Who is left from those heady days when Jews and Blacks enjoyed such a close relationship and a sense of shared past, shared fight, shared destiny?
Shabbat Matot-Mas’ey 2020
Rabbi Stephen Weiss
At the 2017 dedication of the African American Museum in Washington, DC, Congressman John Lewis was honored for his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Susannah Heschel spoke at that gathering. Susannah is the daughter of the great Jewish philosopher and civil rights leader, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Many of you may know Susannah from her time teaching here at Case Western Reserve University.
In her remarks, Dr. Susannah Heschel recalled her father marching in Selma Alabama. John Lewis, she said, was beaten bloody on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state troopers; he was asserting his freedom to demonstrate. “So how do you react to something like that? You can be angry or depressed or resentful or take vengeance and instead, look at him. He’s an advocate of nonviolence …. That’s the lesson we want to teach everybody, starting with our children – we can we bring warring sides together. It’s easy to take vengeance, but in the Torah, God says: ‘Vengeance is Mine.’ God can take vengeance, but not us.”
Susannah went on to describe how inspired her father was by the civil rights movement. She said, “My father came to America, and he witnesses the birth of a civil rights movement that made Moses and the prophets and the story of Exodus essential. All the major speeches didn’t even mention Jesus. Here is a Christian message that’s open to Judaism and even quotes from Amos and Isaiah. It was so incredible to him, this inclusivity.”
She went on to say, “So my father felt a kind of passion about civil rights. When he was invited to speak out for the first time in 1963, it was so emotional. He said: ‘Racism is Satanism, unmitigated evil.’ … When he spoke at the first summit of religion and race, he prepared another speech, ‘The white man and pharaoh.’ He told his fellow Jews, ‘You’re pharaoh in this story.’” Cornell West called it the strongest speech against racism since the days of the abolitionists.
As inspired as Heschel was by the black leaders of the civil rights movement, those leaders were equally inspired by Judaism, by Jews and by Rabbi Heschel. John Lewis spoke at the dedication of the museum about how the story of the Exodus and the gospel hymn Go Down Moses were the catalysts that turned him into an activist. John Lewis is a great friend of the Jewish community, who speaks out strongly against anti-Semitism and most recently co-sponsored the Congressional Resolution condemning the BDS movement. Other civil rights leaders were just as passionate in their appreciation of Heschel and their willingness to stand by and fight for the Jewish people. When locked in prison cells, civil rights leaders most often turned to reading Heschel’s book The Prophets for comfort and inspiration. Susannah Heschel described in her speech how leaders of the civil rights leaders would always hug her with so much warmth and affection.
I am blessed that I call Congressman John Lewis my friend. We came to know each other through the Black Jewish Coalition during my years as Rabbi in Atlanta, and we shared in many efforts together on behalf of both of our communities. Through the years we have strayed in touch, and most years when I am in Washington for AIPAC, we have the opportunity to connect. His love for the Jewish people was genuine.
The same can be said for Reverend James Orange, another major leader of the civil rights movement, who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We also enjoyed a close relationship in my days in Atlanta, and worked together for both communities, and his love for and loyalty to the Jewish people along with his firm stand against anti-Semitism endeared him to me. And though of course, I never knew Martin Luther King, Jr., I was privileged to call Coretta Scott King, of blessed memory, my friend, along with her children. she was and they are also great friends to us.
Who is left from those heady days when Jews and Blacks enjoyed such a close relationship and a sense of shared past, shared fight, shared destiny? Dr. King is gone, along with Ralph Abernathy and so many others. More recently Coretta Scott King and Reverend James Orange, both of whom have passed on. John Lewis remains the last of that generation. Sadly, at the end of December he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
How different the words and actions of these great civil rights leaders were from the words that we have been reading and hearing coming from Black sports figures and celebrities in recent weeks.
First there was DeSean Jackson, who plays football on the Philadelphia Eagles. In a twitter post, Jackson quoted extensively from an anti-Semitic tract, saying ” “Hitler said, ‘because the white Jews knows [sic] that the Negros are the real Children of Israel and to keep Americas secret the Jews will blackmail America… The[y] will extort America, their plan for world domination won’t work if the Negroes know who they were. The white citizens of America will be terrified to know that all this time they’ve been mistreating and discriminating and lynching the true Children of Israel.” Never mind that, of course, Hitler never made such a statement, and that he hated and despised blacks as much as Jews.
Then there was the interview which media celebrity Nick Cannon, host of the popular TV show The Mask, conducted with rapper Professor Griff, who left the rap group Public enemy after making anti-Semitic remarks back in 1989. During the interview, Cannon made a number of vile remarks, including that the Rothschilds controlled the banking system and that too much power is wielded by “the Illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds.” Regarding Griff’s statement in 1989 that the Jews are wicked, Cannon told him, “you peak the truth.” He also, like DeSean Jackson, made the claim that blacks are the true children of Israel.
Jacksons and Cannon’s remarks are joined by other similar remarks made by black notables in recent years, including sadly by our own LeBron James. But Jackson’s and Cannon’s remarks were so horrific and came so close together that they have caused an outcry in the Jewish community and have led some to wonder, is the era of black Jewish partnership behind us and are blacks today broadly anti-Semitic?
I want to tell you clearly and explicitly, the answer to that question is “No.”
First, as is always true, celebrity statements get more attention and create the illusion that they represent the majority when they do not. James Pasch, director of the Cleveland office of the ADL tells me that these statements are not the ADL’s main concern. They are much more worried about the dramatic incident of every day anti-Semitic attacks, which continue to escalate dramatically in this country. In the Cleveland office’s region of the ADL, anti-Semitic attacks are up 100% since last year. But the overwhelming majority of these attacks are not committed by blacks.
Second, many Black leaders across the board have roundly condemned these remarks and made clear that they do not represent the black community.
But perhaps most important, we need to understand where these remarks come from.
The quote used by DeSean Jackson comes from a book published in 2017 or 2018 by a leader of the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement, a fringe group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled as a hate group. (By the way, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a civil rights organization founded by blacks). Canon’s messages come right out of the teachings of the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, founder of the Nation of Islam. We do not know DeSean and Cannon absorbed these teachings, though there is absolutely no indication that they have any connection to these groups. Indeed, it seems from their apologies that they absorbed these hateful ideas out of ignorance more than anything else. Both of these individuals have offered apologies. They have reached out to rabbis in their communities to seek to learn and better understand. Jackson has already met with a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who offered to take him to the Holocaust Museum, and is traveling to Auschwitz with another survivor organization to learn the difficult and painful history of our past.
This needs to be our answer. We need to recognize that the hatred that we see coming from prominent figures in the black community is not representative of the leaders of the community or of the community as a whole.
We need to recognize that it is so often the case that hatred comes out of ignorance and that the answer to hatred is education. We need to unmask the sources of these ideas and fight the organizations that promote them. To focus on Nick Cannon or DeSean Jackson distracts us from the real fight.
We have stopped speaking out about Farrakhan and the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement because they are not in the news. That was a mistake. We need to educate the public so that these hateful ideas cannot take root. We need to challenge leaders in the Black community to educate their children and their people about the dangers of hate. But we dare not also make the mistake of labeling all blacks as sharing the hateful views of the smaller number who attach to these groups.
Too often today, our response to seeing any anti-Semitism expressed by a any members of the Black community is one of two fold. Either, because we are committed to the civil rights movement and to racial justice in this country, we turn our heads away and ignore those remarks; or we condemn the makers of those remarks as evil, seek to end that person’s job and career, and we separate ourselves from the black community feeling self-satisfied that we do not need to engage with them because, “after all, they hate us.”
Neither of these is the right response. The right response is to remember that there is a deep enduring relationship between our communities. and that the majority of the members of each of our communities appreciate each other and love each other and recognize hate when they see it, and stand against it whether that hate is against blacks or against Jews. We need to remember that we share in this fight together.
Dr. Susannah Heschel is right. God, says, “Vengeance is Mine.” It is not ours. Screaming, yelling, demanding that people pay a price, separating ourselves from an entire population will not make hatred go away. The way that we make hatred go away is by exposing it to the sunlight.
I pray that DeSean Jackson and Nick Cannon continue to pursue the outreach and the education that will help them understand the falsehood of the words they wrote and spoke, and will turn them from opponents of the Jewish people to friends, lovers and advocates.
I pray that we can maintain a strong relationship between our communities, and that together we can eliminate the curse of hatred that hangs over this country. We can only do it together, but if we do it together, we can yet bring about a day in this country when all people will be treated with love, respect and dignity. We can win the day.