Black Antisemitism in America Past and Present

Key Findings:

This article analyzes how Black American-specific forms of antisemitism and anti-Zionism took shape, spread, and intensified among large numbers of (non-Jewish) Black people in the US, from the era of Malcolm X through the current Black Lives Matter movement. 

From the mid-1960s, Black militants, often Black nationalists, began to mount a full rhetorical assault on Jews and the Jewish state. Many Black leaders took refuge behind Black American novelist James Baldwin’s 1972 slogan “the powerless, by definition, can never be racists” to avoid condemning this trend. Contemporary “anti-racist campaigners” continue to echo the formula “Racism equals prejudice plus power,” resulting in the anti-academic but no less worrying cultural trend of Jew hatred from other marginalized communities getting a pass, because the antisemite has first registered themselves as a victim.

In contrast to the historical accusations of Jews creating capitalism and communism by antisemites, Black nationalists (both Christian and Muslim) drew on hoary myths of Jews as masters of deceit and named Jews as the developers of racial capitalism — determined to subjugate and exploit Blacks above all. Jews were victimizers, never victims, whose suffering — if acknowledged at all — was neither unique in magnitude nor nature to others’ (especially those of Blacks). The idea that Jews lead the enslavement of Black people, and had never been slaves themselves, emerged amongst other such vitriolic and ahistorical notions.

The expansion and intensification of the racialized forms of antisemitism/anti-Zionism among Blacks that accompanied the development of the new attachment to Arabs from the 1960s to the present are also analyzed. The increasingly strong Black-American bond with Arabs (especially Palestinian Arabs) rests on their identification in this context as fellow “anti-racist” people of color, struggling against “white” Jews and Israelis (even decades before the current embrace of intersectionality). 

Black nationalist leaders of the 1960’s-80’s became convinced by the rhetoric of Arab League, the Organization of Arab Students and the PLO, and sought to forge an alliance with their brown brothers (whose Arab states were supposedly racially egalitarian, in contrast to Israel which discriminated against people of color, and Zionists who were “accomplices of colonialism and imperialism”). 

Upon its founding in 2014, Black Lives Matter leaders and activists insisted upon the parallel experiences of Black Americans (routinely menaced by racist police) and their brown brothers in “Palestine,” (allegedly terrorized by racist Zionist military forces). At once, BLM leaders and activists disregard the system of racial hierarchy that has prevailed in Arab lands for centuries, and pervade the baseless charge that it is Israeli training programs that instruct US police forces in the brutal methods they deploy in Black American communities. This claim, however unsubstantiated, renders Israel and Zionists responsible for American police violence. 

The specific legacies and mega-contributions of Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan (Nation of Islam), Tamika Mallory (Women’s March co-chair), Jewish Voice for Peace (anti-Zionist, very loosely “Jewish” organization) and Ilhan Omar toward the sunder of the historic Black American-Jewish American alliance and the rise of Black American antisemitism are unpacked in detail.

The responses —and non-responses— of Black and Jewish leaders to the spreading anti-Jewishness are also traced.