PBS series 'Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History' explores a complex relationship

The first enslaved Black people in English-speaking America arrived in 1619 in Virginia. The first Jewish settler arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. Thereafter, over the next 400 years, two radically different histories, and radically different fates, unfolded. The Black and Jewish community went their separate ways.

Until, at critical points along the way, something remarkable happened: They joined together.

They found common cause in civil rights, politics and arts. Together they formed the NAACP, built schools in the Jim Crow South, and created the "Grand Alliance" during the Civil rights movement. They changed popular music, and — in the bargain — all of American culture.

Then, during the past 40 years, those bonds were frayed, by support for Israel, the Nation of Islam and Black self-determination. The Crown Heights riots were a flashpoint in the early '90s, while more recent ones have been support for the Palestinian cause and the destruction of Gaza. 

To call this mutual history enormously complicated and often fraught risks being checked by the fact that it has also been transformative. How then to make sense of this fascinating crazy quilt span of American history — and on TV no less?

In the four-part  "Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History" (WNET/13, Tuesday at 9) — which gets around to all of this — Henry Louis Gates Jr. starts under the floorboards.

The veteran star of countless PBS series — "Finding Your Roots," among the best-known — begins these four hours by asking viewers to, in effect, think of the whole span of Western culture as a house. From a distance, that house seems sturdy enough, with everything in its right place, except that under the floorboards flow two hidden streams. They're hidden because they're the inconvenient truths in the story of American democracy:

"One is antisemitism," he says, "and one is Black racism."

It's that otherness — those 'isms — which formed the basis of the original bonds, Gates explains here."Black and Jewish America" makes the case over these four hours that they're more important than ever.

"It is a history that has waxed and waned," says Phil Bertelsen, a longtime Gates production associate ("African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross") who directed these four hours along with Sara Wolitzky (2012's "MAKERS: Women who Make America").

But "the motivation to make this were the Charlottesville riots [in 2017], and the Charleston [Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal] church shooting [in 2015] and the Pittsburgh [Tree of Life] synagogue shooting [in 2018]. To the extent that anti-Black racism in the Jewish community and Black antisemitism causes a divide between us — yes — we do talk about those divisions. The greater concern is this resurgence of white nationalism that's attacking both our communities. That history of allyship is more important than ever because the seeds of division are being sown actively as we speak."

A long, complex, fraught history

Like most Gates productions, "Black and Jewish America" is a clean, straight-ahead look at the subject matter. Yet what makes this all so tricky — and often riveting — is that there's nothing clean or straight-ahead about the history itself. (The first two hours were offered for review.) "Black and Jewish America" speeds past the manifold complexities and differences, then settles in for those magical stretches when Black and Jewish leaders found that common cause.

This particular history begins with the Bible's book of Exodus, which for millions in bondage became the archetype of escape from chattel slavery in the south. Abolitionist Harriet Tubman was to become the American Moses, while the old spiritual "Go Down Moses" the anthem for emancipation.

During Jim Crow, a vicious 1908 anti-Black riot in Springfield, Illinois — anticipating a far worse one in Tulsa, Oklahoma 13 years later — ended in lynchings and widespread destruction. Reformers were shocked, while W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Mary White Ovington went on to form the NAACP, with the help of prominent Jewish supporters, notably Columbia University professor Joel Spingarn. The great alliance had thus begun, and in the immediate years that followed, Booker T. Washington and Sears president Julius Rosenwald built thousands of so-called "Rosenwald schools" across the South.

Next Tuesday's hour (Feb. 10), "Strange Fruit" — named for the Billie Holiday hit written by a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol — covers the expansive music and cultural alliance. With a melding of jazz, swing, Tin Pan Alley and Yiddish influences, popular music was revolutionized and eventually the movies too. (Billy Crystal is interviewed in this hour about his uncle Milt Gabler, founder of jazz label Commodore records, which first released "Strange Fruit" in 1937.)

The so-called "Grand Alliance" (Feb. 17) marked the golden years, the high point of a collaboration that changed the world. Far more than other white groups, including clergy, Christian organizations and labor unions, Jewish activists were at the center of the Civil Rights movement over a two-decade run. They helped organize the Freedom Rides of 1961, and the Mississippi voter registration of 1964 — so-called "Freedom Summer." Both the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League organized the legal battles against Brown versus Board of Education, and went after the Ku Klux Klan in various courtrooms across the south. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — the prolific author, leading Jewish philosopher and professor at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary of America — marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965.

And Jews were murdered too — Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, with James Chaney, alongside a dark road in Neshoba County Mississippi, on June 21, 1964.

There were many authors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but it's impossible to imagine them without this special alliance.

The Rupture

And then came the collapse — the fourth hour's "Crossroads" (also Feb. 17) — and it was explosive. When and where it began is as complicated as the rest of this history, but as "Black and Jewish America" explains, not so much the various events that precipitated it — the stuff of New York tabloid headlines for years, including in this one. Andrew Young was fired as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1979 after meeting with a representative from the Palestine Liberation Organization. That led to a backlash from Black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, one of the original Freedom Riders, later a leader of the Black Power movement (who'd changed his name to Kwame Ture) and by now a hard-line anti-Zionist. By the early 1990s, leaders and academics like Leonard Jeffries Jr. were blaming Jews for financing the Atlantic slave trade. Most explosively, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan doubled down, calling Judaism — among much else — a "gutter religion."

After the Crown Heights riots of 1991 — sparked when a Hasidic rabbi's motorcade struck and killed a 7-year-old Black boy, Gavin Cato — the breach seemed permanent. In 1994, Murray Friedman, a prominent Jewish American historian — and himself a former civil rights leader — wrote a book entitled "What What Went Wrong?: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance." In this he wrote, "There was never any doubt in my mind that the Black/Jewish alliance stood at the center of the great American experiment in democracy [so] it should not be surprising that I view the destruction of the alliance with a measure of sorrow and anger."

For Gates, 75, who'd grown up in Jim Crow West Virginia and whose mother had befriended a Jewish neighbor, the breach was deeply personal too.

Not quite a year after the Crown Heights riots, he published an editorial in The New York Times in which he decried Black leaders — demagogues, he called them — and Black intellectuals ("pseudoscholars") who were stoking a rise in antisemitism in Black communities.

"We must not allow" them, he wrote, "to turn the wellspring of memory into a renewable source of enmity everlasting."

It is that message that's left lingering at the end of these four hours. The times may be different but those two streams remain under those floorboards.

"Skip's [Gates] motivation here is this sort of unabashed white nationalism that's become more undeniable," says co-director and producer Wolitzky "That's what's most salient to us too about the present moment — pitting people against each other [because] pitting groups against each is a function of people in power and an attempt to create scapegoats. It's obvious how much we need each other. But to strengthen if not rebuild the partnership takes a lot of honesty, about the good, the bad and the differences. That's the only way to move forward.

She adds, "With this film, we're not telling anyone what to think, but our hope is that it provides a foundation for folks to move forward together."

Her colleague, and co-director, Bertelsen, puts it this way: "We need to learn to have the difficult conversation because there's better good served with a coalition than without one. We just can't let division win. History always reminds us that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, as long as you keep moving forward."