My children are blessed to have been raised in a country different from the Germany of the 1930s and the Poland of the immediate postwar era. Both of my parents are refugees from European antisemitism, and my mother’s comments about her experiences in Poland can seem mysterious to my kids. They haven’t been raised with material exhibitions of antisemitism, and our discussions about it over the years have seemed more like lessons in history.
But antisemitism is on the rise again in the United States. Harmful tropes have returned to explicit politics, with help from the last president. Meanwhile, remarks by Kanye West and Nick Cannon echo ancient conspiratorial themes.
My two children are seven and 11. They are Black and Jewish and have to understand racism and antisemitism when most adults don’t or won’t understand either. How do we address these issues with them?
Black children growing up in America absorb much about race from their environment. Many live in largely segregated cities and experience largely segregated spaces – they see what is happening from an early age. The repeated instances of police violence and Black protest, followed by white backlash – what the historian Elizabeth Hinton calls “the cycle” – do not go unnoticed by Black children.
Meanwhile, leading Republican candidates talk in antisemitic stereotypes – the “dual loyalty” trope that Jewish Americans have a primary loyalty to Israel, or conspiracy theories such as QAnon that resemble the ancient Christian antisemitic conspiracy theory of blood libel. My 11-year-old likes Ye’s music, and now feels bad listening to it. But it’s important that my kids recognize that the narratives he and others share are already embedded in American society.
For some Jewish Americans, remarks and posts by Ye, Cannon and Kyrie Irving come together in a concept that one could, very tendentiously, label “Black antisemitism”. But we must be vigilant to the fact that what could be mislabeled as such is instead antisemitism of other varieties. If Ye describes Jewish financial domination, or control of the media, it is not “Black antisemitism”. It is garden-variety American antisemitism. Christian nationalism is the view that the US was founded as a Christian nation, and its exceptional nature is a testament to the abiding Christian character of its founding laws and culture. Christian nationalism is also a traditional source of antisemitism, the blame for which can hardly be placed on Black Americans.
Even when we look at antisemitic comments made by Black Hebrew Israelites, or some of the leaders of the Nation of Islam, we need to ask whether the antisemitism has anything to do with being Black American, or rather some other source (eg certain forms of Christianity or Islam). There are a variety of sources of antisemitism. None of them are specifically Black.
It is tempting for Jewish Americans to displace the threat of antisemitism on to another minority group. But the real threats we Jewish people face in America have nothing to do with Black Americans, who generally have been and always will be our allies.
US anti-Black racism, unlike antisemitism, is at the heart of the policies that formed our country. The legacy of slavery runs deep in our institutions, culturally and otherwise. Antisemitism, on the other hand, is less intrinsic to the American identity.
As Black Americans are to the United States, Jews were to many European nations – for centuries, their national minority. Elections swung on their issues. The Nazis killed two out of three European Jews. Even in Poland, a country where we numbered for centuries 10% of the national population, it is as if we were never there.
As James Baldwin powerfully argued, in his 1967 essay Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White, this European past, as horrific as it was, has not prevented many Jewish Americans from claiming the privileges of whiteness here. Baldwin aptly writes: “One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.” Even my Black Jewish American children, as young as they are, are keenly aware of these facts. They also know that unlike most American Jews, they cannot escape into whiteness.
The reality is that the fate of Black and Jewish Americans are linked, as Jewish people are characteristically targeted by conspiracy theories that are at the heart of white ethnonationalism and fascism. “Until we see antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security,” Michael Eric Dyson has written, “none of us are truly safe.”
My kids’ strong sense of social justice is, I recognize, in large part personal – for example, the journeys of all refugees from hatred and discrimination remind them of my parents’ similar flights. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists, however, have a quite different view of the source of Jewish support of refugees. According to classic Nazi thinking, Jews were instead drawn to supporting refugees because it was a method to dilute and weaken native white Christian populations. “The Jews will not replace us,” uttered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a very different political and historical context, is a clear reference to this; it also fueled the murder of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
In Nazi and KKK ideology, Jews are the secret agents behind social justice movements. But even recent attacks on critical race theory (CRT) target Jews and Blacks together, albeit covertly. Attacks on CRT are a version of the old “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, and as such appeal to antisemites, who will make the racist assumption that the “theorists” behind it are Jews. There are clear overlaps in the multiple conspiracy theories behind European fascism and those animating the far right in the US. Both target Black people and Jewish people simultaneously.
We owe to Black writers and thinkers very early recognition of these parallels. As the historian Matthew Delmont has memorably put it, Langston Hughes in 1937 essentially described fascism as Jim Crow with a foreign accent. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the main Black newspapers in the US, had a “Double V” victory campaign in the 1940s – victory was to be fought abroad against fascism and here against racism. Black Americans knew that Nazism was a racist project, since antisemitism is a form of racism. As I see it, and tell my children, Black Americans are Jewish Americans’ greatest allies against the forces facing both of us here. More generally, fascist antisemitism is simultaneously mixed with threats to other minorities and marginalized groups and we need to stand against it together.
Some prominent Black American intellectuals, as well as the movements their work has helped spark, have directed ire against actions taken by the state of Israel, which subjects Palestinians to mass over-policing, over-incarceration, and unjust imprisonment. The ubiquitous intrusive checkpoints remind many of the straight line between Jim Crow, Ferguson and Palestine. But my kids are being raised as American Jews, not as citizens of another nation. They are similarly critical of these actions of the state of Israel, and its current direction, as are many other young American Jews.
All talk of “Black antisemitism” is therefore nothing more than a dangerous distraction. Here is the reality.
The most specific threat as a group we Jewish people face in America is the omnipresent threat we Jews will always face, the threat of Christian nationalism, including forms of Christianity that are deeply and sophisticatedly based on Christian teachings. It’s Christian nationalism that maintains that Jews must play a subordinate role in the workplace and elsewhere to Christians. These forms of Christianity have for countless centuries been our most dedicated ideological enemy. As Christian nationalism rises, you will see more antisemitism of the variety that grants that while Jews shouldn’t be exterminated, they need to take a cultural and political backseat to Christians.
Christian nationalists see Israel as belonging, at least for now, to Jewish people – but they feel the US is theirs. They explicitly want American Jews to be second-class citizens. This is Ye’s real beef, and it’s an ancient one. His claim that Jews should work for Christians is not “Black antisemitism” (whatever that would be) – it is rather a traditional, perpetually threatening form of antisemitism.
I invite my children to embrace the remarkable American promise of a multiracial, multireligious democracy, inclusive and fully accepting of the many identities that make up a free society. But it would be foolish to leave them ignorant about the very real obstacles to this ideal.
