African American–Jewish relations

African Americans and American Jews have interacted throughout much of the history of the United States. This relationship has included widely publicized cooperation and conflict, and—since the 1970s—has been an area of significant academic research. Cooperation during the Civil Rights Movement was strategic and significant, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the relationship has also been marred by conflict and controversy related to such topics as the Black Power movement, Zionism, affirmative action, and the role of a small number of American Jews, among a large number of other Americans and others, in the Atlantic slave trade.

During the colonial era, Jewish immigrants to British America were generally merchants from London. They settled in cities such as Providence, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, generally becoming part of local societies. They were slaveholders when that was the local practice.

With major immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, followed by waves from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews and blacks had a greater variety of encounters, and these were markedly different in northern cities and southern areas, many of which were still dominated by agriculture. Jewish immigrants entered northern and midwestern cities in the same period when blacks were migrating in the hundreds of thousands from the rural South in the Great Migration.

In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms". Stressing the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, Jewish leaders emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic and racial restrictions.

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