The relentless siege of Gaza in the past few months, which has most recently taken shape as a brutal attack on the civilians of Rafah, has influenced all manner of conversations about identity in the United States. Many of us have been forced to reconsider the meaning of kinship and solidarity as we watch the Israeli genocide of Palestinians unfold daily on our screens.
One major arena of kinship and solidarity that has come under scrutiny since the start of the Israel-Gaza war is the relationship that generally gets named “Black-Jewish relations” or “the Black-Jewish alliance”. For decades it has been an article of faith among certain elite members of US culture – disproportionately Jewish men – that the “Black-Jewish alliance” is a timeless, natural and durable socio-political relationship between two communities. A guiding assumption of the alliance is that African Americans owe a debt for Jewish advocacy during the civil rights movement. Another premise is that Black support for Jewish people means Black support for Israel.
Recent articles in the mainstream press have lamented the possible dissolution of this so-called alliance, in response to the support of Palestine and calls for a ceasefire from Black activists and leaders. This hand-wringing, which reached a fever pitch in the 1990s with such books as What Went Wrong? and Broken Alliance, relies on the idea that once upon a time African Americans and Jews lived in a paradise of cross-community cooperation and that the relationship had somehow been warped.
But the “Black-Jewish alliance” as it’s commonly imagined is not, or at least is not reliably, an actual thing. The narrative is more of an aspirational idea of how the two groups should coexist in the US. It suggests that because of some crucial moments of collaboration in American history, the two communities have and will always be in complete political alignment. This has never been the case.