Blacks Standing Up for Jews

I'm watching Ken Burns' new three-part series "The U.S. and the Holocaust" on PBS, and it's, obviously, a tough ride, even though Burns offers a balanced presentation, duly citing the many ways America - and various Americans - helped end the Holocaust, not least by defeating Nazis on the battlefield (also: we accepted over 200K Jewish refugees, a larger number than I'd thought). But even in its grimmest moments, the series keeps me latched on to a happy thought.

Jews were very active in the Civil Rights movement. They were right there in some of the most heated, dangerous moments (I have friends who were there, and were jailed for their efforts). It's not well-noted, because, for various reasons, a vast tide of anti-Semitism arose among black people in the 1970s, and since black academics at the time were (properly) deferred to in recording their own story, the role of Jews was, and remains, broadly under-recognized. I'm not bitterly indignant about this. I'm not complaining. It is what it is.

I personally experienced this sour climate after I became a jazz musician in the mid 1980s, perpetually finding myself the only white guy in the band. The flames had cooled some by then, but they certainly existed. When younger, angrier black musicians would inquire about my "family background", my older pals (most, if not all, of my friends at the time were geriatric black people) would step in and describe me as "a mixture". This felt truthful to me, and it's how I self-identify to this day. A mixture of what, exactly? Just a mixture. That's me. Not this, not that. I'm not ashamed of any of my component parts, but I certainly do not feel like any one thing.

So flash-ahead to today, a strange and eerie era of latent yet unrealized anti-Semitism. The coiled spring has not yet sprung. As I wrote way back in 2017,

The infectious smoldering of economic populism, of xenophobia, of white supremacy, and of vitriol at "coastal elites", media, "Wall Street types", etc., is not being pushed forward, I don't believe, primarily by anti-Semitic people (though plenty of rabid anti-Semites are, of course, conveniently enjoying that tide). However, The Jewish Problem is like super-dry, crackly, hyper-flammable kindling, lurking adjacently to it all, just out of frame.

I am not paranoid about this stuff. I normally go months without using the term "anti-Semite". It's not my normal shtick. But my spidy sense has been peaking geometrically (admittedly without any hard evidence), and at the exact same time I've noticed black writers and intellectuals suddenly appearing on TV to articulately and full-throatedly attack the anti-Semitism of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano (who scares me a lot). I also see Black faces in Ken Burns' series, treating our struggle against the Nazis as if it were their own. And I can't stop recalling how American troops in WWI fought to liberate France under the rallying cry of "Lafayette, We are Here," referencing the French general critical to revolutionary America's defeat of England centuries earlier.

I probably should be preoccupied with anxieties about America's political peril, and with foreboding for Mastriano's impending victory, and with sadness from viewing Ken Burn's important series. But whenever I spot a black commentator on TV condemning anti-Semitism in passionate, heartfelt language, I hear "Lafayette, We are Here" and I feel much, much better. 

I was too young to take part in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, etc., so I certainly can't take credit. No one has reason to repay me for anything. Yet while it's not dark here (yet?), and American Jews do not presently require defending/saving, and TV hits aren't courageous actions, I can't help feeling moved. Like something is being made right. 

Support is not something you can ever count on. Go to an aquarium with a mixed tank, and you'll quickly observe that schools don't mix. A bluefish never stands by a whitefish, and when sharks attack, surrounding fish can almost be seen to mumble "I'm alright, Jack" with swimmy Schadenfreude.

Support normally appears only once a tide has turned. Liberals today love them some LGBT culture, oddly forgetful of the recency of their turn. Until circa 2008, when headway had already been made, hardly anyone spoke up for gay people besides other gay people (and not all of them did, either). Everyone loves a winner!

Heartfelt support should never be taken for granted. Black people standing up for Jews feels deeply soothing. It completes the circle re: my love for, and adopted devotion to, Black culture. It helps soothe the profound gap in my life since my elderly friends and mentors departed en masse. And it mellows the memory of the pain I felt as a child and young man observing the needless, senseless, pointless turning of Black people against their longtime allies. Something's different now. The same spidey sense won’t stop registering it.


It certainly doesn't make the world perfect, and it's a mere trickle rather than a flood. But errant wildflowers blooming through pavement cracks can be far more moving than a fancy formal garden.

That's a tenet of Nano-Aesthetics, btw.