Recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks leads Booker to help form Black-Jewish Senate coalition
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A rabbi was on the front line with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and former Rep. John Lewis on the historic march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. Another rabbi spoke before King took the stage during the 1963 March on Washington. Two young Jewish civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi trying to register Blacks to vote.
Decades later, when Barack Obama became the nation’s first Black president, his support among Jewish voters was higher than from any other religious or ethnic group other than African Americans, according to exit polls.
Now, in the wake of a surge in anti-Semitic attacks U.S. Sen. Cory Booker is looking toward that long-term alliance as he takes on a major role in establishing a Black-Jewish coalition in the Senate. The move has precedence.
“There’s been a long history of Black people and Jewish sisters and brothers working together on a whole range of concerns,” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.
“We’ve been coming together,” Booker said. He said U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the only Black Republican in the chamber, has joined as well.
So has U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
“We will be fighting both racism and anti-Semitism,” Blumenthal said. “If you look back at the civil rights movement, it really was one the high points in race relations. It marked a real alliance along religious and racial lines in fighting for civil rights. I think we’re in the midst of a racial justice moment and a reckoning now that could draw us together.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s New York/New Jersey director, Scott Richman, welcomed the coalition.
“This would be an important step towards bringing together two communities with a shared commitment to justice and an end to bias and bigotry,” he said.
There has been a rash of anti-Semitic incidents around the country.
“We have seen a brick thrown through window of a Jewish-owned business in Manhattan, a swastika carved into the door of a synagogue in Salt Lake City, families threatened outside a restaurant in Los Angeles, and museums in Florida and Alaska, dedicated to celebrating Jewish life and culture and remembering the Holocaust, vandalized with anti-Jewish messages,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Friday.
“These attacks are despicable, unconscionable, un-American, and they must stop,” he said.
Anti-Semitic incidents reported to the Anti-Defamation League rose by 75% during the two-week conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., as compared with the two weeks before fighting broke out.
“It’s very important for us to find ways to build meaningful coalitions of conscience,” Warnock said. “We all have to hold the line against hate. We have to show up for one another. Coalitions certainly give us the power to do that.”
There already is a similar coalition in the House, the Congressional Caucus on Black-Jewish Relations.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a member of the caucus, said that just as Jews supported the civil rights movement, King spoke out against anti-Semitism.
“The root of this caucus goes back to the deep partnership and relationship” between Blacks and Jews, said Gottheimer, D-5th Dist. “Recognizing that bond and that relationship spurred the development of this caucus.”
Booker also is involved in setting up another Senate group, a caucus encompassing the eight Black, Hispanic and Asian-American Democratic senators.
In addition to Booker and Warnock, the other members Robert Menendez, Alex Padilla of California, Catherine Masto Cortez of Nevada, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
Booker said the reason for the group was the violence directed against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
“That is 100 percent the case,” Booker said. “That brought us tighter together.”
Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group, found 3,795 such occurrences across the nation from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021. In March, six Asian-American women were among eight people killed at three spas in the Atlanta area.
In New Jersey, bias incidents against Asian-Americans rose 74% last year to 68, up from 39 in 2019, according to preliminary data released by the New Jersey State Police.
“There is a mutual agenda that we should be able to galvanize around,” Menendez said. “We often do informally, whether that’s about immigration, racial justice, economic opportunity, that disproportionally affects our communities.
“There’s a great consciousness of how we are all in this together.”
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Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him at @JDSalant.
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