By Rabbi Sandra Lawson
DURHAM, North Carolina — A little over twenty years ago, I went to a Black–Jewish alliance meeting chaired by a Black man and a White Jewish woman. The Black man later became the mayor of Atlanta. I was excited: it was my first time at a “Black and Jewish” event, and I thought I was finally walking into a space that honored both of my communities.
But very quickly realized that in the conversation, there was no room for someone like me, who is Black and Jewish. The focus was as if the two could not exist in the same person, and no one in my circles was using the term intersectionality at that time. When I asked, “What about Black Jews?” the chairs of the meeting were visibly stymied. I still remember the confused look on their faces and it’s etched in my memory. They had no framework, no language, no plan for including people like me in the conversation. That absence was telling and it stayed with me
And that has continued to be my experience in conversations around Black–Jewish alliances for decades. Too often, they are framed as binary, leaving out the reality that many of us live at the intersection.
The Erasure of Intersectional Identities
When alliances reduce communities to “Black” and “Jewish,” entire groups of people vanish. Black Jews.
This erasure reflects a larger truth about how coalition work often defaults to the most dominant voices in each community. The Jewish side is typically represented by White, Ashkenazi institutions, which leaves out Sephardic, Mizrahi, and other Jewish communities. The Black side is often represented in ways that ignore the religious and cultural diversity of Black people—erasing Black Muslims, Black Jews, and the complexity of African diasporic experiences. Those of us who live in the overlap, who embody more than one identity, become invisible in conversations supposedly designed to bring our communities together.
Historical Patterns of One-Way Solidarity
In Jewish communities, we often hear about the alliances of the Civil Rights era, including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbis who marched in Selma, and Jewish leaders who joined demonstrations in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In those narratives, Jewish participation is often framed as heroic support for Black liberation. But the motivations were complex: there was genuine solidarity, but also self-interest, Jews saw themselves in the broader struggles for justice and to secure their own place in American society. What rarely gets discussed is how these alliances often left untouched the racism within Jewish communities.
Today, too much of the dialogue in Jewish spaces sounds like, “Look what we did for them,” rather than wrestling with why that work mattered, what it cost, and what it failed to address. Many Jews also seem to forget that the stories they are holding on to happened more than 60 years ago, and that repeating them without self-reflection risks turning history into self-congratulation. The “what we did” narrative obscures the ongoing racism within Jewish communities and resists acknowledging that Jews can also be Black. Too many alliances are still one-way streets, with an implicit expectation that Black folks will listen to Jewish stories of antisemitism, while Jewish communities avoid doing the work of addressing anti-Blackness in their own spaces.
What matters is not retelling the same story but asking deeper questions: why are these moments so often remembered only as examples of Jewish heroism, rather than as complicated stories of solidarity, self-interest, cost, and missed opportunities to confront racism within Jewish life? By focusing only on “what we did for them,” Jewish communities obscure the harder truths: that anti-Black racism still exists within Jewish spaces and that Jews can also be Black.
I also know that instead of addressing the issue this critique will inevitably be met with predictable responses: accusations of harming the Jewish community, attempts by White Jews to educate me on Black history without my lived experiences as a Black person or lectures about Jewish history from people who don’t recognize that I’ve spent much of my life in Jewish spaces—including becoming a rabbi. These reactions themselves demonstrate the problem: the refusal to hear Black Jewish voices as authoritative within our own communities.
Power and Privilege in the Conversation
To build authentic alliances, we must name the complexity. Many Jews benefit from White privilege in American society, while also experiencing rising antisemitism. Black communities face systemic racism. Black Jews live at the intersection of both realities.
When Jewish institutions use their influence to center only antisemitism, alliances become shallow. They often protect Jewish comfort while demanding empathy from Black communities. For example, programs may ask Black audiences to hear about Jewish pain without creating space to confront anti-Black racism within Jewish congregations. Jewish institutions should also commit to addressing racism, homophobia, and other forms of bias within their own spaces, because many Jews are more than one thing and hold multiple marginalized identities. Otherwise, such dynamics reinforce inequality instead of dismantling it.
What Genuine Alliance Could Look Like
A real Black–Jewish alliance must be rooted in mutuality. That means addressing antisemitism in Black communities and also fighting racism in Jewish communities. It means centering Black Jewish voices as leaders. It means recognizing that our struggles are interconnected—that the same systems that uphold White supremacy target both of us, even if in different ways.
Why This Matters
The way we build alliances has consequences for how safe our communities are, how strong our movements become, and how much we can actually achieve.
When alliances erase intersectional identities, they replicate the very oppressions they claim to fight. When they run only one way, they fail to cultivate the solidarity that true liberation requires. But the deeper problem is this: many in the Jewish community continue to hold onto the racist assumption that Black people are more antisemitic than White people, despite evidence to the contrary. And many in the Jewish community behave as if Black people owe them something—gratitude for past support, deference to Jewish pain, or automatic solidarity without reciprocity.
This false narrative continues to shape alliance work, and it justifies avoiding the harder work of confronting anti-Black racism within Jewish spaces. The Jewish community must reckon with how its institutional power within a hierarchical structure has been used in ways that harm Black communities, while simultaneously demanding empathy and understanding from those same communities.
If Jewish communities truly believe in the values of justice and repair we claim to hold sacred, then we cannot continue to center our own comfort while perpetuating harm against Black people which also means harming ourselves because many Jews are Black. We cannot keep acting as if Black people are indebted to the Jewish community while refusing to examine racism in the Jewish community.
The choice before the Jewish community is this: Will we continue demanding solidarity from Black communities while refusing to examine our own racism? Will we keep retelling stories of past allyship to avoid present-day accountability? Or will we finally do the transformative work that genuine alliance requires—centering Black Jewish voices, confronting anti-Blackness in our institutions, and abandoning the racist narratives that have shaped our relationships for too long?
The question is no longer whether the Jewish community wants alliances that make us feel good. The question is whether we have the moral courage to build alliances that actually move us all toward freedom.
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Rabbi Sandra Lawson is the Executive Director of Carolina Jews for Justice