Apartheid state, colonial power, racist regime. We are all too familiar with the persistent allegations. Such malignments fundamentally mischaracterise Israel as a white oppressor state. The claims are certainly nothing new. They have been circulating for decades, while excusing and encouraging violence against the Jewish state. Yet they have intensified with calculated precision since the cataclysmic events of 7 October 2023. Conveniently overlooked, however, is the fundamental truth that the Jewish community, both within Israel and across the global diaspora, constitutes a vibrant mosaic of individuals representing a spectrum of skin colours and diverse ethno-cultural origins. These basic, readily available facts challenge any effort at a monolithic racial categorisation.

Nevertheless, the underlying objective of these detractors, achieved through the deployment of antisemitic theories and tropes, reveals a more surreptitious motive. Indeed, it exceeds wanting to sow racial discontent simply within the Jewish community. In fact, it involves the cynical instrumentalisation of vast numbers of non-Jewish people of colour in an attempt to strategically stigmatise Jews and separate them from their proximity to other marginalised groups, further contributing to their own isolation. This, in turn, aims to deny Jews their legitimate place within the broader scope of struggles for social justice.

Accordingly, the crucial question then becomes: how can such hostile attacks be thwarted? The answer lies in rediscovering the potent legacy of an historically profound alliance, unearthing the deeply rooted and intertwined experiences of African Americans and Jewish Americans, two communities that have battled systemic oppression.

Speaking as a Catholic of African American heritage, I don’t hesitate to acknowledge that many non-Jewish people of colour view Jews as being invincible or so well established that they are no longer at risk of being marginalised, given that they have survived the likes of Herod and Hitler. Conversely, the Jewish community sometimes underestimate the unique and persistent impact of institutional racism and the ongoing vulnerabilities faced by Black people. The fact is, the two communities must remind each other and humankind itself that neither Black nor Jewish suffering is a closed chapter in this world. Both, notwithstanding their distinct forms, unfortunately remain constants in this world.

Common Ground and a Common Grave

It was 1964. I was barely three years old at the time. While playing with wooden ABC building blocks on the living-room rug, I suddenly stopped. Like my parents, I began to stare at the images flickering on the black-and-white television screen. An FBI poster was being shown. It depicted three men side-by-side in mugshot fashion. A Black man named James Earl Chaney in the centre, flanked by two white men, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. However, the urgently sought individuals were not suspects, but missing persons. Missing persons in Mississippi.

A wanted poster with photographs of the missing men (from left to right): Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner, 29 June 1964. (Source: Public Domain. FBI).

Something, one way or another, was in the air. In the stifling heat, the scent of faded magnolias and fermented molasses hung heavy. Outsiders who found themselves here perceived the aroma as both intoxicating and unsettling. It was a sickly-sweet, putrid cocktail of smells, often accompanied by a smoky undertone. The locals were unfazed. Back then, it was common practice to deliberately burn overgrown pastures to make way for new growth. So, the scent of mulch and straw repeatedly stung the nostrils, tickling and even tormenting.

At times, however, one could also smell burnt wood. Burnt wood that evoked eerie rituals. Rituals straight out of ghost stories. Yet, these ghost stories were rooted in the present and corresponded to the truth. At night, crosses blazed on the open hills while white shadows swirled in the moonlight. Sometimes, the flames engulfed a log cabin. An inhabited, overcrowded log cabin, whose remains rose into the firmament the next morning as gray, shimmering clouds of ash, permeated by the acrid aromas of decomposition. Whoever thought to seek refuge in the coolness of the forests could suddenly stumble upon a slit, frayed hangman’s rope. The telltale exhibit of vigilante justice lay either on the carpet of leaves beneath the oaks or hung, even swaying slightly, from the branches. Any grove could transform into a place of execution at any hour.

There had been several urgent warnings against visiting the realm of the rednecks. The plan to visit Mississippi, of all places, the scene of the gruesome murders of Emmett Till (1941–1955) and Medgar Evers (1925–1963), was akin to leaping into the abyss. Yet, James Earl Chaney, 21, as well as Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, absolutely refused to be deterred.[1]

The African American Chaney was originally from Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish American colleagues from New York City. All three belonged to the civil rights organisation Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an NGO founded in 1942. In Mississippi, perpetually amongst the poorest states in the USA, and throughout the former Confederacy, a nexus of laws, economic coercion and violence had established an electoral system that systematically marginalised Black citizens. Consequently, the African American population was largely denied meaningful political participation. This was particularly stark in Mississippi, where Black individuals constituted as much as 45 percent of the population, yet only approximately 15 percent were deemed eligible to vote.[2] Confronting this injustice, CORE established Freedom Schools to empower and mobilise disenfranchised citizens. The aim was to overcome the barriers to voter registration through education and encouragement. CORE activists undertook the courageous step of establishing such a school in the Deep South to specifically prepare Black individuals for the state-mandated literacy tests.

In that era, predating the digital tools that now significantly facilitate protest coordination, mobilising people for a common cause posed an immense challenge. Instead of flash mobs, there were leaflets; instead of posts, posters; and instead of TikTok and tweets, there were telegrams. Nevertheless, the organising team successfully rallied numerous volunteers in a short period.

The Freedom Summer of 1964 marked a turning point in the American Civil Rights Movement. Thousands of young people, predominantly white students, journeyed to the Deep South of the USA. They arrived not as protesters with signs, but as allies with registration forms. Their goal was to assist Black citizens in registering for the elections scheduled for November. Indeed, that’s what they did. They also visited a church of the Black community in Neshoba County. Driven by a profound belief in justice and equality, they confronted raw racism. Their motivation? To change the world – or at least a part of it. Ultimately, their work significantly contributed to raising awareness of the injustices in the South and strengthening the Civil Rights Movement.

The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan did not take kindly to this. Particularly those in Philadelphia, a community of five thousand souls – a stark contrast to the size of the northern City of Brotherly Love of the same name. A mere three days after the initiation of the search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, their charred station wagon was discovered at the periphery of a local swamp. Some six weeks elapsed before their bullet-riddled remains were unearthed in an earthen dam on a nearby farmstead.

The autopsy reports revealed a grim prelude to their deaths: the three activists had been subjected to torture before their execution. Chaney endured repeated and brutal beatings prior to being shot and, with a particular barbarity rooted in racial animus, was additionally castrated. A typical fate for a Black man at the hands of the KKK. His colleagues, Schwerner and Goodman, were each shot directly through the heart. Goodman’s autopsy further chillingly disclosed the presence of fragments of red clay within his lungs and clenched fists, evidence suggesting he was buried alive.[3] The Klan’s virulent hatred was especially directed towards those white individuals who aligned themselves with the emancipation of Black people. In particular, educated and relatively affluent Jews from the liberal North, such as Goodman and Schwerner, were made the targets of a sadistic demonstration.

The burned-out station wagon of the three CORE activists. (Source: Public Domain. FBI).

Buried bodies on the farm in Philadelphia, Mississippi. (Source: Public Domain. FBI).

In 1967, seven individuals, including a deputy sheriff, were convicted in connection with these heinous crimes. None, however, served more than six years of imprisonment. The suspected orchestrator, the local Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, who also served as a part-time Baptist preacher, was not finally convicted until 2005, when he received a sentence of sixty years for three counts of manslaughter. The federal authorities designated the case “Mississippi Burning”, and it subsequently served as the basis for the 1988 feature film of the same title.

A Black females Moses, a Rabbi named Prinz, a Reverend King

Between the flames of hatred and the torchlight of freedom, much was afoot in the USA. The Klan’s terror and the languid pace of justice against hate crimes did not deter the interfaith, multicultural alliance from persevering. Indeed, Jewish men and women constituted a disproportionately large segment of the white individuals involved in the struggle for civil rights. Fully half of the young activists who participated in the pivotal Freedom Summer of 1964 in the crucible of Mississippi were Jewish – a striking fifty percent.[4]

Moreover, the alliance between Black and Jewish communities in the fight for civil rights during the 1960s was not a sudden blossoming, but rather the resurgence of historical bonds forged in the crucible of shared suffering. The echoes of enslavement resonated across both groups, albeit through distinct historical trajectories. Jewish people endured periods of forced servitude in antiquity, their narratives woven with the bitter threads of captivity. Centuries later, the brutal transatlantic slave trade brought Africans to the Americas, marking another profound chapter of human bondage. Yet, even prior to this transatlantic horror, the Arabic slave trade across the Sahara, beginning some fifteen hundred years ago, had already scattered and subjugated countless Black lives. Separate fates emerged, continents and cultures apart, but a common understanding of oppression, of being dehumanised and exploited, subtly underlay their distinct histories.

This latent empathy, born from parallel experiences of marginalisation, would eventually find powerful expression in the shared struggle for liberation in America. The Book of Exodus, with its multicoloured pages of parchment recounting a journey from bondage to freedom, found a powerful echo in the modus operandi of Harriet Tubman.[5] This African American woman, armed with both Bible and pistol, successfully guided approximately 300 enslaved people north across the Mason-Dixon Line between 1849 and 1865. Tubman, the fearless conductor of the Underground Railroad escape network, was known to insiders by the codename “Moses”, and the song Go Down, Moses served as her signature tune. This piece, based on Exodus 5:1, resonated deeply with the enslaved; it was sung as they toiled in the fields, during their meagre rest and prayer times, but also as a coded message to signal an escape or to call for rebellion.[6]

Parallels can be drawn between the fight against slavery and the burgeoning women’s rights movement, and within this context, the activism of the Jewish feminist Ernestine Rose[7] stands as a compelling example. Born in Poland in 1810, Rose emigrated to the United States and became a prominent figure in various social reform movements, most notably abolitionism and the fight for women’s equality.

Rose’s commitment to the abolition of slavery was deeply rooted in her belief in universal human rights. She saw the enslavement of Black people as a fundamental injustice, a denial of their inherent dignity and freedom. This conviction was not isolated but intertwined with her advocacy for women’s rights. For Rose recognised that both enslaved people and women were subjected to systemic oppression and denied their full personhood. Her outspoken and courageous abolitionism, remarkable for a 19th-century Jewish woman, involved extensive lectures challenging pro-slavery views, even facing hostility in the South. Her anti-slavery activism underscored the intersectionality of social justice, likely fuelled by her own experience of prejudice, and highlighted the interconnectedness of the fight for human liberation alongside her pioneering work for women’s rights.

In 1909, Henry Moscowitz, a Jewish American of Romanian descent, joined forces with W. E. B. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals to establish the esteemed civil rights organisation, the NAACP. Between 1910 and 1940, Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald remarkably founded over 2,000 elementary and secondary schools for Black students, as well as 20 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

African American soldiers took part in freeing Jews from Nazi concentration camps. In Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen in Austria, the “Black Panthers” of General Patton’s 761st US Tank Battalion participated in the liberation. In Buchenwald, the African American unit 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion treated surviving inmates shortly after their liberation. These accomplishments offer a poignant, potent illustration of shared humanity in response to the hate espoused by the Nazis and the KKK.

After the war, a King and a Prinz built an admirable relationship with each other in the name of justice: Reverend Martin Luther King and Rabbi Joachim Prinz. Born in Upper Silesia, Prinz was later active in the Vereinssynagoge Friedenstempel before his immigration to the USA. Beginning in 1958, Prinz served as president of the American Jewish Congress, and in this capacity, he became the first rabbi to reach out to the rising Black Baptist preacher. King’s charisma, courage and intellect profoundly captivated the exiled rabbi, laying the foundation for a valuable collaboration. In 1963, Prinz was among the organisers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and he stood as one of the keynote speakers at the demonstration before the Lincoln Memorial, the very stage where King delivered his monumental “I Have a Dream” speech.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel, originally from Warsaw, also played a significant role in the interfaith friendship. Prinz and Heschel, who had both narrowly escaped the clutches of the Gestapo, were Holocaust survivors. Their solidarity, expressed arm-in-arm, whether demonstrated in the March on Washington or on the arduous path from Selma, Alabama, forged a bond between them and Black Americans so strong that its unifying power eclipsed the destructive, hate-fuelled arson of the racist and antisemitic Klan. For King, who had visited Jerusalem in 1959, questioning Israel’s right to exist was out of the question. In 1968, he asserted, “The talk about driving the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea, as we have heard it in recent weeks and years, is not merely unrealistic; it is suicidal for the whole world, and it is also terribly immoral.”[8]

King lauded the American Jewish Congress as “one of the few organizations willing to take a forthright stand for integration in the South.”[9] Furthermore, King warned that it was the aim of racial supremacists to employ scapegoats to facilitate their political and social dominion over all people. “Our mutual fight,” King declared, “is against these deadly enemies of democracy, and our glory is the fact that when we are chosen to be the proving ground, we shall prove that courage is a characteristic of oppressed people, no matter how cynically and brutally they are denied full equality and liberty.”[10]

Such reciprocal loyalty on the part of the Jewish community towards the Black community spanned several generations and weathered some ugly crises, such as the deadly Crown Heights riots (1991).[11] Jewish solidarity was also clearly evident in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd mobilised tens of millions of people worldwide.

Introspect? Or Intifada?

As time flowed on, the resonance of King’s message faded. We shall overcome was displaced by From the river to the sea. Thus, it is hardly surprising that 55 years after King’s assassination, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement welcomed the terrorist attack on Israel perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023.[12] BLM posted a gleefully schadenfreude-filled illustration depicting a paraglider with a Palestinian flag – a tasteless allusion to the massacre at the Supernova music festival. Others followed suit. It echoes James Baldwin’s purposefully provocative warning: “Negroes are antisemitic because they’re anti-white.”[13]

Prominent figures like Kanye West, Dave Chappelle and Ta-Nehisi Coates joined in with conspicuous criticism of Israel, without a hint of empathy for the Jewish community. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first African American president, responded to antisemitic incidents at her university with relativisation and indifference. Yet, precisely on university campuses, a shift in thinking is now discernible. The Black Student Union (BSU) of the University of Michigan recently dissociated itself from the pro-Palestinian Tahrir Coalition.[14]

This is because the BSU felt subjected to systematic discrimination within that coalition. “However, it has become increasingly apparent that Black identities, voices, and bodies are not valued within this coalition, and therefore we must withdraw,” the statement read.[15] Similarly negative experiences are being gathered at universities between New York and Los Angeles. African American students in the Free Palestine movement feel like tokens or doormen. Black individuals feel they have to stand submissively grinning at the gate while White Saviors in keffiyehs swagger in, preach against cultural appropriation, and are welcomed with open arms by the leadership. In campus dining halls, Arabic speakers call their Black peers “abeed” (enslaved). Protest organisers prefer to be seen with white members of Jewish Voices for Peace. Jokes circulate that Black attendees are only interested in the watermelon, a symbol of the pro-Palestinian movement, echoing Jim Crow-era stereotypes portraying Black people as lazy and dependent on cheap food due to poverty. Despite the intifada’s emphasis on ‘decolonisation’, there’s little willingness to address the nearly 1,500-year history of the Arab slave trade. Heated online disputes reveal a turning point. Black users confront Hamas’s brutal anti-LGBTQ+ stance. Others warn against Black mothers raising their children to be martyrs for Islamism, referencing Hamas’s child soldier terror camps. Black individuals retort that Muslim terrorists like Boko Haram have also killed thousands of Africans. Furthermore, they question why the Palestinian cause overshadows far greater tragedies in Congo or Sudan.

The Hamas execution of two Tanzanians on 7 October 2023 continues to resonate. One of them, Joshua Mollel, an agricultural intern at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, was racially abused on camera before his captors shot him – a chilling ellipse to the KKK’s lynching of Black activist Chaney alongside his white Jewish colleagues Goodman and Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964. Such historical parallels prompt many African Americans to reflect on times when Jewish people risked their lives to help Black individuals in the Jim Crow South to exercise their right to vote.

The Gaza war added further dynamics to the US election campaign in 2024. Pro-Palestinian voices in the USA accused the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, a Black woman married to a Jew, of subservience to Israel and demanded, accordingly, that progressives refrain from voting for her. Even party colleagues turned their backs on her. As a result, she lost in important swing states such as Michigan, where the nationwide victorious Donald Trump even received notable support from the Arab community. Interestingly, despite their concerns about the Democrats’ overall commitment to Israel, 78% of American Jews voted for Harris.[16] Black women, who overwhelmingly supported Harris with 92% of their vote, took note of the strong Jewish voter loyalty.[17]

A Path Forward

Amidst the contemporary complexities and occasional fractures, Black and Jewish communities are slowly rediscovering their deep-rooted historical parallels and shared experiences of marginalisation. The pace of this renewed awareness must be accelerated, for the consciousness of their laudable common history underscores the enduring value of their alliance. This partnership can once again become a potent force, indeed, not only in domestic struggles for justice. In fact, it has the potential to function as a unique mediating voice, leveraging Black perspectives to foster understanding even within the charged geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, operating behind and beyond the confines of military conflict. History itself has dispelled the insidious myth of the white supremacist Jew as a baseless fabrication designed to sow division. The chains have been broken; the bonds must be strengthened.

Michaela Dudley, J.D., a Berlin-based journalist, diversity speaker and cabaret artist, was born in 1961 in the USA. In her youth, she experienced the Jim Crow era of segregation. Herself a Catholic, she recalls being befriended by the children of concentration camp survivors, and she is a fierce opponent of antisemitism. The Juris Doctor prides herself as a queer feminist and LGBTQ advocate. She is a respected columnist and commentator in the German press (taz, Berliner Zeitung, Tagesspiegel) and has authored the German-language book Race Relations: Essays über Rassismus (2nd edn., 2025) in which she also addresses the historical alliance between Blacks and Jews.