A Brief History of Jewish and Black Americans
Due to the recent anti-semitic controversies surrounding the artist formerly known as Kanye West, I decided to do some digging into the history of relations between Jewish and Black Americans. I already had a somewhat cursory knowledge of some of these facts, which prompted me to take a closer look.
Ye’s comments have prompted a lot of discussion with people I know. My comment to these people is usually the same - regardless of mine or your opinion on the matter there is no denial of a long history of relationships, whether professional, cordial, exploitative or not, between Jewish and Black Americans.
I present the facts with no bias, only a curiosity and interest in our collective American history.
‘Selma’ Distorts History by Airbrushing Out Jewish Contributions to Civil Rights
The black-Jewish relationship is complex, with many changes over time, but the historical record is clear. One of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 was Henry Moskowitz. According to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Jewish philanthropy was responsible in whole or in part for the founding of more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and twenty black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities).
But white and specifically Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement went far beyond institution-building fund-raising. Arnie Aronson was an important organizer of the 1963 March on Washington where Rabbi Uri Miller recited the opening prayer and Rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke before Dr. King’s historic “I have a dream” speech. The civil rights confrontations in St. Augustine, Florida, came to a head in the spring of 1964, when three wives of Episcopal bishops joined northern college students to take part in civil rights activities, during which Dr. King was arrested. From jail, he wrote to his friend, Rabbi Israel Dresner in New Jersey, urging him to recruit rabbis to come to St. Augustine, resulting in a huge mass arrest of the rabbis who responded.
On the subject of MLK Jr., the famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was co-written with Stanley Levison, a Jewish lawyer and civil rights activist.
NPR states, "As MLK/FBI explains, it's King's association with Stanley Levison, a progressive lawyer and businessman with Communist Party ties, that initially caught the attention of Hoover."[13] The New Yorker review states, "Of particular interest to the Bureau was King’s close associate Stanley Levison, who had formerly harbored Communist sympathies and, as a treasurer in the American Jewish Congress, had supported the defense of the Rosenbergs. On the strength of such weak links, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, was asked to approve the covert wiretapping of King, whom he openly admired. Kennedy complied."
The song ‘Strange Fruit’, a civil rights soliloquy originally recorded by Billie Holiday and eventually re-recorded by Nina Simone to be sampled on Kanye West’s ‘Blood on the Leaves’, was written by an American Jew - Abel Meeropol. He wrote the words originally as a poem. Interestingly, Meeropol was also a member of the CPUSA and, according to this Wiki article, taught James Baldwin in high school.
Lorraine Stein was an American Jewish woman from Newark who, along with her first husband Alfred Lion managed Blue Note Records, and with her second husband Max Gordon, the Village Vanguard jazz club, both near monolithic fixtures in the world of jazz. She mentored dozens of young Black artists coming up to New York off the southern circuit.
This Jewish duo escaped the Nazis to break sound barriers with Blue Note Records
“White companies, big record companies, did not record African-Americans during that time,” said professor Eddie Meadows of the UCLA global jazz studies department. Lion and Wolff were different, he said: “Because both were from outside the US, I think they witnessed the music culture of African-Americans and saw an opportunity.”
Interestingly that article introduced me to Max Margulis, who was the seed investor for Blue Note and also had ties to Marxist publications.
Famously, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild family, was host to and a fierce advocate of Black American jazz musicians, hosting them and even paying their bills.
In New York, de Koenigswarter became a friend and patron of leading jazz musicians, hosting jam sessions in her hotel suite, often driving them in her Bentley when they needed a lift to gigs, as well as sometimes helping them to pay rent, buy groceries, and making hospital visits.
The baroness is a legendary figure in jazz, immortalized in many songs written about her, such as the Horace Silver tune ‘Nica’s Dream’.
The history of Jewish and Black relations in the music industry is a long one and I can hardly do it justice here, but it is clear that these two groups’ relationship has completely defined the direction of American music. When I hear Ye speak on this subject, I think back on a century-long history of Black and Jewish relationships and what it might mean for either group. I do certainly feel that this topic is ‘between them’ - not for the gentiles, so to speak.
As a final thought, I wonder if this history is tangential, or parallel, or derived from the original Jewry of the Holy Land. Judah and Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, are just a few hundred miles apart. And the theological connective tissue between East Africa and the Levant is ancient and storied. I am not a believer in ‘Black Israelites’ but I have written extensively about the Ethiopian Tewahedo church and Ge’ez, its liturgical language. The Ethiopian bible contains many books not seen for thousands of years in the West, but later discovered to be Israelite in origin, such as Enoch and Jubilees.
But mostly, I would just hope that we collectively can talk about things and be open, as well as more discerning and conscious of our own history and its nuances.