“The very success of the ‘Grand Alliance’ created the conditions for its own dissolution, as Black activists demanded leadership of their own struggle.” — Dr. Marc Dollinger
By Barrett Holman Leak in San Diego
The third installment of the PBS series Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, titled “Grand Alliance,” is an informative, if occasionally painful, deconstruction of the most celebrated era of interracial cooperation in American history.
While the previous episodes laid the groundwork of shared trauma and early 20th-century labor solidarity, Episode 3 dives headlong into the 1960s—the decade where the “interwoven” threads of these two communities were pulled to their absolute tension and breaking point.
The episode begins with the iconic imagery of the 1965 Selma march, where Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Director Sara Wolitzky uses archival footage to emphasize that this wasn’t merely political convenience. For the Ashkenazi Jewish community in 1960s America, the Holocaust was not “ancient history.” It was a fresh wound just about 20 years old), a raw motivation that dictated a moral imperative: “Never Again” applied to everyone. However, the documentary quickly moves forward to ask a more difficult question: What happens when a partner in a revolution begins to outpace their ally in social and economic mobility?
The Architecture of the Alliance
The first third of the episode provides a rigorous accounting of Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. It isn’t just a list of names; it’s a statistical and moral mapping. We see that at the height of the movement, white-presenting Jewish activists made up a staggering percentage of the white volunteers in the South—nearly half of the white lawyers defending protesters and contributed a significant portion of the funding for organizations like the NAACP and SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee).
According to historical records and as detailed in the series, before Kivie Kaplan ever took office as president, he expressed a strong desire for the role to be filled by a Black leader. In 1966, following the tenure of Arthur Spingarn, Kaplan tried to convince his close friend and baseball legend Jackie Robinson to take the presidency.
Kaplan recognized that as the movement entered the era of Black Power, having an Ashkenazi Jewish man at the helm of the nation’s premier civil rights organization was becoming increasingly incongruous with the demand for Black self-determination.
Robinson declined the offer. He believed that the NAACP, at that time, was becoming too rigid and was failing to reflect the evolving needs of the African American population. However, Robinson encouraged Kaplan to take the post himself, viewing him as a “man on a mission” who could stabilize the organization’s finances and membership.
Despite his initial hesitation, Kaplan was elected and served as president from 1966 until his death in 1975. His tenure was marked by the exact tensions discussed by Marc Dollinger in Episode 3:
Kaplan was highly successful in increasing “Life Memberships,” raising the numbers from 221 to over 53,000. However, while Kaplan was a devoted ally, his presidency became a flashpoint for critics within the movement who argued that the NAACP was “too white-led” and focused on legal goals (Kaplan worked closely with the Religious Action Center of the Union for Reform Judaism [RAC]) rather than the more radical, economic demands of the Black Power era (particularly reparations).
Kaplan’s efforts to “step back” highlight the paradox of the “Grand Alliance”—a dedicated Jewish leader wanting to hand over the reins of power to honor the principle of Black leadership, only to be drawn back into the role to maintain the organization’s structural survival.
The Kingston Springs Turning Point
The emotional core of the episode, however, is the detailed exploration of the December 1966 SNCC staff meeting in Kingston Springs, Tennessee. Here, the series provides one of the most nuanced examinations of the “expulsion” of white activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Rather than misrepresenting this as an ungrateful act of antisemitism, as many contemporary accounts did, the episode allows historians like Marc Dollinger and Cheryl Lynn Greenberg to explain the internal logic of the Black Power movement. The argument was simple but devastating to the Jewish volunteers: For Black Americans to achieve true liberation, they needed to be the leaders of the movement for racial equality – just as Kivie Kaplan had expressed earlier.
The documentary captures the heartbreak of Jewish activists who now were being asked by Black leaders to leave the leadership in the South and yet remain a partner by returning to their Northern white and Jewish communities and combat the anti-Black racism that existed in those communities. The film describes this moment as a “divorce,” one that left the Jewish community reeling and searching for a new identity in a rapidly changing social landscape.
Black Power: The Mother of Jewish Power
It is in the aftermath of this “divorce” that Episode 3 finds its most provocative thesis. Jewish historian Dr. Marc Dollinger argues that the rise of Black Power didn’t simply push Jews out of the Civil Rights Movement; it set Black Power as the blueprint for being Jewish in America.
It documents how young Jews, inspired by the “Black is Beautiful” mantra and the radical tactics of the New Left, began to reject the “white-bread” assimilation of their parents. They stopped trying to blend in and started leaning into their own ethnic distinctiveness. This wasn’t a retreat into isolationism, but a pivot toward a new kind of activism—one focused on Jewish survival.
Avi Dresner, whose father marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., provides the episode’s most poignant takeaway regarding this shift:
“We learned how to protest from the Black community, and then we turned those same tools toward the Kremlin and toward the defense of Israel.” — Avi Dresner
This quote opens the episode’s final act. The documentary brilliantly connects the sit-ins of the South to the “Let My People Go” campaign for Soviet Jews. It shows how the same energy that once fueled the march on Selma was redirected toward the gates of the Soviet Embassy and the battlefields of the Middle East.
The Shadow of 1967
The 1967 Six-Day War is presented as the final catalyst that separated the two communities’ trajectories. For young Black activists, who increasingly viewed the world through a lens of anti-colonialism, Israel’s military victory cast the Jewish state as an “occupier” rather than an underdog. Older Black activists supported Israel through the Six Day War, rooting for its success and supporting the modern State of Israel. For Jews, Israel’s survival was a moment of existential triumph—a manifestation of “Jewish Power” that mirrored the self-determination they had admired in the Black Power movement.
The episode does not shy away from the friction this caused. It explores how the divergence of interests—Black Americans focusing on domestic economic justice and American Jews focusing on international Zionism and Soviet Jewry—created a gap that has never fully been bridged.
A Mirror for Today
Episode 3 is more than a history lesson; it is a mirror. It challenges the “golden age” narrative of Black-Jewish relations by showing that the alliance was always complicated by imbalances of power and access to “whiteness.”
The episode concludes by suggesting that the “Grand Alliance” didn’t truly end; it transformed. The series makes a compelling case that the Jewish community’s modern identity—its pride, its political strategies, and its commitment to its own people—was ironically forged in the fires of the Black liberation struggle.
In “Grand Alliance,” PBS has delivered a dense, challenging, and ultimately necessary exploration of how two peoples can be simultaneously closer than ever and yet fundamentally misunderstood by one another. Again, it did not acknowledge, much less explore the existence of Black Jews. It would not have been hard to find them. For example, I personally know a Black Jewish family, who was connected to Rabb Abraham Joshua Heschel and Susannah Heschel as personal friends. I am looking forward to the fourth and final episode but I would have liked there to be an episode or two that took time to look into this. It is actually a crucial piece of the interwoven legacy embodied by African American Jews. It is a missed opportunity in this series.
Next week, February 24, is the final episode. It will cover current relations among Israelis, American Jews and Black Americans (but again, not Black Jews) including the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
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Barrett Holman Leak is an African American Jewish freelance writer based in San Diego.