In the opening decades of the 20th century, Black and Jewish journalists began documenting ominous similarities in the ways their communities were targeted by violence. In Eastern Europe, there were pogroms against Jews. In the United States, there were lynchings and race riots against African Americans. A February 11, 1911, headline in The Afro-American Ledger equated “Jew Baiting in Russia” with “Negro Baiting” in the US. Many other American newspapers of the period — Black, Jewish and Yiddish — also made this comparison in their coverage.

Filmmaker Sara Wolitzky described these articles as one of the historical surprises she encountered while working on the new PBS documentary series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History.” Directed and executive produced by Wolitzky and fellow filmmaker Phil Bertelsen, the four-part series runs throughout February, which is Black History Month.

Episode one, “Let My People Go,” aired on February 3. Surveying the historical Black-Jewish relationship, which arguably peaked in closeness during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, the episode found previous connections between Blacks and Jews in the US, including in early 20th-century newspaper articles.

“Both [communities] were very aware of the plight of the other,” Wolitzky told The Times of Israel over Zoom. “Black newspapers, and Yiddish or Jewish newspapers, were reporting on racial terror in their respective communities — ‘Pogroms going on in Eastern Europe are like what’s happening to us in America,’ and vice versa.”

She added, “Even if Jews had a relative amount of safety at that time in America, there was a commonality [with Blacks] in their persecution, and mutual sympathy.”

The series was conceived by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, during a much more recent period of racist strife in the US: The 2017 “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which marchers waved Confederate flags and shouted anti-Jewish slogans. Gates is an executive producer on the series, as well as writer and host.

“Dr. Gates was always of the belief that anti-Black racism and antisemitism were these two streams under the footbridge of Western culture, as he says in the film,” Wolitzky said. “That moment [in Charlottesville] was on the heels of the........

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