Georgia elected Jon Ossoff, its first Jewish senator, and Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock, its first Black senator, in a suspenseful runoff election on Tuesday.
For scholars, Warnock and Ossoff’s joint Senate victory reflects a long, winding relationship between Black and Jewish communities in the United States, particularly in the context of Georgia’s political history.
Often, people date Black and Jewish leaders working alongside each other to the Civil Rights Movement, but historians argue that’s too simple a narrative.
“It’s not just the 1960s context,” said Dr. David Garrow, a historian and biographer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “… Pronounced Jewish support for Black equality goes back literally a century.”
He noted that many of the White allies involved in the creation of the NAACP in the early 1900s, were Jewish, with Jews in the North serving as long-time champions and financial supporters for civil rights causes.
Even in the Jewish community, that early history of solidarity – led in part by secular socialist and communist Jews – is sidelined, said Dr. Lewis Gordon, a professor and department head of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, who is Black and Jewish.
Among American Jews, the image of prominent Jewish thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is widely embraced as a peak moment for Black-Jewish relations, but that narrative ignores “the consistent and determined commitment to these changes from the left-wing Jewish community,” he added.
