Except for the absence of Ramadan which is half a year away, this season’s convergence of Christmas and Hanukkah with Kwanzaa (meaning “first fruits of the harvest” in Swahili) makes it such a great time to invoke the ecumenical spirit—especially among African Americans and Jews. Then In January and February come MLK’s Birthday and Black History Month.
In the seventies, soon after Maulana Karenga (who grew up in LA) began popularizing Kwanzaa, I wrote a doctoral dissertation at UCLA on the history of Black-Jewish relations with a “downer” for a title, i. e., “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict.”
Perhaps this is the season for me to correct the balance by emphasizing the positive. There’s a new film, Selma, that covers the archetypal instance of interracial-interreligious cooperation about which virtually all readers will know: Reverend King and Rabbi Heschel marching hand-in-hand for voting rights for African Americans in the South. The Paramount film will be given a special showing on Saturday night at the Museum of Tolerance with Simon Wiesenthal Center Dean Rabbi Marvin Hier providing some historical context.
The general public is pretty much ignorant of an instance of Jewish-African American cooperation from a century before the Selma March during an even more bloody episode involving racist violence: the 1863 New York City Draft Riots during the course of which over 100 people died —including many “black lives that mattered” who were lynched or burned. I will allow William P. Powell, an African American doctor, to tell his story:
On the afternoon of [July 13, 1863] my house . . . was invaded by a mob of half grown boys. [They] were soon replaced by men and women. From 2 P.M. to 8 P.M. myself and family were prisoners in my own home to king mob, from which there was no way to escape but over the roofs of adjoining houses. . . . How to escape from the roof of a five story building, with four females—and one cripple—besides eight men, without a ladder, or any assistance from outside, was beyond my not excited imagination. But the God that succored Hagar in her flight, came to my relief in the person of a little deformed, despised Israelite—who, Samaritan-like, took my poor helpless daughter under his protection in his house, where I presume she is now, until friends send her to me. He also supplied me with a long rope. I then took a survey of the premises, and fortunately found a way to escape . . . through the pitchy dark.
Nor is the historical record lacking in reciprocity by African Americans and Africans. The NAACP’s William Pickens, who had made friends with Arnold and Erna Kalisch during a European vacation in 1932, was kept informed by them of the deteriorating German-Jewish situation between then and April, 1933, when they fled Berlin for Denmark. In addition to doing what he could to help the Kalisch family and other Jewish refugees, Pickens urged the NAACP to respond positively to an appeal by the International Relief Association. Assuming the editorial reins of The Crisis from W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins also of the NAACP took a similar position then and again at the time of the 1938 Evian-les-Bains Refugee Conference. Later, Wilkins lobbied both the Truman Administration and independent Liberia during the battles over the 1947 UN Partition Resolution and 1948’s U.S. recognition of Israel.
If one wants to go really far back, it was Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian royal servant of King Zedekiah (c. 600 BCE) and a possible convert to Judaism, who intervened to save the life of the Prophet Jeremiah, who had been sentenced to languish at the bottom of a cistern or pit (Jeremiah 38:7, 39:16).
These are just some of the answers to those who raise the question: “What have African Americans ever don’t for Jews?”
*A Wiesenthal Center consultant, Harold Brackman is coauthor with Ethiopian-Jewish scholar Ephraim Isaac of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press, forthcoming).
