Monday MLK Day Open Comments

Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Joshua Heschel in Selma, Alabama

Jeff Dunetz founded the popular conservative, Jewish-flavored website “Yid With Lid” back in 2005 and now known simply as The Lid.  He has been a steady advocate for conservative ideology and politics ever since and a voice Jews on the Right.  Recently Dunetz published a report on a question people ask everyday and have asked me.

How Did The Black-Jewish Civil Rights Alliance Become African-American Antisemitism ?

“At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed.”

These were the words with which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel opened his address at the 1963 National Conference on Race and Religion, in Chicago. It was at that same conference that Rabbi Heschel first met the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was the keynote speaker at this national gathering. The two became close friends and allies working together for equality and justice until Reverend King was murdered in 1968.

and this,

When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous march to Selma, Alabama, he walked hand in hand with many Jews, including his close friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. When he made stood at the Lincoln Memorial and said, “I Have A Dream,” King close friend Rabbi Heschel and a contingent of Jews were there with him.

but it wouldn’t last,

After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the leadership of the Civil Rights movement was inherited by people like Jesse Jackson, who saw the Jews as their competition for achieving middle-class status.  Black leaders such as Jackson,  Andrew Young, and Louis Farrakhan went public with anti-Semitic comments. As it spread, the hatred didn’t infest all Black Americans, but those on the liberal side of the aisle.

In his book Race Matters, Activist Cornel West contends there were no good times where  “blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction.” West says that the 1960s period of black–Jewish cooperation is often downplayed by blacks and romanticized by Jews: “It is downplayed by blacks because they focus on the astonishingly rapid entry of most Jews into the middle and upper-middle classes during this brief period—an entry that has spawned… resentment from a quickly growing black, impoverished class.

and this,

1979. Andrew Young, then Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, violated administration policy, and met with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Almost immediately, Young was gone. By most accounts, he was asked to resign because he had deceived the State Department—but black leaders saw a Jewish conspiracy. Young’s dismissal, said Jesse Jackson, was a “capitulation” to Jews.

and further fuel on the fire,

On July 20, 1991, Leonard Jeffries of City College who had a history of anti-Semitic slurs presented a two-hour long speech claiming “rich Jews” financed the slave trade, Jews control the film industry (together with Italian mafia), and use that control to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. Jeffries also attacked Diane Ravitch (Assistant Secretary of Education), calling her a “sophisticated Texas Jew,” “a debonair racist,” and “Miss Daisy.”[as in Driving Miss Daisy].

It is human nature to want to blame someone else for their own misfortune and, unfortunately, there are a lot of hustlers out there willing to oblige folks looking for that someone else.

RTWDT.