This past October, Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, described the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis as “exhilarating.” Although Rickford later apologized for his remarks and was subsequently placed on leave, he’s but one of numerous notable Black Americans—from Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah to Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack and the leaders of local Black Lives Matter chapters—whose aggressive anti-Israel, if not pro-Hamas, rhetoric has been stoking Black-Jewish discord.
And a number of prominent Jews have responded in kind. Ronald Lauder, the Estée Lauder scion whose namesake Viennese business school cut ties with Harvard in late December following the school’s decision (since reversed) to back university president Claudine Gay in the wake of her disastrous appearance before Congress. Then Len Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born billionaire announced that he was suspending donations to Harvard, where his family has already given some $270 million.
Unshackled from the niceties of polite tolerance in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, America’s Blacks and Jews are no longer afraid of pointing fingers—particularly at one another. Many Blacks view Jews not as another embattled minority but part of the ruling class. And a growing number of Jews, meanwhile, consider diversity-equity-and-inclusion (D.E.I.) initiatives to be anti-Semitic. My father is Black, my mother is Jewish, and I’m caught in the cross fire.
Leading the anti-D.E.I. brigade is Bill Ackman, the billionaire Jewish investor whose relentless attacks against Gay’s leadership essentially sealed her demise. Ackman—who’s married to Israeli designer-architect Neri Oxman—went further than the rest, taking aim not just at Gay, who resigned under pressure last week after multiple accusations of plagiarism, but at the entire system of D.E.I., which he believes is what got her hired in the first place. (Oxman, in turn, was accused of plagiarism last week.)
“DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement … [that promotes] anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment,” Ackman wrote in a sprawling, 4,000-word screed on X the day after Gay resigned. Philosophies such as D.E.I. are the “root cause of antisemitism at Harvard,” he declared.
For their part, many Black commentators appeared to view the attacks on Gay as racially motivated. “They will do whatever it takes to undermine, humiliate and unseat Black people in positions of power they don’t want there,” CNN political analyst Natasha S. Alford posted on X.
Reverend Al Sharpton—whom many Jews fault for his role in inciting the 1991 Crown Heights riot, which pitted local West Indians against Orthodox Jews—described Gay’s sacking as “an attack on every Black woman in this country … [and] an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion. ” He went on to call for a protest in front of Ackman’s office.
Gay herself wrote in The New York Times shortly after her resignation, “I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”
That same week, Jews and Blacks enjoyed another highly public tussle. During a game between the Utah Jazz and the Dallas Mavericks at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center, a quartet of local Orthodox rabbis seated courtside held up signs declaring, I’m a Jew and I’m proud.
Their objective wasn’t a cameo on the jumbotron but to protest point guard Kyrie Irving, who was suspended for eight games in 2022 after promoting a documentary that denied the Holocaust. Irving—who’s recently taken to wearing keffiyehs at press conferences in support of Palestine—was reportedly miffed by the rabbis’ actions, and team officials later told the clerics to remove the placards. A representative for Irving has denied that he complained, and a Utah Jazz representative claimed the signs breached their code of conduct.
“DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement … [that promotes] anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment,” Bill Ackman wrote in a sprawling, 4,000-word screed on X.
Instances like these are likely to continue, and the next front could very well be the upcoming Academy Awards, on March 10. This year, for the first time ever, best-picture nominees must meet a series of D.E.I. “standards” mandating minority inclusion throughout the production process. But Jews—here, as in so much of the D.E.I.-sphere—don’t qualify as an “underrepresented racial or ethnic group,” according to the Academy, despite comprising a scant 2.4 percent of the American population and despite the recent uptick in anti-Semitism.
This week, more than 260 Jewish entertainment figures, including Amy Schumer, Julianna Margulies, and Tiffany Haddish—who, like me, is both Black and Jewish—signed an open letter decrying the new Oscar rules, which they called “both steeped in and misunderstand[ing] antisemitism.” And some Jewish groups are already girding to take on the Academy, possibly via the types of legal maneuvers that saw the Supreme Court outlaw affirmative action last year—moves that would have bordered on heresy mere months ago.
While many D.E.I. advocates view Jews as white and privileged, if not as oppressors, the fact is nearly 10 percent of Jews today are nonwhite, according to recent Pew data, and 20 percent of “Jewish households” include minorities, reports a 2019 study by the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative. And while Jews are over-represented in the upper-income brackets, many are barely scraping by, particularly among the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox segment.
Both Jews and Blacks were among the earliest arrivals to the New World, Blacks as slaves, Jews often escaping from the Iberian Inquisition. Since then, Jews and Blacks have been connected by parallel histories of oppression. The presence of Jewish activists during the civil-rights movement—and the murder of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—further solidified this mythology.
Such sentiments began to lose steam following the parallel rise of Black Power and pan-African liberation ideologies that centered on Palestinian demands for statehood, and began to truly break down in the 1980s with the rise of the openly anti-Semitic Nation of Islam along with high-profile gaffes by Black leaders such as Jesse Jackson, who infamously referred to New York City as “Hymietown” during a 1984 interview. But the tensions are ratcheting back up again.
There are the extreme cases, such as Kanye West, who said he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” or Alice Walker, who, despite having once been married to a Jewish man, has endorsed a writer that believes Jews were responsible for the Holocaust and may be secretly reptilian. And on the other side, we have self-described “race realist” Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor whose dean is seeking to have her tenure revoked for having invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her class, among other things.
Although Ackman may be overreaching in his calls to abolish D.E.I., he’s not entirely off base. As long as race-based-preference programs continue to exclude Jews, they’ll face a crisis of legitimacy that will only further cast doubt on their necessity, which remains very real.
The finger-pointing is certain to continue in this fractious election year, particularly with so many young Blacks opposed to President Biden’s support for Israel. And then there is the push for reparations for slavery, whose adherents often invoke Israel’s successful reparations campaign in the 1950s just after the Holocaust and independence.
True, Blacks and Jews may still be far from an all-out race war. But the battle lines have been drawn.
David Christopher Kaufman is an editor and columnist at the New York Post, a regular opinions writer for The Telegraph, and an adjunct fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute