Why Supporting a Movement Has Never Meant Supporting Everything Within It

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand Black-Jewish relations is to compare the Civil Rights Movement at its most idealized with Black Lives Matter at its most controversial. The comparison usually runs like this: in the 1960s, Jews stood beside Martin Luther King Jr.; half a century later, many Jews hesitated to embrace Black Lives Matter. The implication is that either Jews abandoned an earlier commitment to racial justice or the Black freedom movement became something fundamentally different.

The problem begins with the comparison itself. The Civil Rights Movement was never simply Martin Luther King Jr. It included the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, local movements, integrationists, Black nationalists, pacifists and advocates of armed self-defense. It included King, but it also included Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Jewish organizations supported major parts of that movement while opposing some of its leaders, rhetoric and political positions.

The better question is therefore not why Jews once supported a Black movement without reservation and later stopped. They never supported every part of either movement without reservation. The real question is whether disagreement with particular Black leaders, organizations or political positions should justify withdrawal from the broader struggle against racial injustice—and whether Jewish disagreement with one part of a Black political movement should be interpreted as opposition to Black equality itself.

That question existed in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter made it visible again.

The Civil Rights Movement Was Never One Thing

Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement was substantial. Jewish organizations supported civil-rights legislation; rabbis marched; lawyers participated in litigation; and Jewish volunteers were disproportionately represented among white participants in Freedom Summer. Yet historical memory has gradually simplified the movement Jews joined.

By 1967, SNCC looked very different from the organization many Jewish activists had entered earlier in the decade. H. Rap Brown had become its chairman and embraced rhetoric far removed from King’s disciplined nonviolence. During a July 1967 press conference, Brown compared white repression of Black Americans to Nazism and declared that Black people would not “play Jews.” Jewish reporting understandably treated the remark as insulting to Jews who had faced Nazi persecution.¹

SNCC’s position on Israel created another rupture. Its June-July 1967 newsletter published a sharply anti-Zionist treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, followed by a more formal August statement critical of Zionism and American support for Israel. SNCC’s own historical archive preserves both the controversy and the internal debate over the material.²

Jewish organizations could therefore support Black voting rights, oppose segregation and condemn racial violence while rejecting Brown’s rhetoric or SNCC’s position on Israel. Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of the American Jewish Congress argued in late 1967 against both Black separatists who wanted whites out of the movement and Jews tempted to use Black militancy as a reason to retreat from civil rights.

That earlier history matters because Jewish solidarity was never synonymous with endorsement of every Black leader. Nor were Jews themselves politically uniform. Some were deeply involved in civil rights; others were more conservative or became resistant when racial change moved from Southern segregation into northern schools, neighborhoods and institutions.

Black Lives Matter did not invent these tensions. It placed them in a different political environment.

2016 and the Question of........

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