On Juneteenth

We pray that the Black-Jewish alliance that helped shape this country still holds.

Picture it: Selma, Alabama, 1965. A Baptist preacher and a Jewish theologian walk side by side across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. One is the son of a sharecropper’s grandson. The other fled Poland as a child, lost most of his family to the Nazis, and came to America carrying the Torah in one hand and a hunger for justice in the other. Neither man needed to explain to the other why he was there. They already knew.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel did not find each other on the internet. They found each other in the tradition. King was shaped by the Black church, by its preachers, its liturgy, its long and anguished reading of Exodus. Heschel was formed by Hasidic masters, by prophetic Judaism, by a theology that made social justice not a political preference but a religious obligation. When they marched together, they were not two activists who happened to share a cause. They were two men of God, rooted in ancient texts, answering a call they had both heard from the same direction.

That partnership between the Jewish community and the Black community is one of the most consequential in American history. Jews made up an estimated half of the young white volunteers who went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist, funded more than 2,000 schools and 20 historically Black colleges between 1910 and 1940. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. These are not feel-good footnotes. They are load-bearing facts.

Today is Juneteenth. June 19, 1865: the day enslaved people in Texas finally heard what had already been true for two and a half years. Freedom had been declared. It just took a while to arrive.

Jews know something about that gap between the declaration and the arrival. We also know something about the long memory required to keep a people together across centuries of waiting. Zikaron, memory, is not nostalgia for us. It is a religious practice. We remember because memory is what makes the future possible.

The Black-Jewish alliance that shaped this country still holds. But unless we change course, it is in danger of dissolving. Not because the values changed. Because the institutions that housed those values were replaced by something that cannot house anything at all.

In the 1960s, the movement lived in the churches and the synagogues. That matters more than it might seem. A church has a pastor. A synagogue has a rabbi. These are people with names, with congregations, with accountability. When someone in the room says something that betrays a partner, the pastor notices. The rabbi speaks up. Martin Luther King noticed.

When a student at a Harvard dinner in 1967 made a remark against Zionists, King did not hesitate. “Don’t talk like that,” he said. “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.” King said that because he was a man of faith who understood that solidarity is indivisible. You cannot march with your Jewish brothers and sisters on Monday and sign a charter against their homeland on Tuesday. His movement was led by people educated and grounded enough to hold the coalition together.

Now consider what happened when the next generation of civil rights movements emerged from the internet instead of the pew.

Black Lives Matter began as something many Jews recognized immediately. The shared grief and concern was not a Jewish issue or a Black issue. It was a human issue. Jews showed up because the tradition demands it. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof: justice, justice you shall pursue.

But the movement had no pastor. It had no rabbi. It had no one in the room with the authority to say: this is a line we will not cross, because crossing it breaks faith with people who marched with us and bled with us. And so the line was crossed. BDS language entered the platform. Israel was isolated and demonized. Jews who had come in solidarity found themselves on the wrong side of a document that treated their people’s homeland as a colonial project.

This did not happen because Black Americans turned against Jews. Most didn’t. It happened because a leaderless, internet-born movement is infinitely susceptible to capture. Anyone can write a paragraph. Anyone can add a clause. There is no pastor to say no. There is no history in the room.

That is the great civil rights failure of the internet era. Not a failure of values. A failure of structure. The values that drove Heschel across that bridge are still there. The obligation is still there. What is missing is the institution that gives those values a home and a guardian.

So what is the Jewish obligation on Juneteenth?

It is not to perform solidarity or to apologize for the current moment’s tensions. It is to insist. To insist on our place in this history, which we earned. To insist on our values, which brought us to the table and still hold us there. To insist that our Jewish identity is not a complication in the struggle for justice. It is the reason we showed up in the first place.

And to remember what this alliance is capable of when it holds. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The dismantling of legal segregation in the most resistant country on earth. These did not happen because two communities agreed on everything. They happened because two communities, rooted in their own traditions and accountable to their own God, found enough common ground to change the world. That is not ancient history. That is a model. It is still available to us. The question is whether we have the institutional courage and the religious grounding to rebuild it.

Heschel said that when he marched at Selma, he felt his legs were praying. That is not a metaphor for political engagement. That is a description of what it looks like when a person of faith acts from the center of who they are.

On Juneteenth, that is the model. Not the hashtag. Not the platform document. The man walking across the bridge, legs praying, knowing exactly why he is there and who he is walking beside.