There’s nothing in the Jewish tradition about an obligation to look after blacks just as there is nothing in the black tradition about an obligation to the Jewish state. Organized Jewry supported black civil rights, not because it had anything to do with Judaism, but because it was strategically useful in empowering the Coalition of the Fringe against the white Christian core.
Although the platform itself is not at all about Israel or the Jewish people, it is ironic, but understandable, that the Movement for Black Lives seeks to distance itself from the Jewish state. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2008, “the Zionist idea is almost the exact opposite of the integrationist idea which dominates black political thought. Indeed, Zionism’s natural corollary isn’t the civil rights movement, it’s the very black power movement which Martin Luther King and his followers rejected.”
Since 2008, much has changed. The new fight for civil rights looks nothing like its 1960s counterpart. It has become much less integrationist and much more focused on black power and empowerment. I have often wondered why we have seen no modern day Rabbi Heschels marching arm in arm with the modern day Martin Luther King Jrs. It is not because the Movement for Black Lives does not have support and allies among Jewish groups. It is because the Movement for Black Lives is not asking anyone to understand what it means to be black. It is demanding that white society acknowledge that we have never, can never, will never understand. Martin Luther King Jr. is dead, and white America killed him.
The American Dream has also become the Jewish Dream. After all, as Coates writes, before Ashkenazi Jews were white, we were Jewish. Though it hasn’t always been this way, American Jews are the wealthiest, best educated, most assimilated group of Americans. How could we white Jews possibly hope to understand what it’s like to be black in America?
The Movement for Black Lives and their chosen alliances represent a radically different attempt at creating American black power. Instead of looking for powerful allies, they’ve chosen to align with Palestinian nationalists. Instead of asking to be fully integrated into existing white America, they’re demanding deep structural changes to the U.S. healthcare, education, military and criminal justice systems as we know them.
