African Americans and Jewish Americans have interacted throughout much of the history of the United States. This relationship has included widely publicized cooperation and conflict, and—since the 1970s—it has been an area of significant academic research. Cooperation during the Civil Rights Movement was strategic and significant, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The relationship has also featured conflicts and controversies which are related to such topics as the Black Power movement, Zionism, affirmative action, and the antisemitic trope concerning the alleged dominant role of American and Caribbean-based Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.
Background
Early Jewish communities in what became the United States were primarily Sephardi (Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent and of their New World colonies or Italianate), refugees and immigrants from Brazil, where they had moved from Portugal, trying to escape the Inquisition, or Amsterdam, where many Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled, or from England. They settled in cities such as New York, NY, Providence, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, gradually integrating into the local society. Few, but some, Jews became slaveholders, which was a long-established institution in the colonies. Notwithstanding occasional viral rumors to the contrary, historian Eli Faber says that "[t]he numbers just aren't there to support the view" of significant numbers of Jewish slaveholders, and that "Jews were involved, but to an insignificant degree. That doesn't absolve them of that guilt, but everyone made money off African slaves: Arabs, Europeans, Africans." Like many Christians of the time, some Jews used the Bible to justify the enslavement of Black people. For instance, a Jewish editor named Jacob N. Cardozo explained that "the reason the Almighty had made the colored black" was to mark him as inferior, providing an obvious, God-given approval of slavery. For the most part, American Jews did not accept a sense of responsibility for the larger society around them until the late 19th century. When they finally did so, Southern Jews lagged far behind Northern Jews.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to the U.S. for social and economic opportunities due to widespread pogroms in their homelands. They mainly settled in cities across the Northeast and Midwest, such as New York City, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, where manufacturing industries were in dire need of workers. Jewish immigrants entered northeastern and midwestern cities in the same period when Black people were migrating in the hundreds of thousands from the rural South in the Great Migration; Jewish and Black people had a greater variety of encounters, and these were markedly different in urban Northern centers and agricultural Southern areas. It was around this time that Northern Jews began to express massive sympathy for the plight of Black Americans:
In the early 1900s, Northern Jewish daily and weekly publications frequently reported on violence against Blacks, and often compared the anti-Black violence in the South to the deadly anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. They were inspired by principles of justice and by a desire to change racist policies in the United States. During this period, Northern Jewish leaders invested their time, influence and economic resources into Black endeavors, supporting civil rights, philanthropy, social service, and organizing. Historian Hasia Diner notes that "they made sure that their actions were well publicized" as part of an effort to demonstrate increasing Jewish political clout.
Julius Rosenwald was a Northern Jewish philanthropist who donated a large part of his fortune to supporting Black education in the South by providing matching funds for construction of schools in rural areas. Northern Jews played a major role in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its early decades. Northern Jews involved in the NAACP included Joel Elias Spingarn (the first chairman), Arthur B. Spingarn, and founder Henry Moskowitz. More recently, Jack Greenberg was a leader in the organization.