I am starting this new series on Black Jewish relations because the recent efforts of Van Jones, a CNN commentator and the person who received $100 million from McKinsey and Bezos, have caught my attention and imagination. What he is trying to do could be game-changing. He has had one meeting of Blacks and Jews in Miami, and another is scheduled for Chicago. I am trying to get an invite as either a participant or a journalist. Van Jones’s work is not the only one. The Black Jewish Black Christian Leadership Council on Israel Relations (BCLCIR) is another group planning to take 500 Black Christians to the Holy Land in Nov. They have another 400 on the waiting list.  More trips are planned. The group describes itself as a Black Christian, pro-Zionist group.  Those who came up with it and those who funded the trip came up with a brilliant idea, as Black Christians love Jesus, Holy Land tours, and probably haven’t translated the love for Jesus into support for Israel.  What follows is a series on Blacks and Jews.

From Selma to the Dinner Table: The Long Effort to Rebuild the Black–Jewish Alliance

Prologue: how Black–Jewish reconciliation evolved from coalition to dialogue, memory, Rekindle and EXODUS

This prologue traces the recurring effort to rebuild Black–Jewish cooperation and asks what the newest generation—Rekindle and EXODUS—must learn from earlier dialogue movements.

I come to Black–Jewish reconciliation from both sides of the doorway. I spent roughly twenty-five years in Black Baptist ministry and served in leadership roles in the Black Ministerial Alliance and the Boston Ten Point Coalition. In recent years I also became a member of Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, began attending Shabbat with unusual regularity, and participated in Rekindle and an EXODUS dinner.

Those experiences have changed the question for me. I am less interested in whether Blacks and Jews can say gracious things about one another than in whether we can understand why two communities with so much shared history can experience the same event so differently—and still remain in relationship.

When Van Jones brings Black and Jewish leaders together through the EXODUS Leadership Forum, or when participants enter a Rekindle Fellowship cohort for months of structured conversation, they are joining a much longer history of attempts to answer that question.

The famous photographs make it easy to think that history begins with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching together from Selma to Montgomery. It does not. Nor did efforts to preserve or rebuild Black–Jewish cooperation end when the civil-rights alliance began to fracture in the late 1960s.

Can two communities with important shared interests, different histories and increasingly serious disagreements still work together?

The chronology is instructive because every generation has tried a somewhat different answer.

Black and Jewish cooperation existed well before Selma.

Jewish figures participated in the founding and early development of the NAACP. Jewish civil-rights organizations filed briefs in desegregation cases. Black and Jewish organizations collaborated on employment discrimination, housing, education and voting rights. During Freedom Summer, Jewish students and clergy participated at levels far beyond their percentage of the American population.

The alliance reached its symbolic high point during the King-Heschel era.

But even then, it was never as uncomplicated as later memory suggested.

Black and Jewish organizations differed over affirmative action, community control, Black nationalism and the meaning of integration. Urban relationships could place Jews and Blacks on opposite sides of landlord-tenant, merchant-customer, teacher-parent and employer-worker relationships. Israel increasingly introduced another source of tension.

By the late 1960s, the model of simply joining forces against Southern segregation was no longer sufficient.

The civil-rights movement had succeeded enough that the harder questions increasingly concerned who exercised power, how opportunity should be distributed and what equality........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)