Why we need to talk about black anti-Semitism

At the Glastonbury musical festival in England this weekend Bobby Vylan – a British-born rapper of African heritage – led the crowd in a chant of “Death, death, to the IDF”. It was a potent reminder of a dispiriting trend: the growing hostility among those of African heritage in the United States towards Israel and even to Judaism itself. One notable development seen during the bitter battle over Gaza and the recent strike on Iran has been broad embrace by African-American celebrities of anti-Israel and sometimes openly anti-Semitic memes. These include such figures as the influencer Candace Owens, Kanye West, also known as Ye, and, to a less heinous extent, the New York Times‘ Afro-centrist columnist Charles Blow.

These figures, as well as the usual anti-Semites like Rev. Louis  Farrakhan, embrace memes about Jews that wouldn’t look out of place among the Tsarist secret police or National Socialist ideologues. West recently released a music video titled “HEIL HITLER (HOOLIGAN VERSION)” on X, featuring Nazi imagery and the lyric “So I became a Nazi, I’m the villain.” Ye has thirty two million followers, more than twice the global Jewish population. On X he posted: “I love Hitler – now what bitches.” 

Owens, who has six million followers, espouses a number of discredited and troubling views: that Israel is imposing apartheid on its Arab citizens, and that Hollywood is run by Jewish gangs. She compares Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Hitler, although, given her perspective, perhaps that’s a sort of sideways compliment. Having ridden her MAGA credentials to big ratings, after Trump’s attack on Iran she now claims to be “embarrassed” at having supported him.

All this suggests that anti-Semitism has spread from the fringes of black society to people with wide influence in the community. The growing rift between these two historically-persecuted groups represents a sad breaking up of a once great alliance. In the last century, Jews were deeply involved in the founding of the NAACP, and were prominent among the Civil Rights era “freedom riders.” The 1965 Civil Rights act, notes Martin Luther King speechwriter Clarence Jones, would not have occurred without a “coalition of blacks and Jews” – including Stanley Levinson and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the namesake of my younger daughter’s Hebrew grade school.

Now much of the hostility comes from educated African-Americans

But today both communities are increasingly at loggerheads in Congress, academia, the literary salons, and the streets of our cities. At the root of this growing conflict, notes historian Marc Dollinger, is a shift from a shared legacy of persecution towards a new form of leftism that casts Jews as “settler-colonial” oppressors. “Jews”  he writes, “morph from socially progressive advocates for Civil Rights in the United States to oppressive Zionists depriving the local indigenous population.” 

The conflict well predates the recent obsessions with the Palestine question. Novelist James Baldwin wrote in a 1967 New York Times essay, that, despite shared struggles, differing levels of affluence increasingly separated them. Belief in Jewish stereotypes is almost three times as common among black liberals than their white counterparts. These tropes are also far more prevalent among black conservatives, such as Candace Owens, than among white ones. Black Americans under 30 express a degree of anti-Semitism to which we can only find an analog in the contemporary alt-right.  

These tensions worsened after the October 7^th pogrom. Black support for the Palestinian cause, once largely restricted to radical elements, has gone mainstream.  Of the nine congresspeople who refused to condemn Hamas after the event, five were black. Similarly of the 13 who opposed Israel’s right to respond to Iranian missile attacks, seven were African-American. Perhaps even more disturbingly, black politicians and ministers nw commonly denounce Israel’s “genocide”, with some calling the IDF Nazis and even repeating the old canard that Jews controlled the slave trade. Black Lives Matter enthusiastically embraced the Hamas pogrom while the NAACP has also turned decidedly against Israel.  

Blacks are arguably – along with extreme leftists, Muslims, and the usual far right racists – the most anti-Israel constituency in the country. A New York Times Sienna poll found that a third of all blacks favored the Palestinians in the current conflict, roughly twice the level for whites. In October, the predominately minority Richmond City Council passed a controversial resolution that recognized the suffering of Palestinians and accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Oakland’s resolution for an immediate ceasefire passed with no mention of Hamas’ atrocities, which some advocates argued was a plot by the Israel Defense forces.

Worse still, this new wave of anti-Semitism is not one of poorly-educated ghetto residents. Now much of the hostility comes from educated African-Americans; historian Henry Louis Gates suggests we now see an “anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment.”

Research from Tuft’s Eitan Hersh found young black college students were the racial group most likely to avoid being friends with supporters of Israel. Black student leaders, including at heavily Jewish schools like NYU, have been prominent backers of Hamas. This reflects the ideological indoctrination that impacts all students, with young Americans far more likely as a generation to back Palestinians as opposed to Israel. The longer they stay in school the more likely they are to adopt anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views, notes a recent ADL study.

These trends have been exacerbated by the sprawling DEI bureaucracy, which is often indifferent and even hostile to the concerns of Jewish students. Even at my own somewhat politically quiescent school, DEI officials even gave the Martin Luther King award to the Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has voiced support for the October 7^th pogrom.  

Fortunately, the DEI empire is now under assault by the Trump Administration (our DEI director was essentially cashiered by our board of Trustees). But the dismantling of DEI is unlikely to curb anti-Israel and anti-Jewish thinking now embedded at demonstrably anti-Semitic places like Harvard, UC Berkeley and Columbia.

Even grade schools, particularly in heavily minority areas, have become havens for anti-Jewish hatred, as evidenced by anti-Semitic targeting of Jewish teachers in heavily minority schools like Queens Hillcrest High School; or attacks on Jewish student athletes at a basketball game in Yonkers. 

California’s education establishment has adopted an ethnic studies program, shaped by Critical Race Theory, that is openly anti-Zionist and  dismisses Jews as white oppressors. San Francisco has seen anti-Israel walkouts in ten high schools, organized by an advocacy group with access to student addresses. In Toronto, children as young as eight were “compelled” to attend anti-Israel rallies at the bequest of their progressive teachers.

Like the tragic children of Gaza, minority children are being groomed to hate Israel – as well as the people who predominate there. In Oakland a teacher held an unauthorized teach-in, reports the New York Times, including a coloring book for elementary students with a Palestinian character who says, “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”   

This conflict poses a major problem for the Democratic Party, where both groups have long been key bastions. Most established Democratic figures – including uber-party apparatchik Donna Brazile, Bill Clinton Nancy Pelosi, California Governor Newsom – have remained pro-Israel. But heavily-black Oakland recently elected as Mayor Barbara Lee, a longtime opponent of the Jewish state’s resistance; and in Los Angeles the anti-Israel Democratic Socialists – the party of New York’s Zohran Mamdani – are ascendent.

Some, like the well-connected Bay Area publicist Sam Lauder insist that well-financed groups like his Democratic Majority for Israel will succeed in halting the pro-Hamas trend. There is certainly some solace to be found in the defeat, heavily funded by Jewish Democrats, of Squad members Corrie Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Yet this strategy also has its downsides: casting Jews as outsiders seeking to use their money to shape black leadership. This is likely to become a major theme in the upcoming New York mayoralty race where, as of now, African-Americans and Jews are the key electoral bulwarks against the rise of the anti-Israel socialist Mamdani.

For now the black anti-Semites have the wind to their backs. Many young blacks deny the Holocaust and some even favor eliminating Israel and giving it to Hamas. Jewish authors, and Israelis, are being banned from literary events, much as occurred in the early days of Nazi Germany, even as the intelligentsia  applaud Ta-Nehisi Coates – who is so anti-Israel that he even wonders if he would have participated in the October 7^th pogrom. Even worse, a National Book Award was recently bestowed on W. Paul Coates, a publisher of rabidly anti-Semitic texts like The Jewish Onslaught.

This leaves Jewish Democrats in an increasingly difficult position, given that 85% of Jews support Israel and oppose its destruction. They will support  sympathetic minority figures such as New York’s Richie Torres, of mixed Dominican heritage, New York Mayor Eric Adams, or former Congressman Mondaire Jones, a prominent black politician who was excoriated for opposing Bowman’s reelection. And then there’s the rise of young political thinkers like Coleman Hughes, who criticizes both the ideology of ‘neo racism’ as well as the comparisons of Israel with South Africa apartheid or Jim Crow America.   

This conflict poses a major problem for the Democratic Party, where both groups have long been key bastions

In the long run, geographic and demographic trends could either widen or repair this historic rift. The two groups, who often used to live near each other in America’s major cities, began to lose touch as two thirds of Jews have left urban areas for the suburbs. But equally, blacks are increasingly moving to these suburban communities themselves. Mixing these two groups in the same neighborhoods again could do something to recreate those old bonds.

Despite the general public pessimism  about race relations, the fastest growing race in America is mixed and the largest minority community is the largely mixed-race Hispanics; one in ten babies born in the U.S. have one white and one non-white parent. Black identity is also changing; more than ten percent are immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere – people who came here not as chattel but for opportunity.

Over time these changing conditions could help return us to the integration mindset so prominent in the early Civil Rights movement. When he was growing up in New York, recalled native son Colin Powell, things were not broken primarily along black and white lines, but by “a mélange of numerous often competing” ethnic communities, notably Jews and blacks. It is in these kinds of milieus where deep racial rifts can be healed, to the benefit of both.