The relationship between African Americans and Jews in America is, like all discussions of race,

burdened with the full weight of America's tribal culture wars.

But we should perhaps try to go back a little in history, for there have

been moments of extraordinary friendship and collaboration when Jews and blacks marched shoulder

to shoulder and helped America rise a little closer to its ideals of civic equality. Jews and

blacks have both shared the same adversaries who regard the two communities

with racist disdain, and that shared threat has, at times, drawn the communities closer together.

Going back further still, no thinking about the experience of African Americans can escape the

fact of slavery, slavery that brutalized the souls of African Americans can escape the fact of slavery. Slavery that brutalized

the souls of slave owners, oppressed slaves, and whose effects lingered in American law for

generations after the Civil War brought slavery to an end. Slavery is the great wound of the American nation,

and the experience of the Jews, ancient and modern,

served for enslaved blacks as a source of inspiration.

The Israelite imagery of an oppressed nation of slaves

who is delivered through its faith in God

is a dominant motif in African-American

song, poetry, and literature well into the 20th century. Even now, quite a few black

Christian congregations have traditional social attitudes, moral confidence in their religious

witness in the public square, and a real

belief in the significance of Israel and the Jewish people's building up of the Jewish state.

For their part, American Jews have led major communal efforts on behalf of African Americans.

As Joshua Morovchik has recently detailed in a spring 2021 essay in the journal Sapir, the

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