Jews fought hard for civil rights. But now, Black activists have abandoned them

Oct. 7 was not just a day of mass carnage committed against the people of Israel. In the United States, it has come to now represent an historic betrayal of the Jewish people.

The modern civil rights movement has largely looked away from the suffering of the Jews and turned their attention to the Palestinians and what Arabs may face in an Israeli counterattack.

They made their pivot before any of us understood the depraved acts inflicted on the Israeli people — a trauma seen in the faces of their workers who had to recover the bodies.

Children and young adults in southern Israel had been burned alive. Parents and children had been tortured in front of one another before they were executed.

This week, the Israeli Defense Forces brought the world media to see for themselves the explicit footage Hamas took of their own butchery. For some reporters it was too much. They couldn’t stomach it and left early.

BLM offers its support for Palestine

The added tragedy of this event has been the hostility coming from various corners of America’s Civil Rights vanguard.

With nary a word of sympathy for the victims, various chapters of Black Lives Matter inflicted new degradations on American Jews.

Woke abandons its humanity: In supporting Hamas' attack

They blamed the Israelis for the atrocities committed against their own people by Palestinian-Hamas.

Some even celebrated those atrocities.

Black Lives Matter Global Network pushed back against these BLM affiliates, calling them fakes.

They misunderstand the Israeli conflict

But BLM has always been a ill-defined coalition, and other arms of the movement began declaring their allegiance to Palestinian terrorists who had just murdered 1,400 mostly Jews.

Black Lives Matter at School, a program that facilitates social-justice discussions in classrooms across America and enjoys the endorsement and insignia of the National Education Association, put out this message:

“... this unfolding loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives is the direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians.” 

That’s one way to put it.

In fact, that’s the Hamas way to put it.

Not only does it reveal ignorance of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it’s an apologia for mass murder.

Jews were early supporters of civil rights

To understand the enormity of this sell-out, you have to know the history of the American Civil Rights Movement and the essential role that Jewish America played.

If the greatness of a culture can be measured by its moral acuity — its ability to discern good from evil — then the Jewish people are the best among us.

Among white Americans, they saw early the day-to-day abuse of Black America and mobilized to try to stop it.

In the 1800s South, Jewish shopkeepers were first to see the humanity in their Black customers when their Christian counterparts would not. They were the first to address them as “Mr.” and Mrs.” and to allow them to try on clothes, wrote historian Howard M. Sachar in his book “A History of the Jews in America” (Knopf, 1992).

Further north, Julius Rosenwald, a child of German-Jewish immigrants, bought the struggling Sears Roebuck Co. and built it into a retailing behemoth.

After meeting with Black educator and orator Booker T. Washington, he chose to spend part of his fortune building schools for Black children in the South. When he was done, he had contributed more money than anyone in history to help Southern Black people.

They were integral to this movement

Virtually everything you’ve read about civil rights before and after Martin Luther King, Jr. was backed by brave and committed Jewish people contributing their time and talents to help Black people gain acceptance and equal rights in their own country.

American Jews played large roles in helping found the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as recounted by ReformJudaism.org.

In 1910, Jews were important early allies of the Urban League that was created to fight racial discrimination in the industrial north.

In the early 1950s, the American Jewish Committee commissioned the research of Black sociologist Kenneth Clark that showed how segregation was harming Black children. The research helped inform the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education on desegregation, Sachar wrote.

During the critical voter registration drives of the 1960s, Jewish people were spread out across the South. One Black leader of that time estimated “as many as 90 percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish,” recounted Sachar.

“Large numbers of them were recent graduates of Ivy League law schools. They worked around the clock analyzing welfare standards, the bail system, arrest procedures, justice-of-the-peace rulings."

Jewish activists paid a heavy price

In 1964, Jewish college students, activists and rabbis road the buses of Freedom Summer with their young Black cohorts and together faced the mob. One of those Jewish activists was Arthur Lelyveld, who was attacked by white segregationists with a tire iron and nearly killed.

Two Jewish students, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their Black colleague James Chaney, were murdered in Mississippi.

What had been a common crime against Black people in the South shocked the nation when it involved two young white men — a damning statement about 1960s America. “Discovery of their corpses accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” wrote Sachar.

Martin Luther King, Jr. trusted the Jewish people and brought them into his inner circle to help organize and use their connections to otherwise power the movement.

One of them, New York attorney Harry Wachtel, helped King plan the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches and played a large role in setting up a meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

MLK was close friends with Jews

So prized was Wachtel, that he and his wife accompanied Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta to Oslo, Norway, in 1964 when King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another New York Jewish attorney, Stanley Levison, was even more important to King. He helped him write speeches and raise funds and advised him on strategy. Levison co-wrote one of the drafts for King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Stan Levison was one of the closest friends Martin King and I ever had,” said activist Andrew Young. “Of all the unknown supporters of the civil rights movement, he was perhaps the most important."

If the Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was largely “unknown” to the general public, there was one group of Americans paying attention.

The Ku Klux Klan saw them and began to plot against them, wrote Sachar.

“In one year, from November 1957 through October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal edifices were bombed in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and undetonated dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia, North Carolina.”

Jews are considered 'white oppressors'?

Last week, Tabia Lee, an African American administrator and educator who understands what is happening with Black activists, reprised a column she had written for Compact magazine in March.

She told how she had been hired by Silicon Valley’s De Anza College in 2021 to head the school’s department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is the empire-building arm of the critical social justice movement, of which BLM is the beating heart. There are DEI offices now in virtually all of America’s universities and a wide swath of our public schools.

At De Anza College, Lee discovered that “DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people" she wrote in the New York Post.

“As a black woman, I was the perfect person for the job — on paper. Yet I made the mistake of trying to create an authentically inclusive learning environment for everyone, including Jewish students.”

Her critics called her “a dirty Zionist.” The school refused to promote her events, she wrote. “I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.’ ”

Eventually she was fired, and she wrote this:

“I have never encountered a more hostile environment toward the members of any racial, ethnic or religious group.” 

Message sent: Jewish lives don't matter

It wasn’t hard for American Jews to see the evil that was Jim Crow and lynching. They had seen such evil unsheathed in Czarist Russia and stoking the ovens at Auschwitz.

Then came Oct. 7, and they saw it once more.

And when they looked around, their friends from the Civil Rights Movement were largely gone and the message was sent:

Jewish Lives Don’t Matter.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Black Lives Matter forgets how hard Jews fought for civil rights