Why Do Some Black Leaders Ignore Jewish Contributions to Black America?
A summary of Jewish contributions during the Civil Rights Movement
I wrote recently about how the 1619 project distorts history, undermines journalism, and corrupts education. Click here to read more:
(Briefly, I illustrate how 1619 poses as history but is written by journalists, claims to be good journalism but avoids and spins the issues of the day to create false narrative rather than inform, and is repackaged into education that misleads our youth about their own country.)
1619 Does Not Talk About Jews, Yet it is Antisemitic
How can that be? I’ll now address what seems minor, but is in some ways core to the 1619 Project’s faults and distortions. It erases the Jews.
Yep. Jewish people are a critical part of the history of Civil Rights in America. So critical, that you cannot write a valid history of Black People in America, without talking about the Jews.
Yet that is exactly what Nicole Hannah-Jones and her NYT cohort did.
The Truth about Jews and Blacks
Nicole Hannah-Jones would not exist (as a scholar) without Jewish support for her forbears. From education to civil rights, she stands on Jewish shoulders.
- Fully half of the Black people who were educated in the American South after 1900 were educated at schools funded by Jewish people. 5,000 schools, without which we would be decades behind in Black American influence and achievement.
- The NAACP was organized with the help of numerous Jewish leaders including Rabbi Stephen Wise, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, Lillian Wald, and Louis Marshall.
- Professor Joel Elias Spingarn was an early supporter of the NAACP, serving as Chairman of the Board, Treasurer and ultimately President for 9 years until his death in 1939. Overall 26 years of dedication to racial justice.
- Spingarn left his position only due to his death, at which point he was succeeded by his brother Arthur Spingarn, who served until 1965.
- When Martin Luther King needed white bodies on the line with him in the Deep South, to help restrain white supremacist attacks and police brutality against the marchers, he turned to the Rabbis, including Maurice Eisendrath and Abraham Heschel. These righteous Jews put their lives and bodies literally on the line.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel was a close confidant and co-organizer of Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights movement.
- Jews made up 30 percent or more of the civil rights activists in the South during the movement, despite being perhaps 2% of the US population. A 15x over representation in the movement, at a minimum.
- Some report that fully 90% of civil rights lawyers in the South during the Civil Rights Movement were Jewish. Perhaps an overstatement, but we get the idea.
- Justice Felix Frankfurter advised the NAACP for years, and went on to sign the Brown vs Board of Education decision on the Supreme Court.
There’s too much to list, but let’s just be clear that Jewish Americans stood with Black Americans in a unique and outstanding way from the start, and particularly from the early 1900s through the Civil Rights Movement.
Jewish Allyship is Missing From the 1619 Project
I don’t have a huge staff. I have not been researching this for years. I am not a tenured professor of Journalism. Nicole Hannah-Jones has and is all of that.
Yet I find all this information quite easily, and she somehow did not. Weird, isn’t it?
The Irony…
The 1619 project focuses on what is missing from history, and ascribes it great meaning.
What, then, does the erasure of the Jews say about the 1619 project itself?
There is more. A new Critical Race Theory-based children’s book, “Not My Idea” also erases Jews from the history of the Civil Rights movement, while it elevates and illustrates contributions from Nuns and other Christians. Christian contributions are great, but Jewish erasure is obvious throughout critical theory texts, and even largely on the NAACP web site (search for the Rabbis and NAACP founders above, and you won’t find much).
Why Erasure is Antisemitic
You can spin a web of any design through narrative by cherry-picking facts, and spinning or distorting. What authors leave out of political and polemic writings is as important as what they leave in. Nicole Hannah-Jones could not conceivably have researched the history of race in America for decades and missed the role of the Jews.
Is this unintentional? Either way 1619 omissions illuminate a broader conspiracy (and I do not use the word “conspiracy” casually or lightly) to erase and elide, hide and distort, minimize and marginalize the Jews.
The erasure enables a new narrative, grounded in Nation of Islam writings, supported by Members of Congress, and percolating through media and culture: that Jews are hyper-white; somehow more racist than racist despite being a imperiled and oppressed minority.
Jew Hatred Beneath the Surface
A contextual side note: the Jews are always to blame…. When there was a plague, the Jews spread it. When capitalism was the problem, Jews were the bankers; yet when Socialism was the problem, Jews were Communists. Colonialis was the big evil for a while, and many cast Israel as the exemplar. Now that racism is the hottest issue, of course Jews are the “hyper” racist, despite history showing the exact opposite.
Erasure often serves to eliminate awareness of a people, but in the case of the Far Left, Jewish Erasure is an active distortion, selecting the negative without context of the positive, to demonize and blame Jews for the ills of society, and disrupt the historic alliance between Blacks and Jews. Ask yourself — how many Black people today know about all this?
What is old is new again.
