Many of us are still trying to get our heads around the stunning victories for Democratic candidates and for democracy itself coming out of the 2026 midterm elections. While all the results have not yet been fully tabulated, it is clear that the Democrats have turned both chambers of the US Congress and several state houses a deep majority blue.
The Democratic Party won elections up and down the ballots all across the nation, even in places where they either had never been successful or hadn’t won in many years.
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The Democrats took over most statewide elected positions in Texas, and all but one statewide position in Georgia. They have a real chance of pulling out wins in senatorial races in Mississippi and Alaska.
I have been focusing particularly on the great southern state of Georgia, where the former mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has become the first African-American woman to lead not only Georgia, but any state in the union. This precedent-setting victory is coupled with the successful candidacies of seven other African-American women who captured other statewide offices.
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The state is also led in the US Senate by two young and dynamic progressive voices, with African-American Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish progressive. From the time of their first campaigns for the Senate, both in 2020, to the present, they have worked tirelessly together, sharing resources and their deep commitments to solve problems and work for the people of Georgia and the nation.
Similarly, in the recent election, Keisha Lance Bottoms and Jon Ossoff shared resources and strategic aid across race and gender lines — they even appeared at each other’s campaign rallies to present a united front of solidarity, even against the oftentimes racist and antisemitic attacks lodged against them by their Republican opponents and supporters.
African-American and Jewish-American relations
African-Americans and Jewish-Americans of every “race” have a bittersweet history fluctuating across a wide continuum — from cooperation and alliance to tension and conflict — depending on historical, economic, political, social, and geographic circumstances.
At times, they are comrades in struggles for equality; at other times, they are competitors for seemingly scarce resources and for opposing political outlooks. Sometimes they travel side-by-side working for common interests; at other times they stand alone serving self-interests. Occasionally their goals merge, and sometimes identities and cultural styles collide into public conflict. And all too often, they do not regard one another at all.
I choose to focus on the bittersweet relationship between African-Americans and Jewish-Americans because of, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., their “inescapable web of mutuality.”
According to Jewish writer and activist, Letty Cottin Pogrebin:
I single out blacks and Jews because, like women and their husbands or lovers, when we give each other a hard time and it hurts more because we once were very close. (The humorist Calvin Trillin captures our former closeness by recalling an apocryphal headline in a New York newspaper in the good old days: COLD SNAP HITS OUR TOWN. JEWS, NEGROES SUFFER MOST).
bell hooks (1995) added that “…white supremacy relies on the maintenance of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism, hence there will never be a time when these two struggles will not be connected.”
While Jews, of course, are members of every so-called race, regarding this history in the United States, in much (not all) of it, I am primarily referring to Jewish-Americans of Eastern, Central, or Western European heritage—or Ashkenazim; their primary European language is/was Yiddish.
The Sephardim — Jews of Southern European (primarily Portuguese and Spanish), North African, and Middle Eastern heritage whose primary language is/was Ladino (also called Judezmo or Judeo-Spanish) — and the Mizrashim — Jews of Arab lands and Turkey — continue, in many sectors, to be constructed (assigned) as persons of color within the United States and often do not have the same degrees of “white skin privilege” currently accorded to many of the Ashkenazim.
Background of the relationship
African-Americans and Jewish-Americans have an extremely complex and multifaceted relationship. Numerous factors directly and indirectly affect the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and societal spheres of this relationship.
The relationship (tenuous as it is) dates to colonial days with differing — and often contradictory —accounts, sometimes accusations, of Jewish involvement in the institution of slavery. Though evidence exists that some Jews contributed financially to the transatlantic slave trade and a few others enslaved Africans, this direct involvement was scaled in proportion to their overall small population size and socioeconomic standing as urban merchants.
Unlike their greater later involvement (of primarily secular Jews) in the “Civil Rights” movement in the 20th century, Jews played a small but not insignificant role relative to their numbers overall in the Abolitionist movement. By 1885, a group of German-Jewish rabbis established the progressive Jewish Reform Movement based on a platform of social activism and social justice.
Greater contact between Jews and blacks came by increased immigration of Jews (between two and two and one-half million) fleeing persecution and harsh economic conditions, predominantly from Eastern Europe to the United States between 1880 and 1920, and African-American migration (approximately six to seven million between the late 1800s and 1970s) escaping racial hatred and poverty from the southern regions of the US to northern and northeastern cities such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and others.
Both groups were fleeing their homes to make better lives for themselves and their families, and they began to exist for each other “as a kind of mythic mirror, by which they reflected and refracted on themselves and on their respective histories.”
Jews fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany, however, came to the United States with employable skills (and later with “white-skin privilege” brought about by their changing ethnoracial assignment determined by the dominant society). This equipped them to eventually succeed in the cities, while Black people fled to the north as victims of a southern rural culture, without many of the cultural and educational tools needed to succeed in a racist and urban environment.
Jews immigrated with a clear advantage, which increased the class socioeconomic gap (and subsequent tensions) between African-Americans and Jewish-Americans, sometimes resulting in the present day in charges by African-Americans of exploitation and discrimination by Jewish shop owners, landlords, and household employers.
For example, in 1927, the National Urban League organized a boycott of stores — many of which were Jewish-owned — that did not hire bBack people, under the motto: “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” In the field of domestic labor, many Black women did not want to work for Jews. One column in the Cincinnati Enquirer on September 21, 1941 read: “Colored woman wants week work; neat; with references; no Jewish people.”
African-Americans and Jewish-Americans established an early working alliance in organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 to battle racism in the United States. Jews (many of whom were secular) were among the founders and promoters of the NAACP and provided the organization with three of its presidents: Arthur and Joel Spingarn and Kivie Kaplan.
Jewish support was based on both empathy for another oppressed group tinged with self-interest. Problems arose, however, over accusations by African-Americans of Jewish control and paternalism.
In 1913, the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith founded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to eliminate antisemitic literature and to respond to the arrest of Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory superintendent in Atlanta, Georgia who was wrongfully accused of killing 13-year-old Mary Phagan who worked in the factory. The Frank case pitted the testimony of an African-American against the testimony of a Jew, leading to conflict between the two groups.
In the words of Jewish writer and professor, Jerome Chances, the year 1943 marks the “beginning of [Jewish involvement in] the [modern] Civil Rights Movement.” Jewish groups joined the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) founded by A. Philip Randolph.
Several progressive Jews, including Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader in the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP, argued for continued and increased alignment with blacks in Civil Rights struggles. A number of conservative Jewish voices, however, responding to antisemitism throughout the world, and most notably in Europe, cautioned against aligning with Blacks, asserting that the enemy of one’s ally becomes one’s enemy.
The United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two countries: one for the Jews and one for the Palestinian Arabs, with Jerusalem to become an international enclave. On the fifth day of Iyar in 5708 on the Jewish calendar (May 14, 1948), Israel was established as an independent country.
The surrounding Arab countries joined with local Palestinians in an attempt to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state, and six Arab armies invaded Israel. While some Black leaders in the US supported the Jewish state, others — for example, Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and later Stockley Carmichael (Kwame Toure) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — sided with the Arabs.
“The Jew,” said Malcolm X, attributed to an interview he had with author and sociologist C. Eric Lincoln, “…drove our Muslim brothers out of their homeland, where they had been settled for centuries, and took over the land for themselves… In America, the Jews sap the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel…”
The “Civil Rights era” of the 1950s-1960s has been referred to as the “Golden Age” of African American and Jewish American relations and coalitions by some, predominantly Jewish political and religious activists — possibly a romanticized notion — while others, predominantly some contemporary African-Americans either downplay or trivialize the relationship during that time. Probably somewhere between these poles the truth lies.
What seems certain, however, is that a number of incidents and circumstances put a wedge between Jews and blacks during this period. For one, many Jewish organizations opposed the increasing direct-action strategies used by some civil rights organizations. In addition, the growing move toward nationalism during the mid- to late-1960s by both blacks and Jews seemed to have further separated the groups.
By the 1960s up to the present day, a series of flashpoints further strained the relationship: the ongoing tensions in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors, with American Jews and Black people often taking opposing “sides”; the controversy over differing notions and perspectives of school control between the predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers Union and black and Puerto Rican residents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in New York City.
There was also the firing of Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter for meeting secretly with representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), with some Black leaders blaming Jews for the firing; the perceived antisemitic statements made by Jesse Jackson in his 1984 bid for the Presidency.
Also, the rise in prominence and mainstream visibility of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, whom many Jews perceived employed the tactic of antisemitism as a major strategy in this ascension; the eruption of tensions between predominantly Hasidic Jewish and Afro-Caribbean residents in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn following the accidental killing of a Black child by a Jewish motorist.
In addition, the nomination and subsequent withdrawal of the candidacy of Lani Guinier by President Bill Clinton to the post of Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice, with some Black officials accusing members of the Jewish community of conspiring to sink the nomination.
And there are differing perspectives on issues of affirmative action, the saliency of “race” in contemporary U.S. society, “white skin privilege,” the effectiveness and viability of the concept of “cultural pluralism,” and individualistic versus collectivistic cultural outlooks.
In 1991, the Nation of Islam published a 390-page volume called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, whose main thesis is that Jews dominated the American slave trade, and that Jews were “key operatives” in the crime of slavery, playing an “inordinate” and “disproportionate” role and “carv[ing] out for themselves a monumental culpability in slavery—and the Black holocaust.”
In 1999, Joseph C. Miller reviewed the book in The Journal of American History and wrote that the Jews were engaged in the slave trade no more and no less than merchants of other backgrounds relative to their overall numbers.
Two years later, the national Jewish Civil Rights organization, the ADL, published Jew-Hatred as History in response to The Secret Relationship, calling it “a mendacious work of antisemitic propaganda.”
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, already existing tensions come to the surface as several Black leaders — most notably Minister Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, Anthony (Tony) Martin, and others — traveled to college and university campuses, some quoting from The Secret Relationship, asserting that Jews were heavily involved in the enslavement of Black Africans.
For example, Leonard Jeffries, who directed the African American Studies Department at the City College of New York, told an audience that Jews controlled the African slave trade centuries ago and that Hollywood’s Jewish moguls have engaged in a “system of destruction of Black people.”
At Kean College in Union, New Jersey on November 29, 1993, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, an aide to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, blamed the German Holocaust on its victims and attacked Jews for “sucking our blood in the Black community,” and for financing the slave trade and now controlling the U.S. government.
Speaking at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on December 6, 1994, Anthony (Tony) Martin, a Wellesley College African-American professor, was to deliver a speech titled “Black Leaders Under Siege.” However, during his presentation, he focused on oppression by Jews and the enslavement of African-Americans, and often referred to his book, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.
The conflict between African Americans and Jews was further exacerbated following the October 7, 2023, massacre of approximately 1,200-1,300 Jews and the abduction of around 251 in southern Israel by members of the ruling Hamas military in the Gaza Strip, and the subsequent Israeli military strike force killing a large number of Hamas fighters and also killing and wounding tens of thousands of civilians.
A number of strategies have been employed by African-Americans and Jewish-Americans to open channels of communication and improve relations between the groups. Strategies include national conferences (for example, a national Black and Jewish student conference in Washington, DC in October 1996), joint projects to reduce racism and antisemitism, college and university courses, film projects, and several dialogue groups facilitated around the US.
As we have seen under the two regimes of the Trump presidency, members of disparate groups and identities increasingly have joined in coalition and in solidarity to push back against the forces that have attempted to take back the progressive programs we have fought tirelessly to gain.
Possibly, the midterm 2026 election results in the great state of Georgia and elsewhere will signal another Golden Age not only between African Americans and Jewish Americans, but one of people who hold progressive political ideals and a march toward “a more perfect union.”
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