Coming Back to the Table

The Freedom Seder and the Possibility of Black-Jewish Solidarity After the Break

On April 4, 1969, one year to the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., approximately 800 people gathered in the basement of Lincoln Temple, a Black church in Washington, D.C., for an unusual Passover celebration. Jews and Christians, Blacks and whites, rabbis, ministers and movement activists read from a Haggadah written by Arthur Waskow, then a Jewish peace and civil-rights activist who would later become a rabbi. Waskow called it the Freedom Seder. The date was deliberate. Washington still carried the memory of the uprising that followed King’s murder; Black Power had transformed the language of racial politics; the Vietnam War had divided much of the liberal coalition; and the Black-Jewish relationship remembered through Selma and Freedom Summer was already under considerable strain. Yet on the anniversary of King’s death, people from communities whose political relationship was becoming more difficult gathered around the Jewish story of Exodus.¹

That gathering matters because it offers a different way to understand Black-Jewish solidarity. The familiar story often moves from the moral clarity of the Civil Rights Movement to rupture: rabbis marched with Black leaders, Jewish volunteers went South, Black Power arose, and the alliance weakened. The Freedom Seder complicates that chronology. It occurred after many of the tensions had become visible and suggested that solidarity might not require two communities to share the same history, occupy the same social position, or reach the same political conclusions. The harder possibility was that they might remain in relationship after disagreement.

Exodus as Shared Moral Language

Passover had always contained political possibilities because the Haggadah asks Jews to remember liberation from Egypt as more than an event belonging to distant ancestors. African Americans had also long recognized the power of Exodus. Enslaved Black Christians heard in Moses and Pharaoh a language of bondage and deliverance that slaveholders could not fully control; spirituals drew upon Egypt and the Promised Land; Harriet Tubman became known as “Moses”; and the Civil Rights Movement repeatedly interpreted its struggle through biblical images of wilderness, liberation and promised land. King’s final speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968, placed him explicitly inside that biblical geography when he said that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the Promised Land. He was assassinated the following day.²

Jewish and Black Americans therefore did not discover Exodus together in 1969. They came to the same ancient narrative by different historical roads. Waskow’s innovation was to place those roads beside one another within an actual Passover ritual. He later recalled walking through Washington after King’s murder, past federal troops deployed during the unrest, while preparing for Passover. The scene led him to interpret contemporary power through the imagery of Pharaoh and to compose a Haggadah that joined the traditional Exodus story to modern struggles for Black freedom, peace and human liberation. Published in 1969, the text became communal ritual at Lincoln Temple on the first anniversary of King’s death.³

The comparison contained an obvious danger, however. American slavery and the biblical slavery remembered at Passover are not the same historical event. The Holocaust cannot be collapsed into American slavery; antisemitism and anti-Black racism developed through different histories; Jewish exile is not another name for the African diaspora; and Palestinian displacement cannot simply be absorbed into any of these experiences. Solidarity becomes intellectually careless when it depends upon treating one people’s history as another people’s history with different names.

The Freedom Seder was most powerful when it suggested something more modest and demanding: memory can create moral recognition without historical equivalence. A community can allow its own experience of vulnerability to sharpen its ability to hear another community’s suffering without claiming that the two experiences are identical. That principle imposes obligations in both directions. Black Americans formed by the history of racial hatred have reason to recognize antisemitism when it appears within Black political spaces; Jews whose historical and religious memory repeatedly returns to slavery, exile and persecution have reason to hear Black demands for liberation even when those demands challenge institutions in which Jews themselves have found security. Shared memory does not erase difference. It can create responsibility across it.

Why Selma Cannot Carry the Relationship Forever

The celebrated history of Black-Jewish cooperation in the Civil Rights Movement deserves remembrance. Rabbis marched, Jewish lawyers participated in civil-rights litigation, Jewish organizations supported major legislation, and Jewish volunteers entered Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered alongside James Chaney. That record reflects real courage and should not be diminished.

But an alliance becomes fragile when its present legitimacy depends upon one generation continually reminding another what it did sixty years ago. Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement does not create a permanent obligation for Black Americans to agree with Jewish organizations about Israel, policing, affirmative action or American foreign policy. Black suffering under slavery and Jim Crow, by the same standard, cannot excuse antisemitism when it appears among Black individuals or political movements. History can explain why communities feel wounded or betrayed; it cannot make either community morally infallible.

Marc Dollinger’s research is useful because it complicates the simple story of an alliance flourishing under King and collapsing under Black Power. His work shows that some Jewish leaders understood important elements of Black militancy and Black self-determination, while Black Power itself helped stimulate more assertive forms of Jewish politics. Soviet Jewry activism, Jewish institutional renewal and a more self-conscious American Zionism developed in an environment in which minority communities were increasingly asserting the legitimacy of organizing around their own histories and interests.⁴ Black activists were insisting that Black equality did not require dissolving Black identity into interracial universalism; Jews were increasingly asserting that American inclusion did not require dissolving Jewish identity either. The problem came when the political consequences of those two forms of self-determination no longer pointed in the same direction.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the Limits of Easy Solidarity

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school conflict of 1968 exposed that difficulty with unusual clarity. Black and Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn sought greater authority over neighborhood schools they believed had failed their children. The United Federation of Teachers, whose membership was largely white and substantially Jewish, defended contractual protections and due process for teachers. Disputes over transfers and dismissals produced citywide strikes, while racist and antisemitic rhetoric intensified a conflict already burdened by competing ideas about education, democracy and institutional control. Historians have consequently treated Ocean Hill-Brownsville as a major turning point in New York racial politics and Black-Jewish relations.⁵

The episode becomes less useful if reduced to a morality play. Black and Puerto Rican parents had legitimate reasons to distrust a centralized school bureaucracy that had repeatedly failed their communities. Teachers had legitimate reasons to defend procedural protections against arbitrary removal. Antisemitic statements appeared and deserved condemnation; racism also shaped the larger political setting. Jewish organizations themselves disagreed over how broadly antisemitism should be attributed to the community-control movement. In November 1968, the Synagogue Council of America condemned both antisemitic and anti-Black rhetoric while warning against reducing either the teachers’ claims or the local board’s aspirations to racial hostility. Hundreds of teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many of them Jewish, likewise objected to treating the actions of a few extremists as representative of the entire district.⁶

The significance of the dispute lies precisely in this collision of legitimate claims. It is relatively easy to build coalition when both communities oppose an obvious injustice such as a segregated lunch counter or exclusion from the ballot. Coalition becomes harder when the disagreement concerns who controls an institution, how authority should be distributed, and which rights take precedence when reasonable claims conflict. The first Freedom Seder occurred only months after Ocean Hill-Brownsville had made those tensions unmistakable. Its importance therefore lies not in representing harmony before the break, but in modeling relationship after the break.

What Returning to the Table Requires

A march brings people together around a demand, and a political coalition generally brings them together around overlapping interests. A table asks something different. People remain in one another’s presence long enough to eat, remember, question and argue. The Passover table is particularly suggestive because the Haggadah itself is structured around questions and interpretation. Jewish tradition does not require argument to disappear in order for community to endure; it places argument within a structure capable of holding people together.

That may be a more realistic model for Black-Jewish relations than the expectation that solidarity requires agreement on every major question. Black Americans and American Jews can disagree about affirmative action, policing, nationalism, institutional power and American foreign policy. They can also disagree sharply about Israel and Palestine. For many Jews, Israel is connected to Jewish peoplehood, refuge, self-determination and a history in which political safety repeatedly proved fragile. Many Black Americans encounter the same conflict through Palestinian displacement, occupation, settlements, military power and the language of anticolonial struggle. Neither community is politically uniform, and Black Jews complicate any attempt to treat “Black” and “Jewish” as separate populations. What matters is that these different historical memories can generate different moral intuitions without automatically proving hatred or betrayal.

Returning to the table therefore cannot mean recovering an imagined golden age when Blacks and Jews marched together and agreed about everything; no such uncomplicated age existed. Nor can it mean maintaining peace by refusing to discuss Israel, antisemitism, racism or Palestinian rights. A relationship preserved only through silence is not durable solidarity. The more demanding standard is whether Black criticism of Israeli policy can remain free of antisemitism, whether Jewish concern about antisemitism can leave room for serious criticism of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights, whether Black self-determination can be affirmed without hostility toward Jews, and whether Jewish self-determination can be defended without indifference toward Palestinian suffering.

The Freedom Seder did not solve those problems in 1969, and a table cannot guarantee agreement now. Its achievement was smaller but more durable. It created a place where memory could become conversation rather than ammunition and where communities already experiencing political strain could remain present to one another. That is a more demanding vision of coalition than nostalgia for Selma because it does not depend upon innocence.

The history of Black-Jewish relations should therefore end neither at Selma nor at Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Selma represents extraordinary cooperation; Ocean Hill-Brownsville exposes the reality of conflicting interests. The Freedom Seder points toward the work required afterward: sustaining enough relationship that disagreement does not automatically create enemies. More than half a century later, that may be the capacity the alliance needs most—not agreement about everything, but the willingness to remain at the table long enough to understand both what we share and why we disagree.

Notes

1. Arthur Waskow, “Passover 2006: Every Generation, Pharaoh; Every Generation, Freedom,” Shalom Center; Deena Prichep, “In Freedom Seder, Jews and African-Americans Built a Tradition Together,” NPR, April 4, 2015. Both accounts place approximately 800 participants at Lincoln Temple in Washington, D.C., on April 4, 1969.
2. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” address delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.
3. Arthur Waskow, The Freedom Seder (1969; expanded edition, 1970); Waskow, “Passover 2006.”
4. Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018).
5. Charles S. Isaacs, Inside Ocean Hill-Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–69 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014); Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
6. “Synagogue Council Voices Concern over Conflict Between Jews and Negroes,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 12, 1968; “See Teachers Union Playing Down Black Anti-Semitism in Ocean Hill-Brownsville,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 19, 1969.