MLK, Nostalgia and the Betrayal of Silence
The great essayist Elizabeth Hardwick in her essay The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King observes that perhaps one of the reasons Martin Luther King is such an exalted person in the American imagination is that we have imbued him with all the symbology of a saint, or a prophet, a semi-Christlike figure that died for our sins. She also asks if it was also perhaps a form of nostalgia, nostalgia of the dream, and possibility that King represents, a dream that in Hardwick’s view, was already crumbling and then shattered the day he was shot. King represents the potential of forming powerful alliances across differences, of seeing the Image of God in all people and refusing to let his various identities confine or define who he is – who we are. In our time of identity politics and divisions, this has certainly become an even more powerful dream.
I reread her essay recently, and it made me think that for Jews in particular, there is a nostalgia that King evokes for a time when blacks and Jews marched arm in arm, and worked closely together.
As liberal Jews, we feel a sense of solidarity with African Americans in part because of the way the Passover story became the archetypal myth of freedom, and the imagery was central to African-American spirituality and the fight against slavery.
Many of us have a great deal of pride in the disproportionate number of Jews that were Freedom Riders.
We are proud that so many rabbis like Rabbi Joachim Prinz and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel we close allies of King and very active in his movement. Rabbi Prinz spoke immediately before King at the March on Washington. Rabbi Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the last century, marched with King in Selma and coined the phrase, “Praying with our Feet.”
Growing up in Georgia, I was proud that the synagogue where my parents married, modestly called “The Temple,” had been bombed in 1958 by a group called the “Confederate Underground” because their Rabbi Joachim Rothschild had been speaking on behalf of civil rights.
We know that key civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League had Jews among their founding members. We know that King had a strong sense of solidarity with American Jews and was a clear supporter of Israel’s right to exist. In fact, many black leaders were inspired by the Zionist movement and by the refusal of Jews to continue to be passive in their own oppression.
We have nostalgia for that sense of connection, and we have a powerful sense that our alliance has frayed or worse – there is now open hostility between parts of our communities. We wonder what we need to do to get that sense of solidarity and alliance back. Some of us feel a sense of betrayal or at least a lack of appreciation from the activist black community for Jewish concerns and the goals we share.
The problem is that these views are nostalgia – nostalgia for an imagined past that was much more complicated in reality than we often remember it.
For example, In 1967, James Baldwin published his famous essay Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White twhichargued in part that blacks blame Jews for managing to become white.
In 1967, while most Jews were celebrating the victories of the Six-Day War, many young African American activists saw it as an extension of American imperialism that they were fighting in Vietnam. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee put out a primer on the “Palestine problem” describing Zionism as an imperial project upheld by the “white western colonial governments” of the United States and Europe.
It was in the wake of that war that Arab Americans built bridges with Black activists. For example, the Organization of Arab Students invited Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael to speak at their national convention in 1968, where he delivered a fiery call for Black support of the Palestinian revolution.
We also forget that many Jews were not at all involved in the civil rights movement because they were invested in their newfound whiteness and what today we might call white privilege.
Of course, Jews had not always been categorized that way. There were still signs at restaurants in Georgia when I was a kid that said “no n-word or Jews allowed” and we were regularly grouped together as the idiom for subhuman. People still say that.
So when in the ‘50 and ’60s, when Jews were finally allowed into most country clubs, Ivy League Colleges, ski resorts in Vermont, and neighborhoods that had been redlined against Jews - many Jews were excited at their new levels of acceptance, their acceptance by whites as white, and so distanced themselves from the civil rights movement, or worse.
And like all people, Jews can be racist and Jewish institutions can be racist. Some of the most verbally racist people I knew were Jews in New York who used the word ” Schwartze” regularly and with venom.
Today, when an African American walks into a Jewish space, they are not always welcomed or included, even though Jews of Color make up a significant percentage – around 15% of Jews under 30. If a person we have never seen comes in that we perceive as white, we assume they are connected in some way, but if the person is black, we wonder how they are connected. We are often surprised to learn they are Jewish. We shouldn’t be.
In the progressive Jewish community, we have been confronting racism and bias in our community. We have also spoken out loudly against racism and racial violence. There is more to do, but we are engaged in that work.
But if we are to be genuine allies, the African American communities and institutions also need to confront their own antisemitism and they need to speak out against the Jew-hatred coming from some parts of their community.
For example, after Kanye, Whoopie, Chappelle, Irving or others said things that are clearly antisemitic or ignorant of Jewish history, there was a very noticeable dearth of African American leaders and influencers speaking out on TV and social media. There seems to be a reluctance to call out the horribly Jew-hating things said by Farrakhan and his supporters and to name how widespread his lies have become in the community.
Martin Luther King called out antisemitism, as he did racism, poverty, and imperialism. Those who are carrying on his legacy need to follow his example and confront the antisemitism that infects significant parts of their community.
We must confront the silence.
As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail:
I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Or as Rabbi Joachim Prinz said at the March on Washington just before King spoke:
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those most tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.
Martin Luther King was a genius at strategy, and he worked tirelessly to forge alliances and lean into areas of shared interest. If we are to truly honor his legacy, not as a symbol, but as a thinker and a leader, then we must continue to reach out to form alliances, we must show up when other groups are the victims of hate and bigotry, but also to advocate for our concerns and to confront other marginalized communities about the rising tolerance of blatant antisemitism in those communities with whom we work.
We need friends. Real friends, and in order to show up for one another when we are needed, we also need to do the work of friendship and alliance, taking the time to understand one another, and listen to one another, so that when the sky above us grows dark and full of clouds, and we are in need of friends, we will be there for one another.
Ken Y’hi Ratson