Shared Wounds
There is a peculiar amnesia in American political discourse: we too easily forget that two of the most persecuted peoples in the Western world — Black Americans and Jewish Americans — once marched arm-in-arm toward the same horizon.
Their partnership was not sentimental, nor abstract.
It was born of shared wounds.
Jewish leaders saw Jim Crow and recognized a ghost from Europe — the walls of their grandparents’ ghettos rebuilt in Southern timber. Rabbis rode in the Freedom Rides not to display virtue but to stave off déjà vu. Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney died together in Mississippi because hatred rarely bothers to sort its targets by category.
Yet solidarity, however noble, is never immune to pressure.
After the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, progress diverged. Jewish Americans, long locked out of club and company, leveraged education into economic ascent with remarkable speed — a triumph both admirable and, in a nation still structured by segregation, deeply fraught. They became what economists call a middleman minority: highly visible in commerce, yet not at the top of the hierarchy.
And in too many cities, success bred suspicion.
Black communities — shut out of mortgages, capital, and ownership by policy design — sometimes saw Jewish shopkeepers prospering in neighborhoods where Black businesses could not gain a foothold. Resentment hardened into rhetoric. The Crown Heights riots did not erupt from nothing; nor did Jesse Jackson’s casual slur about “Hymietown.” Ugly moments, yes — but not inexplicable ones.
Foreign policy then drove a wedge deeper.
Israel’s wars became proxies for American tribalism.
The GOP discovered a new route to Jewish votes:
support Israel fiercely, and loudly.
Meanwhile, the left — especially its younger academics — began framing global justice in Palestinian terms.
Two peoples who once shared the same march now found themselves assigned different causes.
And today, under a government eager to police campus speech while ignoring racial justice entirely, the wedge is deliberately weaponized. We are asked to choose — as if refusing genocide in Gaza negates the horror of synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh; as if acknowledging slavery’s afterlives erases six million murdered in Europe.
We should reject this cruel arithmetic.
For there is no competition in suffering.
There is no leaderboard of tragedy.
Both peoples carry trauma inherited rather than chosen — one from slave ships, the other from cattle cars — and both have struggled to make a nation love them back.
The truth is simple:
Black Americans and Jewish Americans are strongest when they remember they share the same enemies — cruelty, exclusion, and the great American convenience of forgetting.
Our paths diverged because politics pulled us apart.
They can converge again if citizenship insists.
The partnership that faced Bull Connor together can — must — withstand the cynical provocations of modern demagogues. History proves that when either group stands alone, the country looks away. But when we stand together?
America looks — and listens.