A demonstrator holds up a hand stained with a red liquid as Hasidic Jews and others protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s polices, near the U.S. Capitol during a scheduled visit by Netanyahu, Thursday, July 25, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) I am a lifelong Democrat and civil rights advocate. Both Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel years ago warned about being silent in the face of the rise of antisemitism and racism in America. King and Heschel, working in solidarity were effective and transformational to attain advances in civil rights and human rights for all.
History has taught us that when Black and Jewish Americans unite to confront hate, both communities emerge stronger and with a deeper understanding of each other’s history and perspectives.
Today, I am alarmed by the growing tolerance of antisemitism emerging within the political party that the overwhelming majority of Black and Jewish Americans call home. The ease with which some leaders excuse away this hatred should haunt all Black Americans. What starts with one minority quickly evolves into the hatred of others.
Many in my party are creating creative excuses for Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. He got it a long time ago. He got it while fighting for America. He didn’t know what it was. Would the same parade of voices coming to Platner’s defense be doing so if he had a KKK tattoo? What’s the difference?
Black America continues to respond and to challenge the resurgence of racism and hate across the nation. We also cannot afford to be silent today about the evil surge of the virus of antisemitism and the increase in hate-filled violence against Jews and Blacks throughout the country.
As a Black American, I know what it looks like when a political party decides one community’s safety is negotiable or ripe for triage. I know the rationalizations — the strategic hesitation, the “but the politics are complicated,” the quiet looking away. I have watched it continue to happen to Black America, even though many of us have been the most loyal and engaged supporters of the party. I will not watch it happen to others without saying it plainly and publicly.
Throughout this election season, candidates are being pummeled with questions about whether they take support from AIPAC – a pro-Israel advocacy organization. One is right to ask whether candidates are backed by one political action committee versus another. But this campaign is far more nefarious. Orchestrated online by a group known as Track AIPAC, this effort is not merely about whether the candidates take AIPAC PAC contributions, they are overtly targeting pro-Israel Americans who personally contribute to candidates. This is a dangerous slope to driving these Americans out of the political process.
Moreover, the focus of Track AIPAC is not merely AIPAC or AIPAC members. It also tracks donations from J Street members – a dovish organization more aligned with the far-left than with AIPAC. That should sound alarm bells as it exposes the effort is targeted at Jewish Americans. Effectively creating a list of who is a good Jew and who is a bad Jew.
If Black Americans await in silence to the tracking of Jews today in America, in the morning Black Americans and others will also be tracked and targeted with impunity.
Singling out American citizens and demonizing their political participation is counter to core Democratic values. Yet instead of calling it out, Track AIPAC is being tolerated — and celebrated — by some in our party. This is not transparency. It is a registry. We know where registries lead.
Black America has its own history with lists — with the government and private actors tracking who we were, who we gave money to, and what organizations we belonged to or allegedly affiliated. We called it what it was: racial profiling and intimidation.
History does not announce itself. It arrives through normalization — through the slow acceptance of things once considered unthinkable. The virus that entered our coalition did not arrive labeled as antisemitism. It arrived as anti-Zionism, then as anti-Israel sentiment, then as willingness to embrace those who celebrate terrorism against Jews, then as systematic targeting of Jewish donors, and now as the punishment of Jewish officials who dared enforce rules equally. Each step felt, to many well-intentioned people, like a defensible position.
That is how social viruses work and spread. Believe me, the lived experiences of Black Americans know this reality and the eventful fatal contradiction to the oneness of humanity.
The Democratic Party has spent decades insisting that the safety and dignity of minority communities are not negotiable. That “the enemy of my enemy” is not a moral framework. It is time to say it now — without the asterisks we seem to reserve uniquely for Jews.
If Jewish Americans, Black Americans and others are not protected from profiling, scapegoating, from registries, and from being driven out of their own party — with the same reflexive clarity we’d bring to protecting any other community — then our coalition is not what we say it is. And every underrepresented community must take note and act to end all forms of bigotry, hatred and discrimination.
Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. is president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), chairman of Spill the Honey, co-chair of the Black-Jewish Action Alliance (BJAA), on the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), Senior Fellow for Divinity and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University Divinity School, executive producer/host of “The Chavis Chronicles (TCC)” on PBS TV Network, and former co-chair of No Labels.
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