Jesse Jackson, the American civil rights leader who died on February 17 at the age of 84, had a mercurial relationship with the Jewish community in the United States.

An ordained Baptist minister who was born and came of age when segregation and Jim Crow laws and regulations oppressed African Americans, he was a protege of Martin Luther King Jr., the preeminent black activist.

Jackson was a founder of the “rainbow coalition,” a broad movement of voters from a variety of religious and social backgrounds dedicated to combating racism, police brutality, substandard housing and poverty.

A brash and dynamic orator, he achieved nation-wide recognition and stature in the 1960s, when American Jews played a fairly prominent and disproportionate role in the movement for racial equality.

This period of cooperation between Jews and African Americans, which started in the early 20th century, was put to the test after the 1967 Six Day War, when increasing numbers of black intellectuals sided with the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel.

Jackson raised questions about US military aid to Israel and endorsed a two-state solution at a time when that notion was beyond the pale in Israel and the United States. In retrospect, his support for Palestinian statehood was visionary.

In 1979, in a provocative move that aroused the anger of the Israeli government and mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States, he met the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, in Lebanon.

Jackson’s objective was to broker ties between the PLO and the United States, which would not engage with the PLO unless its leadership acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and abandoned terrorism.

Jackson, in 1984, put himself forward as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” he said at the party’s convention.

His campaign imploded when The Washington Post reported that he had used the slurs “Hymie” and “Hymietown” in reference to Jews and New York City.

Jackson uttered these offensive words during a supposedly private conversation with one of its reporters.

At first, Jackson claimed he had “no recollection” of his derogatory remarks. But on the eve of the New Hampshire primaries, he addressed a Jewish audience at Temple Adath Yeshurun and admitted he had made them.

While Jackson insisted that his comments could not be “remotely construed as being antisemitic or anti-Israel,” he acknowledged that they were “insensitive and wrong,” and that “off-color” comments had no place in a political campaign. “It’s human to err, divine to forgive,” Jackson said. “I appeal to you as a Jewish community to find yourself in the rainbow coalition,” he said, referring to his diverse supporters.

According to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report, Jackson’s explanation fell flat. As the reporter wrote, “Many of the 200-plus people who crowded into the small synagogue appeared dubious of Jackson’s candor, inasmuch as he waited more than a month to admit to the offensive remark and finally did so less than 48 hours before the nation’s first presidential primary.”

While Jackson did not win the nomination, his bid for the presidency paved the way for Barack Obama’s victory 25 years later and Kamala Harris’ subsequent ascendancy to the vice presidency under President Joe Biden.

Four years later, when he ran again, he was dogged once more by the issue of antisemitism. It surfaced when Vice President George Bush suggested that Democrats had not forcefully condemned antisemitism.

Jackson’s refusal to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, left a sour taste in the mouths of Jewish Americans as well.

Farrakhan, his longtime associate, described Judaism as a “gutter religion” and claimed that Jews were in the forefront of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 17th century onward.

While Jackson and his spokespersons denounced Farrakhan’s antisemitism, they did not condemn Farrakhan himself.

Despite these unpleasant incidents, Jackson managed to repair his relations with the Jewish community. By the 1990s, he had rebuilt trust with segments of it, delivering speeches at synagogues and Jewish community forums, participating in Holocaust remembrance events, and denouncing antisemitism at the Democratic National Convention and a World Jewish Congress meeting in Brussels.

In his speech to the World Jewish Congress, he condemned antisemitism, praised Zionism as a “liberation movement,” and called for a renewal of the Jewish and African American struggle against racism.

After Jackson’s death, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a civil rights organization, eulogized him while acknowledging the “wrinkles” in his record.

“It’s no secret that there were very painful moments in Rev. Jackson’s relationship with the Jewish community,” the council noted in a statement. “He is a testament to engagement, even when there are deep disagreements and pain. He went on to be a key ally to the Jewish community, underscoring the urgency of building strong, long-lasting alliances against bigotry wherever it exists.”

The New York Times summarized his legacy is an evocative sentence: “Through the power of his language and his preternatural energy and ambition, he became a moral and political force in a racially ambiguous era, when Jim Crow was still a vivid memory and Black political power was more an aspiration than a reality.”

Jackson, his glaring flaws notwithstanding, was an indefatigable fighter for freedom, justice and equality.

He will be remembered for his role in improving the lot of African Americans and revitalizing American democracy.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)