The Alliance Has to Survive the Disagreement
The task is not to recreate the Black-Jewish alliance of 1965, but to build a relationship capable of carrying the disagreements of 2026.
When Americans remember the historic relationship between Black and Jewish communities, we often return to a small collection of photographs. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marches beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery. Jewish college students travel south for Freedom Summer. Rabbis are arrested protesting segregation. Jewish organizations join Black organizations in campaigns for civil rights and voting rights.
Those photographs endure because they represent something historically real. Jewish activists constituted a disproportionate share of white participants in parts of the civil-rights movement. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism documents substantial Jewish participation in Freedom Summer, demonstrations against segregation and the Selma campaign, while Jewish organizations and philanthropists supported Black institutions and civil-rights organizations long before the 1960s.[1]
Yet photographs preserve moments better than they explain relationships.
Looking backward from 2026, it is easy to turn Selma into evidence of a simpler age in which Black and Jewish Americans shared a common political and moral agenda. They did not. The relationship contained disagreements even at its strongest, and later decades brought substantial conflicts over Black Power, urban education, affirmative action, electoral politics and Israel. Struggles in the Promised Land, edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West, presents Black-Jewish relations as a history of both cooperation and conflict.[2]
Romanticizing the old alliance can therefore make rebuilding harder. If we imagine an earlier age of agreement, every contemporary disagreement begins to look like betrayal. If disagreement was present from the beginning, the more useful question is what allowed people to disagree without abandoning one another.
I began this series asking what happened to the Black-Jewish alliance and whether it could be rebuilt. I am now less persuaded that restoration should be the goal. We cannot simply return to Selma. Selma is better understood as an inheritance: evidence that people formed by different histories can decide that another community’s claim to justice has become a claim upon them.
The question is what that inheritance requires now.
What Changed
The old relationship was never sustained by photographs alone. It had what we might now call relational infrastructure. Black and Jewish leaders encountered one another through civil-rights organizations, religious institutions, legal advocacy, philanthropy and political coalitions. Historians Cheryl Greenberg and Nancy Weiss document the importance of organizations such as the NAACP and National Urban League and the deliberate coalition building that occurred through civil-rights institutions.[3]
People knew one another before the crisis. Organizations worked together before the disagreement.
Much of today’s Black-Jewish encounter occurs under different circumstances, often through political controversy, social media, national organizations and arguments over events thousands of miles away. Enormous disagreements are therefore being placed upon relationships that may not have enough institutional connection underneath them.
Israel is among the most consequential of those disagreements. For many American Jews, Israel is bound up with history, peoplehood, security, family and Jewish identity. Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of Jewish adults in its 2019–2020 survey considered caring about Israel essential or important to what being Jewish means to them. Yet attitudes varied substantially by age, denomination and political affiliation. Caring about Israel cannot be equated with agreement about an Israeli government or a single political program.[4]
The distinction became considerably harder to maintain after October 7, 2023. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups deliberately attacked civilians, committed murder and cruel treatment and took hostages. In examining Israel’s subsequent operations in Gaza, the commission also concluded that Israeli authorities and forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. Israel has disputed numerous international allegations and legal characterizations concerning its military campaign.[5] Whatever political conclusions one draws, neither the crimes of October 7 nor Palestinian civilian suffering can responsibly be made invisible.
This creates a particular challenge because people can enter the same conversation carrying different historical memories. Jewish Americans may begin with the vulnerability exposed on October 7 and a history in which Jewish security has repeatedly proved fragile. Black Americans may approach the conflict through histories of racial hierarchy, displacement, unequal state power or struggles for self-determination.
Neither description encompasses everyone. There is no single Black position on Israel and Palestine any more than there is a single Jewish one. Some Black Americans are strongly attached to Israel; others identify deeply with Palestinians. American Jews themselves hold widely differing views about Israel. And Black Jews expose the inadequacy of speaking as though “Black” and “Jewish” describe two populations standing on opposite sides of a table.
American politics adds another difficulty. Earlier in this series, I examined disputes involving Black Lives Matter, DEI, antisemitism, voting rights, anti-Black racism and AIPAC. Different communities do not necessarily rank these political concerns in the same order. Pew found in 2024 that 82 percent of Black adults believed President Biden should give greater priority to domestic than foreign policy, while education, the economy, Social Security, health-care costs, poverty, crime and racial issues ranked prominently among their concerns.[6]
That does not establish which priorities are morally superior. It helps explain why political choices that appear coherent within one constituency may produce friction in another.
Jewish Americans may ask why antisemitism is sometimes minimized or subjected to political tests that would be unacceptable if applied to other prejudices. Black Americans may ask why anti-Black racism and racial inequality sometimes seem to recede when other priorities enter the discussion. Supporters of Israel can experience indifference toward October 7 as indifference toward Jewish lives, while supporters of Palestinian rights can experience indifference toward Palestinian civilian suffering as evidence that Palestinian lives matter less.
Relationships deteriorate not only because people disagree, but because people become convinced that what they regard as fundamental does not matter to the other.
Surviving the Room
That leads to what I have come to regard as a useful test of moral consistency: Can our principles survive the room?
Imagine discussing Israel and Palestine in a Black church, then in a synagogue, then with Palestinians, and finally in a political meeting where every sentence may carry partisan consequences. The audience changes, and the history most emotionally present changes with it. Our principles should not.
That does not mean ignoring context. Listening seriously requires understanding why different histories make particular words, events and fears carry different weight. But contextual sensitivity should not become moral inconsistency.
I should be able to condemn the deliberate killing and kidnapping of civilians on October 7 while sitting with people principally concerned about Gaza, and speak seriously about Palestinian civilian suffering while sitting with people still living with the trauma of October 7. I should be able to affirm Israel’s security and Jewish collective life without making Palestinian dignity conditional, and affirm Palestinian dignity and self-determination without treating Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate.
The same standard applies closer to home. Criticism of AIPAC should remain criticism of AIPAC rather than becoming collective judgment of American Jews. Criticism of a Black political leader should not become an indictment of Black Americans. Antisemitism does not become acceptable because it comes from a political ally, nor does anti-Black racism become less objectionable because confronting it complicates a coalition.
This is not an argument that every dispute has a comfortable middle position. People will continue to disagree about Zionism, Israeli governments, Palestinian statehood, American military assistance, affirmative action, DEI and other questions. Sometimes principle requires telling a friend or institution that it is wrong.
What relationship changes is the ease with which disagreement becomes excommunication.
That distinction also helps clarify what we mean by an “alliance.” A coalition can be built around a particular political objective. Solidarity asks something more: that another community’s welfare retain moral significance even when interests diverge. Relationship must go further still, because it has to remain possible after the coalition loses a vote, political priorities change or friends discover that they profoundly disagree.
That may be what Black and Jewish Americans most need to recover.
Building Something New
For that reason, dinners, panels, commemorations and interfaith gatherings, valuable as they are, cannot carry the full weight of rebuilding Black-Jewish relations. It is relatively easy to celebrate a shared past. The more revealing moment arrives when the conversation reaches an issue on which everyone believes something fundamental is at stake.
What is needed is relational infrastructure strong enough to exist before that moment: congregations that know one another before a crisis, clergy who have one another’s telephone numbers before they need to issue a public statement, students who have worked together before controversy divides a campus, and civic, business and nonprofit leaders solving problems together that have nothing to do with Israel or antisemitism.
The purpose is not to manufacture agreement. It is to make disagreement survivable.
That is why I no longer think the proper goal is restoration of the Black-Jewish alliance. The original coalition arose under particular historical conditions. Since then came the Six-Day War, Black Power, affirmative-action conflicts, the growth of Black electoral power, decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, changing American Jewish politics, Black Lives Matter, rising concern about antisemitism, October 7 and Gaza.
We cannot recover an earlier photograph by pretending those developments never happened.
Something new has to be built from what the history has taught us. It should take Jewish vulnerability seriously without requiring silence about Palestinians, and take Black vulnerability seriously without assigning Jewish Americans collective responsibility for governments or organizations they may or may not support. It should recognize that neither community is politically or ideologically uniform and that Black Jews, interfaith families, Black Christians deeply connected to Israel and Jewish critics of Israeli governments complicate every easy binary.
Most importantly, each community must resist caring about the other’s fears only when those fears reinforce its own politics.
Antisemitism must remain unacceptable when it comes from political allies. Anti-Black racism must remain unacceptable under the same circumstances. Palestinian civilians cannot become abstractions because Hamas committed atrocities, and Israeli civilians cannot become abstractions because one condemns Israeli government policy.
Those principles have practical consequences. Jewish leaders should be able to confront anti-Black racism when no political advantage follows. Black leaders should be able to confront antisemitism when it appears among people with whom they otherwise sympathize. Supporters of Israel should be able to acknowledge Palestinian suffering without believing they have diminished the horror of October 7. Advocates for Palestinians should be able to acknowledge Jewish vulnerability without surrendering criticism of Israeli policy.
None of this requires political agreement. It requires moral consistency.
That brings me back to the photograph with which this series began. Heschel and King matter not simply because a Jewish rabbi and a Black Christian minister once walked beside each other. The photograph endures because each reached beyond the immediate boundaries of his own community and concluded that another people’s struggle placed a claim upon him.
The question for 2026 is not whether Black and Jewish Americans can eliminate disagreement. We cannot. The more demanding question is whether we can build enough relationship, trust and shared moral obligation that disagreement does not erase mutual concern.
If Selma still has something to teach us, perhaps it is that. Honoring its moral imagination does not require reproducing the politics of 1965. It requires deciding, under very different conditions, whether the suffering, security and dignity of people beyond our own community can still make claims upon us.
That would not restore the old alliance.
It would build a relationship capable of carrying what comes next.
Selected Sources and Research Notes
[1] Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, “A Brief History of Jews and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.” Documents Jewish participation in Freedom Summer, demonstrations against segregation, the Selma campaign and broader civil-rights work.
[2] Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1997). Examines cooperation and conflict in Black-Jewish relations, including Black Power, affirmative action, urban politics and Israel.
[3] Cheryl Greenberg, “Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the Twentieth Century,” and Nancy J. Weiss, “Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Salzman and West, Struggles in the Promised Land. Documents the institutional and organizational foundations of Black-Jewish civil-rights cooperation.
[4] Pew Research Center, “U.S. Jews’ Connections With and Attitudes Toward Israel,” May 11, 2021. Pew found that 82 percent of U.S. Jewish adults considered caring about Israel essential or important to their Jewish identity while documenting substantial differences by age, denomination and political affiliation.
[5] United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, 2024 reports. The commission investigated crimes committed during the October 7 attacks and alleged violations committed during subsequent Israeli military operations. Israel has contested numerous international findings concerning its conduct and their legal characterization.
[6] Kiana Cox, “An Early Look at Black Voters’ Views on Biden, Trump and Election 2024,” Pew Research Center, May 20, 2024. Pew found that 82 percent of Black adults surveyed prioritized domestic over foreign policy and documented their major domestic policy concerns.