racial divide between Jewish teachers and union leaders and their children's education and wanted an active role in school affairs.
Thirteen teachers and six administrators were fired and a series of teachers' strikes ensued.
Racial epithets were hurled and the union was sullied with Jewish conspiracy theories. The president of the union, Albert Shanker, was branded a racist and jailed for 15 days.
The African American community viewed the strike as "Jewish teachers abandoning their kids" and the teachers viewed the actions as denial of due process.
This is just a brief overview and forgive me for lack of links and such.
But it is leading me to what Barack Obama said in his speech on Martin Luther King Day at Ebenezer Baptist Church:
For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.
This was not just a "I'll play fair and mention everybody" rhetorical flourish.
It was a reminder that no one's hands are clean. We all have a responsibility to stand up and not only acknowledge our culpability, but take positive steps to rectify what is wrong.
In this particular situation, Jews and African Americans, in common cause with their liberal ideology, need to stand together and say, "Yes we can!"