American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
…there was never much of a black-Jewish alliance on the communal or organizational level. There were a great many individual Jews who over the years had worked on behalf of blacks, but, with some exceptions, they were leftist and liberal activists who had little connection to the Jewish community. This was certainly true of the Jewish lawyers and student volunteers who worked with the black movement in the South in the 1960s…During the McCarthy era, Jewish organizations repeatedly pointed out that it was a fallacy to infer from the fact that a great many (perhaps even a majority of) Communists were Jews that a great many, let alone a majority of, Jews were Communists. The logic was impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish pro-Communism, and equally impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish civil rights activism.
