The Condemnation Test

Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Billy Graham, and the Black-Jewish Rift

Black-Jewish relations did not rupture at a single moment. By the late 1960s, Black Power had already altered the terms of an alliance forged during the Civil Rights Movement. Black activists increasingly insisted that cooperation with white liberals, including Jews, could not mean surrendering the right to define Black political interests, choose Black leaders, or build independent Black institutions. Many Jews accepted the legitimacy of Black self-determination while becoming increasingly uneasy with particular leaders, rhetoric, and political positions emerging around it.

The tension was visible well before the 1980s. H. Rap Brown, who became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1967, used language many Jews regarded as deeply offensive, including a comparison in which he said that if whites intended to behave like Nazis, Black Americans would not “play Jews.” SNCC’s increasingly critical position on Zionism after the Six-Day War created additional conflict. Its controversial 1967 newsletter article on Palestine was not initially an authorized organizational statement, but SNCC subsequently issued a more formal Middle East position incorporating much of the critique. Jewish organizations could therefore support Black voting rights and the dismantling of segregation while rejecting rhetoric and foreign-policy positions associated with particular Black leaders.

That distinction became more difficult to maintain during Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign and the rise of Louis Farrakhan. The controversy was not simply about whether offensive statements had been made. It became an argument about the obligations of allies toward prejudice within their own communities and, more difficult still, about what should happen after prejudice had been condemned.

Four questions became entangled. When is an apology sufficient? When does condemning a person’s words require repudiating the person who spoke them? What does reciprocity require of allied communities confronting prejudice among their own? And after an offense has been acknowledged, what makes restoration possible?

By the middle of the decade, those questions had become what might be called the condemnation test of Black-Jewish solidarity.

Jackson, “Hymietown,” and the Apology Test

During Jackson’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Washington Post reported that he had privately referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York as “Hymietown.” Jackson acknowledged using the terms and, during an appearance at a synagogue in New Hampshire, described the characterization as insensitive and wrong. He also expressed concern that the episode could damage Black-Jewish relationships that had taken years to build.

Black Americans did not respond simply by excusing the remark. A Lou Harris survey later reported that 58 percent of Black respondents deplored Jackson’s language, compared with 76 percent of Jewish respondents. The difference was significant, but so was the substantial Black majority judging the remark negatively. The historical record therefore does not support a simple account in which Jews condemned Jackson while Black America defended him.

The sharper disagreement concerned what should follow an apology.

For some Black Americans, Jackson had committed an offense, acknowledged it, sought forgiveness, and should not have been permanently defined by the incident. That position reflected not indifference to antisemitism but a belief that political and moral reconciliation have to leave room for repentance. If apology can never alter a relationship, then forgiveness becomes largely theoretical.

Many Jews experienced the controversy differently because Jackson’s language did not stand alone. His statements about Israel had already caused concern, and Louis Farrakhan, an outspoken supporter of Jackson’s campaign, was making comments about Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Adolf Hitler that made Jackson’s relationship with him increasingly difficult to treat as a separate matter.

Jackson himself attempted to draw that distinction. He rejected Farrakhan’s praise of Hitler and later called Farrakhan’s descriptions of Judaism and Israel morally indefensible, yet he resisted demands that he personally repudiate Farrakhan or reject Farrakhan’s political support. Jackson argued that the opinions of an individual supporter should not automatically be attributed to the candidate that person supported.

The controversy therefore shifted away from the original slur. Jackson had apologized for what Jackson said. The unresolved question became whether he was also responsible for what Farrakhan said and, if so, what an adequate response required.

That was no longer simply an apology test. It had become a repudiation test.

Farrakhan, Black Empowerment, and Antisemitism

Farrakhan’s political appeal cannot be understood solely through his statements about Jews. His message emphasized Black economic independence, personal discipline, stronger families, institution-building, and freedom from dependence upon white-controlled political and economic systems. Those themes belonged to a long tradition of Black nationalism and resonated with people who believed that integration had opened institutions without transferring sufficient ownership or power.

That broader message helps explain why some Black Americans did not regard Farrakhan’s antisemitism as sufficient reason to reject everything he said. It does not make the anti-Jewish material incidental.

In 1984, Farrakhan described Hitler as a “very great man” in the limited sense that Hitler had rebuilt German power, while also acknowledging Hitler’s crimes against Jews. He subsequently attacked Judaism as a “gutter religion,” described Israel as an outlaw state, claimed that Jewish leaders possessed abnormal influence over American government, and portrayed Jews as obstacles to independent Black political power.

Historical analysis needs to distinguish among several responses to that rhetoric. Some Black leaders condemned it directly. Others rejected the antisemitic content but continued to value Farrakhan’s message of Black self-reliance. Still others believed Jewish organizations exaggerated his importance or attempted to use condemnation of Farrakhan to police the boundaries of legitimate Black leadership.

We cannot know how many people privately accepted Farrakhan’s claims about Jews, and there is no need to speculate. The public record is sufficient to establish that his Black-nationalist message attracted audiences even after his views about Jews had become widely known.

For many Jews, that distinction was itself troubling. They did not necessarily believe that everyone attracted to Farrakhan shared his antisemitism. What disturbed them was that repeated anti-Jewish rhetoric did not always become disqualifying. If Jews were expected to oppose racism within Jewish institutions, many believed Black-Jewish solidarity required Black leaders to respond just as firmly when prejudice against Jews appeared within Black political life.

This was where a disagreement over Farrakhan became a disagreement over reciprocity.

Condemning the Words and Repudiating the Speaker

Jackson condemned Farrakhan’s statements more strongly as the 1984 campaign proceeded. In late June, his campaign characterized Farrakhan’s remarks about Jews and Judaism as reprehensible and morally indefensible and declared that they had no place in Jackson’s thinking or campaign. Jackson nevertheless continued to distinguish between repudiating a person’s statements and repudiating the person. He argued that he could reject Farrakhan’s language without accepting the proposition that he was obligated to renounce Farrakhan’s support or deny the possibility of personal redemption.

For many Jewish leaders, the distinction seemed increasingly inadequate because Farrakhan’s comments were not a single offense followed by an apology. They constituted a pattern. The argument from their perspective was therefore not that Jewish organizations should select Black leaders, but that an ally should not maintain political ambiguity toward someone who repeatedly directed hostility toward Jews.

Some Black leaders heard a different implication. Black Power had taught that Black politics could not remain dependent upon validation from outside constituencies. A demand that Jackson move from condemning Farrakhan’s words to repudiating Farrakhan himself could therefore be understood as a demand that Jewish organizations determine which Black figures were acceptable participants in Black political life.

Farrakhan reinforced that interpretation by portraying Jewish criticism of him as proof of excessive Jewish influence over Black politicians and American institutions.

The result was a circular conflict. Jewish pressure for repudiation could be cited by Farrakhan as evidence for his claims about Jewish influence, while Black reluctance to isolate him could be cited by Jews as evidence that antisemitism was being tolerated. Each response seemed to confirm the other community’s suspicion.

Black America, however, never spoke with one voice on the question. Black religious and political leaders did condemn Farrakhan, sometimes sharply. Others resisted what they regarded as preemptive or externally imposed denunciations while disagreeing with his statements.

The important division was therefore not between a Jewish community opposed to antisemitism and a Black community accepting it. It concerned what form accountability should take and who possessed the authority to demand it.

Billy Graham and the Restoration Test

A very different controversy nearly two decades later helps clarify what was at stake.

In 2002, the National Archives released recordings of a private 1972 Oval Office conversation between the Rev. Billy Graham and President Richard Nixon. Graham, perhaps the most prominent American evangelist of his generation, agreed with Nixon’s complaints about Jewish influence in American media. Graham spoke of a Jewish “stranglehold” on the media that he believed needed to be broken and participated in a conversation containing longstanding stereotypes about Jewish influence.

The disclosure was particularly painful because Graham had cultivated relationships with Jewish leaders, publicly supported Israel, advocated on behalf of Soviet Jews, and had been honored for his interreligious work. The problem was therefore not merely that Graham had said something offensive. The tapes appeared to reveal private beliefs sharply at odds with the public relationship many Jewish leaders believed they had with him.

Graham apologized.

His first apology did not settle the matter. He said he did not remember the conversation, deeply regretted the remarks attributed to him, and apologized for the offense they had caused. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, publicly criticized that response as inadequate, arguing that Graham needed to take fuller responsibility for the prejudice expressed on the tapes. Other Jewish leaders responded differently; some emphasized Graham’s subsequent record and the Jewish obligation to take repentance seriously.

Graham then went further. In a second statement, he said he totally repudiated the comments, acknowledged that he had been wrong not to challenge Nixon, and explicitly asked the Jewish community to consider the actions of his subsequent life alongside the words recorded in the Oval Office. Foxman accepted the second apology, though some Jewish leaders continued to believe that the episode permanently complicated Graham’s legacy.

The Graham episode is important precisely because it does not offer a simple story of instant forgiveness. His first apology was challenged. Jewish leaders demanded something more than regret: acknowledgment, repudiation, and evidence that the remarks did not represent his subsequent conduct. Graham responded with a stronger apology, and substantial reconciliation followed. Years later, Jewish leaders who remembered the incident continued to describe both the seriousness of the offense and the sincerity of Graham’s remorse.

That experience creates an illuminating comparison with Jackson.

If the Jackson controversy had concerned only “Hymietown,” the Graham episode suggests that an offensive statement need not permanently define a public figure. Both men said something antisemitic. Both apologized. Both had broader public records that their defenders believed should matter in assessing the offense.

But Jackson’s controversy did not remain confined to Jackson’s own words.

By the time Jewish organizations were demanding stronger action, the issue had become his relationship with Farrakhan, whose anti-Jewish statements were contemporary, repeated, public, and not followed by the kind of repudiation Graham eventually offered. Jewish leaders were therefore no longer deciding simply whether Jackson could be forgiven for something Jackson had said. They were asking what Jackson’s continued relationship with another leader meant.

The distinction is important. Graham was ultimately being asked to account for his own words. Jackson was increasingly being asked to account for both his own words and the words of someone else.

The cases are therefore not equivalent.

Yet the comparison still raises an important question about how alliances handle moral failure. Graham was eventually allowed by many Jewish leaders to be considered in the context of an entire life rather than permanently through his worst recorded conversation. Jackson and some Black leaders believed they were asking for something related: the ability to acknowledge wrongdoing without allowing one incident—or one difficult political relationship—to define an entire leader, movement, or community.

The Graham case therefore adds another dimension to the condemnation test. Condemnation cannot be the end of the process if reconciliation is one of the purposes of an alliance. There must also be some account of restoration.

What constitutes genuine repentance? Does an apology require an explicit repudiation of the original belief? Does subsequent conduct matter? How much time must pass? And, perhaps most important, can allies agree on when an offense has been sufficiently addressed?

Reciprocity and the Case of Meir Kahane

The argument over Black political autonomy becomes more complicated when placed beside the response of organized American Jewry to Meir Kahane.

Kahane, an American-born rabbi who became a member of the Israeli Knesset, advocated removing Arabs from Israel and promoted a politics that major Jewish organizations regarded as explicitly racist. American Jewish institutions did not merely disagree with him. In 1985, twelve major national organizations issued a joint statement condemning his politics as racism, demagoguery, and a perversion of Jewish ethical values. Jewish community organizations around the country frequently refused him institutional platforms and publicly declared that he did not represent American Jewry or Judaism.

Israeli opposition was also substantial. Prime Minister Shimon Peres described Kahanism as a grave danger to Israeli democracy, while the Chief Rabbinical Council rejected Kahane’s racist approach toward Arabs.

Kahane and Farrakhan should not be treated as interchangeable figures. Their organizations, political settings, ideologies, constituencies, and relationships to institutional power were different. The comparison nevertheless raises a legitimate question about reciprocity. Jewish organizations that asked Black leaders to isolate Farrakhan could point to their own willingness to isolate a prominent Jewish extremist.

That fact complicates the claim that Jewish demands were merely attempts to control Black leadership. It does not eliminate the Black autonomy concern.

Jewish institutions unquestionably possessed the authority to determine whether Kahane represented their organizations and their understanding of Jewish religious and ethical tradition. They could exclude him from their platforms and say that he did not speak for them.

The more difficult question was whether those institutions could determine what an equivalent Black response to Farrakhan had to look like.

There is a meaningful difference between saying, “We have repudiated racism among our own, and we expect you to confront antisemitism among yours,” and saying, “We will determine which of your leaders must be excluded before our alliance can continue.”

The first is an argument about reciprocity. The second implicates political autonomy.

The controversy persisted partly because Blacks and Jews did not always agree about where one ended and the other began.

The issue was consequently no longer whether antisemitism or racism was wrong. Both communities had leaders willing to say that clearly. The dispute concerned where moral accountability ended and political authority began.

The Condemnation Test

Attempts at reconciliation did occur. Jackson called for Black-Jewish dialogue, participated in meetings with Jewish leaders, and emphasized the extensive domestic agenda on which Blacks and Jews continued to agree. Jewish leaders also sought to repair the relationship rather than simply sever it. Yet the Farrakhan issue remained unresolved.

A 1987 public exchange between Jackson and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum captured the enduring disagreement. Both men called for renewed Black-Jewish cooperation, but Tanenbaum continued to press Jackson about Farrakhan. Jackson replied that Farrakhan and the “Hymietown” episode, for which he had apologized, should not become the “litmus test” for the entire Black-Jewish relationship. He insisted that antisemitism and racism should be rejected unequivocally while arguing that the communities should not allow one figure to eclipse their broader shared interests.

Jackson’s language identified the central problem, even if it did not resolve it.

For many Jews, Farrakhan was not an arbitrary litmus test. An alliance built partly upon Jewish opposition to anti-Black racism reasonably created an expectation that Black allies would respond comparably when antisemitism appeared within Black political life.

For some Black leaders, however, the repeated demand for repudiation became a test of something else: whether Jewish support for Black political independence extended to situations in which Jews strongly opposed a Black leader or his politics.

The Billy Graham and Meir Kahane cases show why neither side’s concern can simply be dismissed.

Graham demonstrates that condemnation can coexist with repentance and restoration. Jewish leaders did not unanimously or immediately accept his first apology, but many ultimately distinguished his antisemitic remarks from the totality of his life and relationships after he more fully repudiated what he had said.

Kahane demonstrates that Jewish institutions could and did repudiate racism associated with a prominent Jewish figure, lending substance to Jewish demands for reciprocal moral accountability.

Jackson and Farrakhan expose a different problem: what happens when the person being asked to condemn prejudice is not himself the principal offender, when the offender continues his rhetoric, and when demands for moral accountability intersect with another community’s claim to political self-determination.

Seen this way, the condemnation test actually contains four separate questions.

The first is the apology test: When someone crosses a moral boundary, what acknowledgment is required?

The second is the repudiation test: When is condemning offensive words sufficient, and when does integrity require separating oneself from the speaker?

The third is the reciprocity test: Will each community confront prejudice among its own with the seriousness it expects from its allies?

The fourth is the restoration test: Once genuine acknowledgment and repentance occur, is there a path back into relationship?

Black-Jewish relations never developed a shared answer to those questions.

Both communities therefore carried grievances from the Jackson-Farrakhan episode. Some Jews concluded that Black leaders expected Jewish vigilance against racism without demonstrating equivalent vigilance when antisemitism appeared within Black political life. Some Black leaders concluded that Jewish institutions supported Black autonomy only until Black leadership or foreign-policy positions diverged from Jewish preferences.

Neither conclusion described either community in full, but both became part of the memory through which later disputes were interpreted.

That matters because coalitions cannot survive merely by agreeing about what is right when nothing has gone wrong. Their strength is revealed by what happens after injury.

Allies need one another to confront prejudice within their own communities. Yet no community wants an ally to acquire veto power over its leadership. An alliance must therefore be able to demand moral accountability without becoming an instrument of political control. It must leave room for repentance without trivializing repeated prejudice. And it must have some means of restoring relationships after legitimate demands for accountability have been met.

Black self-determination does not require tolerating antisemitism, just as Jewish communal independence does not require tolerating anti-Arab racism. Reciprocity requires both communities to confront prejudice seriously within their own institutions and political worlds.

But reciprocity alone is insufficient.

Durable alliances require something closer to a shared moral infrastructure: agreed expectations about injury, accountability, apology, repudiation, forgiveness, and repair. Without those expectations, every controversy has to be negotiated from the beginning, usually in the heat of public conflict. One community experiences a demand as morally obvious while the other experiences the same demand as an assertion of power.

That is partly what happened in the 1980s.

The unresolved issue was never simply whether Blacks and Jews could condemn hatred. They could, and many did.

The deeper questions were harder.

What requires condemnation?

What requires apology?

What requires repudiation?

What permits forgiveness?

And who gets to decide?

That was the condemnation test.

The alliance did not fail because Blacks and Jews answered it differently once. The deeper problem was that they never developed a shared way of answering it together.

Notes

1. “SNCC Leader Says Negroes Will Resist and ‘Won’t Play Jews,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 28, 1967; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Digital Gateway, “Palestine,” documenting the 1967 newsletter controversy and subsequent SNCC Middle East statement.
2. James R. Dickenson and Kathy Sawyer, “Jackson Admits to Ethnic Slur,” Washington Post, February 27, 1984.
3. “Jackson’s ‘Hymie’ Remark Deplored by 58 Percent of Blacks, Poll Says,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 4, 1984.
4. “Black Muslim Leader Extols Hitler,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 13, 1984; “Mondale, Jackson Denounce Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitic Remarks,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 5, 1984.
5. “Farrakhan Denounces U.S. Jewish Leadership as ‘Spiritually Blind,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 31, 1984.
6. “Jackson Regrets Remarks,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 16, 1984.
7. “Graham Apologizes for Faulting Jews,” Washington Post, March 2, 2002.
8. Eric J. Greenberg, “Billy Graham’s Anti-Semitism Leaves Jewish Leaders Aghast,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 6, 2002.
9. Eric J. Greenberg, “Graham Apology Not Enough,” New York Jewish Week, March 1, 2002.
10. Eric J. Greenberg, “Billy Graham’s New Mea Culpa,” New York Jewish Week, March 2002.
11. “Graham Issues 2nd Apology for 1972 Remarks on Jews,” Washington Post, March 17, 2002.
12. Ron Kampeas, “Billy Graham, Who Championed Israel in Public and Derided Jews in Private, Dies at 99,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 21, 2018.
13. “Jewish Groups Denounce Kahane,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 16, 1985; “As NJCRAC Recommends, Barnstorming Kahane Denounced in Most U.S. Jewish Communities,” February 23, 1987.
14. “Peres Denounces Kahane’s Views as Greatest Danger to Israel’s Democracy,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 3, 1985; “Rabbinate Denounces Kahane,” July 31, 1984.
15. “Rev. Jackson, Rabbi Tanenbaum Urge Improved Black-Jewish Ties, but Rift over Farrakhan Abides,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 16, 1987.