Black Lives Matter and the Test of Black-Jewish Solidarity

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 Israel

“Black Lives Matter” itself could mean several things: the moral assertion that Black lives matter, a broad decentralized protest movement, local organizations, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, or the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of dozens of Black-led organizations.

Those distinctions became especially important in 2016, when the Movement for Black Lives released its first comprehensive policy platform. Most of it addressed policing, incarceration, economic inequality, education and political power. A foreign-policy section, however, described Israel as an apartheid state, accused the United States of complicity in what it called genocide against Palestinians, opposed US military aid and directed readers toward boycott and divestment resources. The Black Lives Matter Network was only one organization within the larger coalition, but the distinctions were often lost in public debate.³

Several major Jewish organizations strongly objected to the Israel language while distinguishing that objection from the platform’s domestic racial-justice agenda. Other Jewish groups responded differently. Jewish Voice for Peace endorsed the platform, while Bend the Arc continued supporting the broader racial-justice movement but acknowledged the pain caused by the Israel section.⁴

The dispute exposed a deeper question about who defines the terms of solidarity. Some Black activists could ask why Jewish support appeared to weaken when Black political analysis extended to Palestinians. Some Jews could ask why commitment to Black equality should require accepting claims about Israel that they believed were historically or morally wrong.

The disagreement was no longer only about racism in the United States. It had become a dispute over whether solidarity required agreement on another people’s nationalism.

2020: A Broader Jewish Response

George Floyd’s killing on May 25, 2020 changed the political environment again. Jewish institutional engagement became considerably broader than the 2016 controversy alone might suggest.

The Reform movement declared that Black Lives Matter is a Jewish value, while also asserting that Jews could remain committed to Israel and work alongside people who disagreed with them about it. More than 600 Jewish organizations, denominations and congregations ultimately signed a public statement affirming Black Lives Matter and committing themselves to racial justice.⁵

The response was not uniform. Mainstream national Orthodox organizations did not join the large statement, although the Orthodox Union itself condemned Floyd’s killing, described racism as a continuing evil and called for action against racial injustice.⁶ That distinction matters. Supporting Black racial justice and formally identifying with Black Lives Matter were not always the same institutional decision.

The difference between 2016 and 2020 is therefore important. The earlier debate centered heavily on whether objectionable positions concerning Israel made participation impossible. By 2020, many Jewish organizations had concluded that disagreement with some activists should not prevent engagement with a much broader racial-justice movement. The expanded 2020 Movement for Black Lives platform also omitted Israel, Zionism and Palestine, further underscoring that neither the movement nor its policy agenda was static.⁷

Black Jews and the Limits of the Binary

The phrase “Black-Jewish relations” contains its own conceptual problem because it imagines Blacks on one side and Jews on the other. Black Jews reveal how inadequate that framework can be.

During the George Floyd protests, Black Jews were not outsiders choosing which community deserved their sympathy. They were experiencing America’s confrontation with racism while participating in Jewish institutions deciding how seriously to engage that confrontation. The Jews of Color Initiative repeatedly challenged an “us versus them” framework that treated Jewishness and Blackness as mutually exclusive identities.⁸

Policing made the contradiction especially visible. Black Jews could experience suspicion or racial profiling while entering Jewish spaces, including synagogues with heightened security. At the same time, many Jewish institutions had increased their reliance upon police and armed security following deadly antisemitic attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City and Monsey. The same police presence that one Jew experienced as protection could be experienced by another Jew as racialized scrutiny.⁹

That reality changes the nature of the discussion. Jewish institutions were not simply deciding whether to support another community’s struggle against racism. They were deciding how to respond to racial experiences occurring within Jewish life itself.

Policing and Different Experiences of Vulnerability

The policing debate also demonstrates why Israel cannot explain every Black-Jewish tension surrounding BLM.

For many Black Americans, policing is interpreted through histories of discriminatory enforcement, surveillance, brutality and incarceration. The Movement for Black Lives consequently advocated shifting resources away from policing and incarceration and toward community-based safety and social investment.

Many Jewish institutions encountered policing differently. After repeated antisemitic attacks, relationships with police, security grants and armed protection had become part of ordinary communal security. Calls to “defund the police” therefore sounded very different in a synagogue accustomed to security outside its doors than in a Black neighborhood where residents associated policing with over-enforcement.

Neither experience invalidates the other. They demonstrate a larger truth about coalition politics: different histories of vulnerability can produce different political understandings of the same institution.

That problem was already visible in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where Black parents and Jewish teachers could both understand themselves as defending hard-won rights. Black Lives Matter reproduced the dilemma in a different setting.

Israel as an Especially Difficult Fault Line

Israel nevertheless gave the contemporary disagreement unusual emotional force.

By the twenty-first century, Israel had become deeply embedded in organized American Jewish identity. For many Jews, Israel represented not simply foreign policy but Jewish peoplehood, refuge, security and national self-determination. Meanwhile, Palestine had become increasingly important within sections of Black progressive politics. Activists using anticolonial or intersectional frameworks connected Palestinian experiences with broader arguments about racism, policing, militarization and political domination.

These frameworks sometimes collided. Some Black activists interpreted Jewish resistance to anti-Zionist positions as evidence that Jewish solidarity reached its limit when Black politics challenged Israel. Some Jews interpreted pressure on racial-justice coalitions to embrace anti-Zionism as evidence that Jewish participation was becoming conditional upon distancing themselves from an important part of Jewish collective identity.

Neither interpretation described everyone. The danger came when the most difficult encounter with one individual or organization became evidence about an entire people.

The history of the 1960s should warn against exactly that move.

The Comparison Cuts Both Ways

Supporting a movement has never required endorsing everything within it.

Jewish organizations could support civil-rights legislation while condemning H. Rap Brown. They could oppose Jim Crow while criticizing SNCC’s position on Israel. Likewise, Jewish organizations in the Black Lives Matter era could believe that police violence and structural racial inequality demanded action while rejecting the Movement for Black Lives’ 2016 claims about Israel.

The principle also runs in the other direction. A Jew who rejected Brown’s rhetoric in 1967 was not thereby defending segregation. A Jewish organization objecting to the M4BL platform’s foreign-policy section in 2016 was not necessarily rejecting Black equality.

The trouble begins when disagreement over one issue becomes evidence that an ally has failed a comprehensive loyalty test.

That standard would not have survived the Civil Rights Movement itself.

The comparison between the two eras therefore has to be movement-to-movement, not King-to-BLM. Both movements contained ideological diversity, internal conflict, radical and moderate currents, arguments over nationalism, and leaders whom allies found admirable or objectionable. The contemporary movement differed in important ways: it was more decentralized, social media magnified individual voices, policing produced different experiences of vulnerability, and Israel had become a much more consequential component of American Jewish identity. But the central coalition problem remained recognizable.

Solidarity Without Ideological Uniformity

Black Lives Matter belongs naturally in the longer history of Black-Jewish relations because it exposed an old question under new conditions: What does solidarity require when allies disagree?

A durable coalition cannot require ideological uniformity. It requires enough agreement about particular injustices to make common action possible, enough independence for each community to retain its own political judgment, and boundaries strong enough that racism and antisemitism remain unacceptable even when disagreement becomes intense.

Supporting Black freedom never required Jews to endorse every Black leader in the 1960s. Supporting Black lives in the twenty-first century did not require endorsement of every organization or position associated with that phrase. By the same principle, Jewish disagreement about Israel, policing or political strategy did not automatically establish indifference to Black equality.

The harder test of solidarity comes after disagreement begins. It asks whether one community can still say to the other: I disagree with you here, perhaps profoundly, but I will not use that disagreement as permission to become indifferent to injustice directed at you.

That is less romantic than the photograph of King and Heschel marching together.

It may also be the only kind of solidarity capable of surviving history.

Notes

1. “SNCC Leader Says Negroes Will Resist and ‘Won’t Play Jews,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 28, 1967.
2. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Digital Gateway, “Palestine,” documenting SNCC’s 1967 newsletter article and subsequent statement on the Middle East.
3. “Black Lives Matter Platform Says Israel an ‘Apartheid State’ Committing ‘Genocide,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 3, 2016.
4. “Jewish Pro-BDS Group Unconditionally Endorses Black Lives Matter Platform,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 5, 2016.
5. Union for Reform Judaism, “Reform Jewish Leadership Statement: Black Lives Matter Is a Jewish Value,” June 12, 2020; Bend the Arc, “American Jews: Black Lives Matter,” August 2020.
6. Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, statement following the death of George Floyd, June 1, 2020.
7. Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “Black Lives Matter, American Jews, and Antisemitism,” 2020.
8. Jews of Color Initiative, “Not ‘Us Versus Them’: Black Jews, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Fight for Equity.”
9. Ben Sales, “Calls to Defund the Police Put Jewish Institutions in a Tough Position,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 12, 2020.