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In August 2026, former Vice President Kamala Harris, widely believed to be preparing for another Presidential run, met with pro-Palestinian activists who had harshly criticized Harris during her 2024 campaign. Harris often defended the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy on the campaign trail. In doing so, Harris, the first Black woman to be the presidential candidate for a major party in the United States, set herself in opposition to many voices in the African-American community who criticized the US’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza under Biden. 

In February 2024, more than 1,000 African-American pastors signed a letter to then-President Biden demanding that he support a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and warning that many Black voters would be unwilling to vote for Biden if he continued to support Israel unreservedly. As one of the pastors, the Rev. Cynthia Hale, stated, “We see [Palestinians] as part of us. They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.” Many Americans of all ethnicities — including many American Jews — were deeply distressed by the suffering in Gaza that occurred during the war between Israel and Hamas. Notably, however, African-Americans were particularly likely to feel a connection to Palestinians and to see them as fellow victims of cruelty at the hands of those who deem them inferior. 

At the same time, many American Jews see solidarity with the people of Israel as an important aspect of their Jewish identity. As a result, tensions have emerged between the African-American and Jewish-American communities in recent years. In February 2026, an ad aimed at combating antisemitism aired during the Super Bowl. The ad depicted a Black student providing support to a Jewish classmate after the latter was subjected to antisemitic bullying. The ad generated racist backlash, with some viewers claiming that it would be absurd to expect a Black child to support a Jewish child, given the supposed enmity between the two communities. As someone who is of mixed-Black and Jewish heritage, I find it distressing to witness African-Americans and Jews being pitted against one another.

African-Americans and American Jews have a long history of solidarity. American Jews helped found the NAACP, America’s oldest racial justice organization, and were disproportionately represented among white participants in the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps the most significant but also the most tragic moment of Black-Jewish collaboration during the Civil Rights Era occurred in the summer of 1964 when hundreds of young white students from the North joined Black Southern activists in a project known as Freedom Summer, the purpose of which was to educate Mississippi’s disenfranchised Black population and help them register to vote. Freedom Summer participants faced harassment and violence from Mississippi’s powerful segregationists. On June 21, 1964, three of the activists — James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, Jewish college students from New York — were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, aided by local law enforcement. The white supremacists who killed the three young men singled out Schwerner and Goodman among the white Freedom Summer volunteers specifically because of their Jewish identity. It is an uncomfortable fact that the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in part because the murders of Schwerner and Goodman mobilized White northern opinion in opposition to segregationism, in a way that the killings of Chaney and other Black activists never could have. At great personal cost, Black and Jewish activists pushed America in a more just direction.

A shift in the relationship between African-Americans and American Jews began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of the Black Power movement, whose advocates rejected the mainstream Civil Rights Movement’s focus on nonviolence, integrationism, and collaboration with white liberals, instead emphasizing racial pride and self-defense. Black Power leaders were often suspicious of white liberals — Jewish or not — who claimed to support the interests of African-Americans. Moreover, previous Black leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., supported the existence of Israel and saw it as a refuge for a fellow persecuted minority. Black Power advocates, on the other hand, often viewed Israel as something very different: a repressive colonial power. Since the Black Power era, many Black activists have continued to identify with the Palestinian Cause. In 2018, for example, NYU’s own Black Student Union endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel economically. Pro-Palestinian activism is likely to remain a key part of political engagement among young African-Americans for the political future. For this reason, respectful dialogue between Black and Jewish Americans surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an essential project.

All too often, people embrace rigid binaries when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, I attended a vigil in Union Square Park organized by an Israeli peace group, where the organizers read statements from Israelis whose family members were killed on Oct. 7th, Palestinians whose family members were killed during the war in Gaza, and Palestinians who survived violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Unfortunately, the vigil was disrupted by both right-wing supporters of the Israeli government, who were angry that the vigil insisted on recognizing Palestinian humanity, and Hamas supporters, who were upset that we were mourning the victims of Oct. 7th in the first place. It is imperative to reject the mentality displayed by the counterprotesters that night. Rather than embracing reflexive and exclusive solidarity with either side and “by any means necessary” thinking, we should approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with humanity, compassion, and open-mindedness, and amplify voices that do the same. Here, I think of the joint Israeli-Palestinian peace movement Standing Together and the pro-two-state solution advocacy group J Street. Retreating into our ideological comfort zones is all too easy, but cannot possibly pave the way for a better future.

Anti-Black racism and antisemitism are as linked today as they were when Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were murdered. In recent years, bigoted far-right influencers and political candidates have spread antisemitism and anti-Black racism to large audiences. Jewish and Black Americans must work together to combat the threat from the white nationalist right. Renewing the Civil Rights Era’s spirit of Black-Jewish solidarity requires fearlessly yet fairly confronting the issues that often divide us.