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Suggested Citation: Hirsachhorn, Sara Yael. 2025. "Israel in the Black-American Imagination From 1967 to 7 October 2023." ISCA Research Paper 2025-5.

 

Israel in the Black-American Imagination From 1967 to 7 October 2023

by Sara Yael Hirschhorn

December 2025

For decades, the iconic photograph of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching arm in arm at Selma, Alabama in 1965, has often defined the image of Black-Jewish relations. After October 7, many in the American Jewish community wondered where their former allies in the struggle for minority rights and human dignity had gone. African-American groups on some university campuses [1] , the movement for Black Lives (the umbrella organization of the Black Lives Matter campaign) [2] , and, even later, the NAACP [3] no longer stood with Israel and her Zionist supporters in the United States. What has changed over the past 50 years? And can we understand new realities in light of a longer history of Israel in the Black-American imagination prior to the 1967 war?

The parallels between old and new were encapsulated in the publication of a series of travelogue-essays collected as The Message in autumn 2024 by journalist-activist Ta-Nehisi Coates. [4]   The author had sky-rocketed to fame as a darling of the liberal elite — including as a top book pick of then President Barack Obama [5] — with his coming-of-age memoir Between the World and Me (2015) about race and Black identity and his position as a social critic at the Atlantic Magazine. [6]   Considering writing as an act of resistance, [7] The Message is divided into 3 journeys – the author’s first trip to Africa (Senegal), an odyssey through the American South, and lastly, a 10-day sojourn to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, which focused mainly on East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 

Perhaps to pre-empt criticism, Coates asserted early in the book that “virtues should be signaled and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest.” [8]   In the section on Israel/Palestine (entitled “the Gigantic Dream”) describing his travels in May 2024, Coates fails to mention at any point in his account the nightmare of the October 7 massacre, Israeli hostages in Gaza, the ongoing Israel-HAMAS War, Palestinian terror, or global antisemitism.  He seems oblivious to the way these events have altered prospects for peace in the Middle East.  His sojourn is a kind of a ahistoric pilgrimage that is decontextualized from the drama of wartime and is almost entirely mediated by Palestinian guides or Far Left Israeli activists, whose narratives he parrots (often word for word) in the text, especially those that evoke familiar themes mixing Palestinian victimhood with Black radicalism (“All that week I listened to Palestinians invoking that tradition, invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own struggle to them. [9] ). Much of the travelogue was a self-conscious, if solipsistic transposition of American racial paradigms to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  For example, he starts his visit at Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in May 2024, which might have been an opportunity to recognize October 7 and the need for a State of Israel as a response to Jewish victimhood.  Yet, it becomes quickly apparent that the memorial is merely a leitmotif of his larger arguments that Zionism, Israel, and the Jews have used their own history of persecution to oppress the Palestinians.  It is also a site that for him is a kind of simile for slavery and the crimes of the American color line — he strangely analogizes the garden’s Avenue of the Righteous [10] with the National Museum of African-American History — and later evokes the image of South African apartheid leader John Vorster laying a wreath to the Jewish dead there. [11]   For Coates, Israel was just another version of apartheid South Africa or the American South, where “just as sure as my ancestors were borne into a country where no one of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.” [12] [Coates does not remark on the 20% of the Israeli population who are Palestinian citizens of Israel or other Arab-Israelis.]  He employs echoes of the evocative phrase of Plessy v. Ferguson, referring to “the separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule.” [13]   Coates also applies the paradigm of Jim Crow to the West Bank, [14] compares the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter near the Western Wall after the 1967 war to the race riots in Tulsa in 1921, [15] the City of David archeological park to confederate memorials in South Carolina, [16] and even the book and subsequent movie ‘Exodus’ by Leon Uris with the racist Ku Klux Klan-celebratory film  “Birth of a Nation” (1915). [17]   Despite these inflammatory parallels, Coates concludes that there is no true comparison with the terrible history of slavery and discrimination in the United States, as “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel.” [18]  

At no point in his narrative does Coates acknowledge any Jewish or Israeli historical or religious claims to the land, whereas Palestinian heritage and rights are perceived as ancient and honorable — if often in a kind of pastoral primitivism.  Later, Coates makes clear that he does believe that the State of Israel has legitimacy, shares common global values, or can take steps to ensure its continued existence in a conflict zone, using quotation marks around the terms “Israel-Palestine conflict,” “[Israel’s] right to exist,” “[Israel’s] right to defend itself,” “Jewish democracy,” and “the only democracy in the Middle East” to suggest the implausibility of these concepts to his readers. [19]   Condescendingly, he quips that “I knew that ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ was essentially a tagline which like ‘the Breakfast of Champions’ or ‘Just Do It’ depended less on logic or observed reality than a form of word association.” [20]   [In contrast, he chafes that [the] “Middle East” is associated with “suicide bombings,” “niqab,” “child brides,” “chemical weapons,” and “bin Laden.” [21] ]  Moreover, he accepts unquestionably that “Zionism demands…” occupation and Kahanism, [22] that Israel is a sin, [23] that a State of Israel is by definition an expression of Jewish superiority and supremacy, [24] and later in the chapter, settler-colonialism, apartheid, Naqba, and genocide.  By the time he ends his journey, even the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust is not sacred, noting that at the beginning of his odyssey he had once “held Yad Vashem at a distance from Israel itself - its echoes to white supremacy, colonial roots, its apartheid policies,” [25] but he ultimately concludes by the end of his trip that even memorials to the dead are just a cynical facsimile of “the state project I now believed Yad Vashem served.” [26]

Coates had already declared earlier in the book that “I don’t really care much for hearing ‘both sides’ or ‘opposing points of view,’ so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views.” [27]   Yet, others saw the book as superficial, misleading, and even dangerous. 

Scrutiny of Coates’s book became a “message” to the media during a 30 September 2024 interview on the television program CBS Mornings. [28]   In a particularly hard-hitting segment for breakfast journalism, anchor Tony Dokoupil (himself a convert to Judaism with children who live in Israel) interviewed the author, remarking about the Israel-Palestine essay that “I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” [29] He wondered why “a talented, smart [writer]…[would] leave out so much,” [30] noting that Palestinians “exist in your narrative merely as victims of Israel,” and questioning, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?” [31]  He pressed Coates vigorously, asking (as the book itself suggested by putting the phrase in quotation marks)  “is that because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”  The author retorted that his work “was not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” and his goal was to represent a viewpoint that he considered was not traditionally given voice,” [32] claiming there was “no shortage of that perspective [ie. Dokoupil’s] in American media.” [33] Coates later complained that Dokoupil had “commandeered” the segment and done a disservice to his African-American co-hosts. [34] [Later, John McWhoter, an African-American professor and columnist suggested that it only perpetuated a myth of Black male fragility that Coates should not have been subjected to tough questioning. [35] ]

The controversy continued: On the anniversary of the 7 October attacks, Dokoupil was called into an editorial meeting at CBS where it was judged that the interview had not met “editorial standards.” One CBS staffer apparently confronted Dokoupil, accusing him that the segment was “racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. ” [36]  In a transcript leaked to the Free Press, CBS News Director Adrienne Roark acknowledged staff concern and asserted that the interview had violated the “legacy of neutrality and objectivity” at the network.  This claim was countered by CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford, who denounced the public excoriation of her colleague and opined, “I thought our commitment was to truth…Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast…devoid of fact and history.” [37]   The scandal apparently drew to a close when Shari Redstone, chair of Paramount Global, which owns the CBS Network, rebuked the news division for reprimanding Dokoupil, suggesting “I think they made a mistake here.” [38]

Yet those who understood The Message’s unique heritage within several generations of Black-American thought, including within his own family, may have thought otherwise. Ta-Nehisi is the son of Paul Coates, a former Baltimore Black Panther and later founder of the Black Classic Press.  The Coates, Sr. was deeply inspired by contemporaries like Malcolm X and James Baldwin (discussed later in this article) and published both well-known and obscure members of the Black intelligentsia for decades.  When asked about his famous son, he insisted that his success was earned, “as long as he’s not doing it to convince the world he’s cool.  He comes from a tradition, and he is connected spiritually to that tradition.  That’s what gives him the power that he has.  It ain’t that I raised him.” [39]   Yet one might also note that Coates, Jr. might have inherited another, more problematic tradition from his father, when allegations arose that the Black Classic Press had published antisemitic screeds — with titles like “the Jewish Onslaught” by Tony Martin, which perpetuated Louis Farrakhan’s canard of Jewish domination of the slave trade, and Yosef Ben-Jochannan’s “We the Black Jews,” that set to deconstruct the ‘White Jewish Race Myth.’ These came to light when the founder was set to honored with a National Book Award.  [Martin’s book was quietly removed from the catalogue when investigative reporters broke the story.] [40]   An investigation by the Free Press found further works that advanced antisemitic, homophobic, and racist messages. [41]   Is this family background where “The Message” received its message?

Paul Coates was a member of a larger generation who were developing attitudes as young African-American intellectuals, writers, and publishers about Israel on the eve of the 1967 war.  By tracing this intellectual heritage, we can better frame the origins of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s arguments within the thinking of a new Black generation after 7 October 2023.

 

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While this article cannot explore the full complexities of Black-Jewish relations, taking a narrower angle related to Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict from the late 1960s, one of the important features of this period was the symbiosis of dual struggles that ultimately led to the perspective of Coates’s essay.  While the Black-Jewish alliance ultimately withered on the vine of the asymmetry of the American experience between these two communities, it did create a new vocabulary that grafted domestic politics upon transnational agendas as was underscored in The Message — one that led to new solidarities “From Harlem to Gaza!” (or the more recent rallying cry of “From Ferguson to Palestine!”).  Yet, as the reaction to the Coates book revealed, this transposition of American race relations upon the Israel-Palestine conflict left a lot lost in translation between the slogans of the 1960s and the realities of the 2020s. 

 The super-imposition of domestic race relations in the United States upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and vice-versa) has a history that is as old as Zionism itself.  Both American Jews and African-Americans saw in the Jewish nationalist idea of the late 19^th century (primarily the political Zionism of Theodore Herzl), a model for their own communities. 

Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the Danish Virgin Islands but later an Ambassador for the Republic of Liberia, founded by liberated African-American slaves and free-born Blacks, might be called the father of Black Zionism.  Blyden had met Jews and even traveled to Ottoman Palestine in his youth, later avidly read Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaadt^[42] and published his own rejoinder “The Jewish Question” in 1898, in which he understood the Jews as the chosen people and admired their “pride in race” as a model for African rejection of white supremacy.^[43]   He also saw the Zionist commitment to the “ingathering of the exiles” as an analogue to the “Return to Africa” movement.  Blyden may have actually been the first to coin the term “Black Zionism,”^[44] but the term has traditionally been associated with W.E.B. Dubois.^[45]  Marcus Garvey then drew on Blyden and Dubois’s Zionism as the chief popularizer — if not progenitor — of Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism.^[46]   Through his Universal Negro Improvement Association, he actively advocated self-determination for Africans in Africa, referring to his own disciples as “Zionists,”^[47] who he claimed numbered six million.^[48]  Black Arts Movement intellectual Larry Neal later quipped that Garvey was “no Theodore Herzl or Chaim Weitzmann, with their kind of skills and resources behind him.  Had he been, he might have brought a nation  into existence.”^[49]

The debates over the Palestine question before the United Nations in 1947 also animated African-American nationalists.  W.E.B. Dubois directly lobbied the Truman administration to endorse the State of Israel at the United Nations.  Actor and activist Paul Robeson offered to entertain the troops should war break out in Palestine after the vote.  Walter White, President of the NAACP, used his influence to attain the vote of Liberia and Haiti for the partition plan,^[50] and the organization adopted a resolution on 26 June 1948 that “the valiant struggle of the people of Israel for independence serves as an inspiration to all persecuted people throughout the world.  We hail the establishment of the new State of Israel and welcome it into the family of nations.”^[51]  Later, African-American diplomat Ralph Bunche negotiated the armistice agreement of 1949 following the assassination of Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte.  There is little data about the general attitude of the African-American public toward the Israel-Palestine conflict around 1948, perhaps because Israel was not a subject of interest or that they largely agreed with the positions of their prominent intellectuals.

The first inkling that unanimity around support for Zionism and Israel was beginning to unravel within the African-American intelligentsia, and that the domestic and international grievances of a new Black nationalist generation would increasingly be linked, came in 1956 with the Sinai Crisis and new solidarities with Arab nationalism and the charismatic figure of anti-colonial Colonel Gamal Abd-Al Nasser.^[52] The nation’s longest-running family owned Black newspaper, the Baltimore Afro-American, condemned Israel for “bare aggression,” but tempered its critique of the Jewish state as only a junior partner in the invasion and even as a “pawn” of imperialism itself.^[53]  The harshest rebuke surprisingly came from Black Zionist W.E.B Dubois, who penned a poem entitled “Suez” in December 1956 that condemned Britian, France, and Israel who “steal the dark man’s land.”^[54] The Sinai Campaign drew the Middle East into the African-American orbit in a way that it had not been the case until then.

Most of the African-American intelligentsia and representative organizations remained favorably disposed toward Israel during the decade of the 1950s.  The transnational linkages of Third-Worldism were still inchoate,^[55] but one group departed sharply from both the Black and Jewish communal approach: The Nation of Islam (NOI).   While the Nation of Islam was not immediately accepted by other Islamic branches with its quixotic early history and theology,[56] it vigorously promoted an orientation toward a transnational Muslim ummah.^[57]  Under the leadership of Elijah Mohammed in the 1930s, NOI sought deeper ties with the Muslim world, convening a conference on colonialism only a year after the Sinai Campaign at the New York mosque in December 1957.  They invited North African dignitaries and even cabled Egyptian premier Nasser during the conference “from your long lost Muslim brother here in America.”^[58]  Malcolm X, who had risen through the ranks of NOI from a prison conversion to the head of the Harlem Temple, visited Cairo and Jerusalem in 1959, and Elijah Muhammed himself undertook the Haj in 1960.   One important dividend of these exchanges, beyond the cultivation of direct ties between the Nation of Islam and Muslim religious leaders, was the chrysalis of a shared sense of Blackness and African-ness. 

Malcolm X, who served as the public face of the Nation of Islam until his break with the movement in 1964, was also its ideologue-in-chief on the Zionist idea. Malcolm had likely been exposed to Zionism in his youth through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and styled himself as a kind of neo-Garveyite.  Yet, Malcolm X was often unsympathetic to both Jews at home and Zionism abroad and clearly articulated the linkage between domestic politics and transnational affairs.  In his famous Playboy Magazine interview with Alex Haley in May 1963, Malcolm X singled out the Jew for keeping the Black man down, opining “when there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s got it.  Walk up and down in any Negro ghetto in America…Every night they take the money out…[and] the black man’s community stays in the ghetto.”^[59]  Malcolm X then linked the economic exploitation of Harlem to the establishment of the Jewish State, suggesting that ‘Israel is just an international poor house which is maintained by money sucked from the poor suckers in America.”^[60] [This sentiment was shared in Watts, where an unnamed ‘black militant’ later told writer Paul Jacobs, “you know them trees you got planted all over Israel from Jews in Los Angeles, well they should have our names on them, not the Jews’ names.  The Money for them trees came off my back, out of the back of every Black brother in the ghetto!”^[61]]  Malcolm continued to preach that Jews were depriving Blacks at home and abroad of their rightful place in the world.

Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam in the winter of 1964, yet he continued to pursue transnational solidarities as the leader of the Muslim Mosque, Inc (MMI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.  He made an extensive pilgrimage to the Middle East and Africa, including the hajj, that year, which left a deep impression on his thinking.   A few weeks later, he penned his only known essay on Israel, entitled “Zionist Logic.” Reflecting on his recent trip, he attacked the “neo-imperialism of ‘dollarism’” of Israeli technical assistance in Africa^[62] and the “Zionist capitalist conspiracy.”^[63] While there is some evidence that Malcolm X’s views on interfaith race relations were evolving prior to his untimely death, he was assassinated on 21 February 1965 by the three man-team of Mujahid Abdul Halim (Thomas Hagan), Muhammad Aziz (Norman Butler), and Khalil Islam (Thomas Johnson). Halim maintained that he had acted alone, and Aziz and Islam provided alibis at the time. They were both exonerated in 2022, although Aziz had already died.[64]

Meanwhile, due to the influence of the Nation of Islam, both non-Muslim African-American intellectuals and Jews were reconsidering Black-Jewish relations through an internationalist perspective by the mid-1960s.  The seminal exchange of the period was Jewish Neo-Conservative^[65] Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 Commentary Magazine essay “My Negro Problem and Ours” and Black intellectual Harold Cruse’s 1969 response, “My Jewish Problem and Theirs.” This exchange encapsulated this evolving outlook. While transnational perspectives were more implicit than forthright in Podhoretz’s cosmopolitanism (and Zionism) and in Cruse’s communism, their interchange inspired both Black and Jewish intellectuals to make these themes more explicit on the eve of the 1967 war.

Before war erupted in the Middle East, the streets of America were aflame in race riots in the mid-1960s.  The riots made visible African-American rage over the slow pace of the struggle for racial equality and laid bare an elemental clash between Blacks and Jews over integration in the United States. 

Some African-American nationalists were beginning to articulate a more explicit connection between Zionism, American Jews, and the Black condition in the months before the Six Day War.  In January 1967, the radical newspaper The Liberator published a 3 part-series by Eddie Ellis, who would later lead the Harlem chapter of the Black Panthers,^[66] entitled “Semitism in the Black Ghetto.”  The series purported to explain and justify African-American antisemitism in light of urban conditions in Harlem.  While the first essay made familiar claims of Black-Jewish economic exploitation in Harlem and offered a critique of white-Jewish liberalism, the second and third articles took a far more adversarial — and antisemitic — tone.  Ellis accused American Jewry of conspiratorial control over the media and education, “Zionist designs” over Black-American life, a willful use of the Holocaust to gain sympathy from the African-American community, and acting as an “Uncle Tom” for white supremacy.^[67]  In summation, “if this then is anti-semitic, or anti-Irish, or anti-European, of anti anything, so be it.”^[68]

The actor and activist Ossie Davis, who was on the advisory board of The Liberator, resigned in protest over the antisemitic polemic, writing in Freedomways in the winter of 1967 that when the first essay was published, “I felt it was racist and said so to the Editor, a man who I still respect,” but with the second and third installments, “[this series] blows it for me, but good, and but definitely.  This is where I get off!” James Baldwin, who had been a contributor as well as a board-member of The Liberator, joined Davis in his resignation, noting “I think it is immoral to blame Harlem on the Jew” and that racism would not end by “take[ing] refuge in the most ancient and barbaric of the European myths.”^[69] 

Despite James Baldwin’s strong condemnation of the Liberator series, his apparent response to the controversy in his seminal column “Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White,” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on 9 April 1967, actually only seemed to reinforce rather than rebut Ellis’s own arguments.  Baldwin depicted a grim childhood in Harlem where every commercial, governmental, educational, and service interaction was an opportunity for Black exploitation.  He then attributed Black antisemitism to an “inevitable” and “understandable” impulse against those who would impede Black progress.  As the title of his article encapsulated, Baldwin theorized that,

In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man – for having become, in effect, a Christian.  The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negros to distrust it.  The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding.  It increases the Negro’s rage.

Most galling to Baldwin was the perceived drawing of equivalencies between the Black and Jewish experience, writing in one of the most memorable lines of the piece, “one does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering.  It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.”  Ultimately, Baldwin saw little in common between Blacks and Jews, concluding that Jews were not only doing the “dirty work” of white Christians (including by paying “conscience money” to civil rights) but were themselves complicit in structural racism.^[70]

Rabbi Robert Gordis angrily responded to Baldwin in the New York Times two weeks later stating in the headline to his article that “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat.”   Referencing the Ellis series and Baldwin’s resignation from the Liberator, he lambasted the author for his conspiratorial accusations of capacious economic exploitation by Jews while lamenting that much Jewish do-gooding, from philanthropy to physical sacrifice in the South, were met “with silence.”   Further, Gordis fulminated, Black Antisemitism came to fulfill a kind of socio-psychological function for African-Americans, whereby they could associate themselves with the white Christian power structure in their shared animus toward Jews.   He castigated Black leadership for allowing antisemitism to flourish in their midst and called upon African-Americans to free themselves of anti-Jewish prejudice.    Ultimately, Gordis argued that it was time for an African-American “auto-emancipation,” quoting Hillel the Elder’s edict, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”^[71]

            [It would not go unnoticed, at least by historians, that Stokely Carmichael closed his own speech at Morgan State College in Baltimore in June 1967 by quoting the same precept from Rabbi Hillel in his appeal to Black Power.^[72]]

It is important to interject at the conclusion of this article that  Gary T. Marx’s landmark study for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community, published in 1967, can serve as a final barometer of African-American attitudes on the eve of the Six Day War.^[73]   According to his ‘Index of Antisemitism,’  most anti-Jewish antipathy was not about Jews per-se but (echoing Baldwin and others) economic exploitation and the slow pace of progress toward racial equality.  Harlem actually scored lowest in the country in statements that singled-out Jews for duplicitous business practices and consolidation of power in the United States.^[74] Only a quarter of African-Americans actually distinguished between Jews and other whites, but those who did so were four-fold more favorable to Jewish-Americans.^[75] Marx openly repudiated Baldwin’s “scapegoat” theory,^[76] although he found some evidence of a relationship between antisemitism and class.  He also saw a correlation between Black antisemitism and perceived support for civil rights,^[77] where white liberals were often the proverbial whipping boy of their group.^[78] Nonetheless, a mere 6% of African-Americans scored very high in antisemitic feeling,^[79] and overall, Black attitudes toward Jews were growing more positive with time.^[80]  Interestingly, as there would be a major shift immediately after the 1967 war, he found that the African-American community was largely apathetic toward Black Nationalism,^[81] as 72% repudiated all 4 statements of it platform and did not support violence as a means to an end of equality.^[82]  Interestingly, whatever animosity existed between Blacks and Jews, residents of Harlem were also the most opposed to the use of force nationwide.^[83]  Yet Marx foreshadowed a new Northern militancy amongst African-Americans, including within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (mentioning young radical Stokely Carmichael specifically who took over the leadership in 1966^[84]), that would have a deep impact upon the nature of the relationship between Blacks and Jews going forward. Indeed, the first salvo of a new war of words between Blacks and Jews immediately after hostilities concluded in the Middle East in June came from SNCC.[85]  Marx prophetically warned that “the future depends on many things, not the least of which is the extent to which this society can bridge the gap between its ideals and its practices.”^[86]

 

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As has been discussed in this article, the troubling of the waters^[87] of Black-Jewish ties had already created profound polarization between (and within) the two communities prior to the Six Day War.   The 1967 Arab-Israel war, however, was a true watershed moment both in the history of the Middle East and in the West.

With her swift victory in six days that early June over the combined Arab armies led by Nasser’s Egypt, Israel and Zionism were suddenly transformed from a nation of plucky yet powerless pioneers, destitute European and Arab-Jewish refugees, and traumatized Holocaust survivors into a veritable bully on the block in the bad neighborhood of the Levant.  After the 1967 war, Israel was perceived as having Jewish-Zionist power and holding it over the Palestinian people. Israel also had newfound prestige and a starring role in Cold War power dynamics. Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this article, with its Ashkenazi Jewish leadership and population (although Israel today is a minority-majority country of “brown” and “black” Jews from Arab Lands and Africa), Israel was perceived as a “white” colonizer in a de/post-colonial moment.

As a sign of the times, Israel’s so-called white colonialist project in the Middle East was soon transposed upon the identity politics matrix of the West.  The 1960s radical linkage between the local and the transnational demanded new solidarities in “Black” and “White.”  Broken alliances between Black and Jews at home soon gave way to the incompatibility between Zionism and ‘Third Worldism,’ and boomeranged back on the American Left by the 1970s.  Putting Coates’s “message” into this larger context of Israel in the Black-American imagination over the course of five decades offers further insight into a new chapter of history since 7 October 2023.

[1] For example, the African American Resistance Organization at Harvard was one of the signatories of the now famous letter from 31 Palestine solidarity organizations on 8 October 2023 that blamed Israel solely for the HAMAS massacre: https://nypost.com/2023/10/09/thirty-one-harvard-organizations-blame-israel-for-hamas-attack/. Later the same organization was embroiled in a scandal for reprinting a series of antisemitic cartoons from the 1960s in its social media campaign in winter 2024: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-02-23/the-antisemitic-cartoon-roiling-harvard-its-not-the-first-time-it-caused-a-firestorm-for-student-groups.  Harvard is perhaps the most notable campus, but many African-American organizations at American universities stood in solidarity with Palestine in public events, memoranda, and policy.

[2] See: https://m4bl.org/statements/movement-for-black-lives-statement-on-us-backed-occupation-of-palestine/

[3] See: https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-urges-biden-harris-administration-stop-shipments-weapons-targeting-civilians-israel

[4] Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (New York: One World, 2024).

[5] The book was included in the President’s 2016 summer reading list, see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/08/12/presidents-summer-reading-list

[6] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

[7] Coates, The Message, 18

[8] Ibid., 102.

[9] Ibid., 142.

[10] Dedicated to “righteous gentiles” who saved Jewish victims during the Holocaust.

[11] Ibid., 215.

[12] Ibid., 126.

[13] Ibid., 126.

[14] Ibid., 144.

[15] Ibid., 199.

[16] Ibid., 200.

[17] Ibid., 178.

[18] Ibid., 204.

[19] Ibid. 134.

[20] Ibid., 175.

[21] Ibid., 175-176.

[22] Ibid., 155.

[23] Ibid., 168.

[24] Ibid., 168.

[25] Ibid., 219.

[26] Ibid., 222.

[27] Ibid., 80.

[28] The full segment can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgWt-QcPYMo

[29] Brian Stelter and Hadas Gold, “CBS News Says Heated Ta-Nehisi Coates Interview Did Not Meet Editorial Standards After Criticism,” CNN, 7 October 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/07/media/cbs-ta-nehisi-coates-tony-dokoupil-interview

[30] Ibid.

[31] Brian Steinberg, “CBS News Says Interview

 with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tony Dokoupil ‘Did Not Meet Editorial Standards,’ Variety, 7 October 2024, https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/cbs-mornings-ta-nehisi-coates-tony-dokoupil-1236170365/

[32] David Bauder, “When is an Interview Too Tough?: CBS News Grappling with Question after Dokoupil Interview,” AP, 10 October 2024, https://apnews.com/article/cbs-news-dokoupil-israel-coates-interview-tone-01035b94b1a824c1589555def1a52c6b

[33] Stelter and Gold.

[34] Abid Rahman, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Says Tony Dokoupil Commandeered CBS Interview: ‘I Don’t Think He Did Nate and Gayle a Service,” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ta-nehisi-coates-tony-dokoupil-cbs-interview-gayle-king-trevor-noah-1236026599/

[35] John McWhorter, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility,” New York Times, 17 October 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-and-the-myth-of-black-fragility.html

[36] Justin Baragona, “Exclusive: CBS Staffers Escalate Criticism of Tony Dokoupil’s Hostility on Palestine,” Zeteo, 10 October 2024, https://zeteo.com/p/cbs-tony-dokoupil-coates-interview-backlash-israel

[37] The Editors, “How is CBS Marking October 7? By Admonishing Tony DoKoupil.” Free Press, 7 October 2024, https://www.thefp.com/p/cbs-marks-october-7-by-admonishing-tony-dokoupil

[38] Alex Weprin, “Shari Redstone Backs Tony Dokoupil Amid Fallout Over CBS’s Ta-Nehisi Coates Interview,” The Hollywood Reporter, 9 October 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/cbs-mornings-shari-redstone-tony dokoupil-tanehisi-coates-interview-1236026823/

[39] Kenneth Stone Breckenridge, “As a Vietnam Vet, Former Black Panther, and Father of a Literary Superstar, Paul Coates Has Lived a Life Reminiscent of the Great Literature He Publishes,” Forward Press, January 2018, https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/historypolitics/paul-coates-ta-nehisi-coates-father-on-black-classic-press/

[40] Andrew Lapin, “National Book Awards Defends Prize for Publisher Who Reissued Antisemitic Books,"Times of Israel, 19 November 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/national-book-awards-defends-prize-for-publisher-who-reissued-antisemitic-books/ 

[41] Mark Oppenheimer, “Why is the National Book Award Going to a Publisher of Antisemitic Books? The Free Press, 20 November 2024, https://www.thefp.com/p/national-book-award-w-paul-coates-antisemitism

[42] The 1986 pamphlet, Der Judenstaadt, reprinted as Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Penguin Books), 2010.  The title is commonly translated as the Jewish State, but is more accurately rendered as ‘the State of the Jews’ as Herzl evinced little interest in the religious character of a Jewish nation.

[43] See Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian, Jr., Israel in the Black American Perspective, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 8-9.  See also, Hollis R. Lynch, “A Black 19^th Century Response to Jews and Zionism: The Case of Edward Wilmot Blyden,” in Joseph R. Washington (ed.), Jews in Black Perspectives (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 42-54, Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) and See Benjamin Neuberger, “Early African Nationalism, Judaism, and Zionism: Eward Wilmot Blyden,” Jewish Social Studies 47, No. 2 (1985): 151-166.

[44] See Edward Wilmot Blyden, The Origin and Purpose of African Colonization (Washington: American Colonization Society, 1883).

[45] Weisbord and Kazarian, 14.

[46] See Desmond Jagmohan, “Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self Determination,” Political Theory 48, No. 3 (June 2020): 271-302.

[47] Weisbord and Stein, 87.

[48] Weisbord and Kazarian, 16.

[49] Larry Neal, Visions of a Liberated Future (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), 13 as quoted in Ethan Goffman, “Burning Bridges: Black Nationalism and Antisemitism,” in Goffman (ed.) Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

[50] Weisbord and Kazarian, 20-24.

[51] Ibid., 23.

[52] For further understanding of African-American intellectuals and their budding interest in transnational Linkages with Africa and the Middle East prior to 1956, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire:Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

[53] Ibid., 29-30.

[54] Full text available at: https://www.best-poems.net/w-e-b-du-bois/suez.html

[55] An early expression can be traced to the Bandung Conference of 1955.

[56] For a summary of the Nation of Islam’s ideology and theology, see Ana Soage, “The Nation of Islam and The Muslim World: Theologically Divorced and Politically United,” Religious Compass (February 2013): 59-69.

[57] See Melani McAlister, “One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African-American Liberation, 1955-1970,” American Quarterly 51, No. 3 (September 1999): 629-631.

[58] Ibid., 633.

[59] Alex Haley, “The Malcolm X Interview,” Playboy Magazine, May 1963.

[60] Lincoln, 166.  See Weisbord and Kazarian, 45.

[61] See Paul Jacobs, “Watts vs. Israel,” Commonweal, 1 March 1968, 649.

[62] This was a pillar of Israeli diplomacy in the 1960s, see for example, Karolina Zielinska, Israeli Development Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa: Soft Power and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2021).

[63] Malcolm X, “Zionist Logic,” Egyptian Gazette, 17 September 1964.

[64] “Men Exonerated in the Malcolm X Killing Will Receive $36 Million,” NPR, 31 October 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1132757141/the-men-exonerated-in-the-malcolm-x-killing-will-receive-36-million. Conspiracy theories, including the involvement of the CIA, FBI, and the New York Police Department in the assassination or coverup abound, in 2024 the Shabbaz family, with the help of famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump, sued these organizations and the case is still pending, see Ben Crump, “Why I’m Helping Malcolm X’s Daughters Sue the U.S. Government,” MSNBC, 21 November 2024: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/malcolm-x-federal-lawsuit-assassination-us-government-rcna180920

[65] Although at the time, neo-conservativism was still in its infancy.

[66] Ellis was arrested in 1969 for murder and spent 25 years in prison for the crime he claimed he did not commit, becoming a well-known incarceration-rights activist.

[67] Eddie Ellis, “…Semitism in the Black Ghetto,” Part II, The Liberator 6:2 (February 1966): 14-15.

[68] Ellis, Part II, 15.

[69] James Baldwin and Ossie Davis, “Readers’ Forum: Anti-Semitism and Black Power,” Freedomways 7:1, (Winter 1967): 75-79.

[70] James Baldwin, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” New York Times (Sunday Magazine), 9 April 1967, 27 (and continuing pages).

[71] Robert Gordis, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat,” New York Times, 23 April1967, 28 (and continuing pages).

[72] Stokely Carmichael, “You Better Come on Home,” Speech at Morgan State College, reprinted in The Movement 3:6 (June 1967): 4; 9.

[73] Gary T. Marx, Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community, (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).  It is important to note that Marx conducted most of his research in 1964, prior to the 1966 riots, which may have skewed his findings.  Statistical and survey methodology of today may also be far more refined than his work in the 1960s, so it can only be judged by the standards of accuracy of its time.

[74] Ibid., 128.

[75] Ibid., 139.

[76] Ibid., 139.

[77] Ibid., 158-159.

[78] Ibid., 173.

[79] Ibid., 131.

[80] Ibid., 135

[81] 72% of those 1,100 surveyed repudiated all 4 statements associated with a pro-nationalist position, which included 1)To abstain from U.S. military service; 2)The establishment of a Black-American nation; and an open response evaluation of whether 3)Muslims and 4)Malcolm X were the best leadership for African  Americans.  Ibid., 107-108.  For a discussion of Marx’s study in the longer-durée, see also, Jennifer L. Golub, What Do We Know About Black Anti-Semitism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1990).

[82] Ibid.,32-33.

[83] Ibid., 33.

[84] Ibid., 211.

[85] See Sara Yael Hirschhorn, “From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to the Harvard Encampment,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 7:2 (2024): 39-49.

[86] Ibid., 213.

[87] I borrow this phrase from Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

 

__________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is Senior
Researcher, Comper Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Antisemitism and Racism Lecturer, Ruderman Program in American
Jewish Studies, University of Haifa.