We need to talk about black antisemitism.

Antisemitism has taken root in segments of the black community, fueled by envy, ideology, and a distorted view of Jewish identity.

Someone needs to tell black people that Jews are not white. (photo: Cherise Eldridge/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by James Beaman, an actor, coach, director, and award-winning screenwriter.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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A couple months ago, on a sunny afternoon, I was weaving my way through crowds in Times Square, late for a rehearsal, moving at a New Yorker’s pace.

Suddenly, my way was blocked by a tall young man. Our eyes met; his were wild with a visible rage. Then: Bam! He punched me square in the face, the bridge of my glasses cutting a bloody gash into my forehead.

As I reeled from this sudden assault, he lunged at me as if to take another shot,but pulled the punch, and instead screamed, “Kike!” in my face, then vanished into the crowd. I mopped up the blood as three teenagers, who’d witnessed the attack, laughed at my distress.

In three decades as a resident of midtown Manhattan, nothing close to this had ever happened to me. I later learned that there had been pro-Hamas demonstrations in the Times Square area for a couple of days — heated, virulently antisemitic protests against the Israel-Hamas war. Tensions were high. I guess my assailant thought he’d take his tension out on my face.

I staggered home, dressed the wound (which has left what will likely be a permanent scar), and, to help process the shock, I posted about the attack on Facebook, along with a selfie I had taken right after.

Comments on my post expressed horror, concern, sympathy. A couple of my colleagues reported having also been randomly attacked in the city, in the aftermath of the barbaric massacre of October 7th.

But then, there were comments with a very different tone.

“Hmm. Are you sure you heard right?” “Did he really use that word?” “That’s kind of an old-fashioned word.” “I mean, how would he even know that word?”

I haven’t mentioned yet that my assailant was black. He was black. Clearly, these questions insinuated that a 20-something-year-old black guy couldn’t possibly have heard of the “old-fashioned” hate slur kike. So they were implying … what? That I was making this up? That I might be making it all up?

I fired back: “What do you mean? Everyone knows that one. It’s a classic, you know, like the ‘N’ word.”

I was incensed. Never mind the callous disregard for the distress I was in; they were, as the kids say, “low key” accusing me of making up a racist lie! Undeterred, they continued the interrogation: “Well, did you file a police report?”

I hadn’t. I didn’t see the point. The attack took less than a minute; the perpetrator was long gone. And, what? A police report would prove it happened? Then, they got to the real nitty gritty: “How did he know you were Jewish?”

Ah. So he couldn’t possibly have used that anachronistic slur after punching me in the face because … I don’t look Jewish? Right. The gloves came off after that little antisemitic bit of stereotyping: “Well, you weren’t wearing a yarmulke! He didn’t know you’re Jewish.”

That’s the point! He was fired up with hatred toward Jews. It was being chanted in the streets, an hour or so before. An angry black kid saw an older white man’s face, decided it was a Jewish face — making it fair game — and he took a pop at it.

Oh yes, I also haven’t mentioned that the teenagers who were laughing at the attack were also black. Now, they may have been laughing because teenagers just suck. But facts: They were black.

Now, as it happens, I am a Jew. And Jews are not White.

This concept comes as a surprise to some, a provocation to others. It’s the truth. Jews are a race. All Jews are genetically tied to their ancestors in Judea. Jews were, for millennia, marginalized and segregated into ghettos within gentile cultures. Preserving the faith and the blood line, Jews married and procreated within their own communities, committed to the survival of the race.

Nevertheless, Jews have always tried to assimilate, and it’s in America where we’ve had the most success: integrating, achieving across the landscape of American life, culture, and industry.

But Jews had nothing handed to them. When the great wave of immigration came in the first years of the 20th century — Jews escaping persecution in the wake of the pogroms in Eastern Europe — my grandparents and great-grandparents were among them. They came with nothing, but they believed in the “American Dream” and were eager to be Americans. They took Americanized names. Great Tin Pan Alley songwriters like Israel Beilin and Jacob Gershwine became Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

My great-grandmother, Genya Prizant, who survived the Kishinev pogroms by hiding in a sewer, came here at 15 years old, married an Americanized cousin, and became Jennie Miller. Jews strove hard to achieve success in a variety of industries. Opportunity abounded, it didn’t matter if you were Jewish! Until it did.

My grandfather, who worked as a field auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, had to change the family name in the years leading up to World War II, due to rising hostility against Jews in America. The Red Scare and the McCarthy witch hunts were in large measure an effort to oust undesirable Jews.

Antisemitism is always lurking quietly in the shadows, ready to pounce. And pounce it has, in recent months. In London, dear Jewish friends are removing their mezuzah from their doorways; they kept their Chanukah candles away from their windows last December, fearing they’d be seen from the street.

It’s baffling to me, then, that so-called “anti-racists” — the people whose obsession is seeing racism in every encounter and every relationship — have no cognizance of what the Jewish experience of racism might be in this culture. Jews are only 2 percent of the population. What kinds of micro-aggressions do you imagine Jews put up with?

Believe me, I could tell you stories. The blunt, ugly truth is that “anti-racists” only see race in terms of skin color — and only certain skin colors. To them, Jews are white. Jews have white privilege. They can “pass.”

Much of the anti-Jewish hatred expressed by black activists and civil rights crusaders over the decades stems from resentment over what they perceive as Jews insinuating themselves into the white echelons of privilege and power by “playing white.” That’s another classic Jew-hating trope: Jews are sneaky, conniving, opportunistic cronies making nice with the white gentile powers that be — and getting away with it, because they can pass.

And that’s just racist.

So, why am I focusing here on black antisemitism? Why even mention that my assailant and those amused teens were black? Is-Jew hatred an especially black phenomenon? No, but it’s been brandished by black activists and leaders in the black community for decades. Take the extreme and often pathological Jew-hate obsession of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who said:

“The satanic Jews, they control everything and mostly everybody. If they are your enemy then you must be somebody.”

Then there’s the rhetoric of civil rights activist and spokesman for — yup, The Nation of Islam — Malcolm X, who said: “I think this, that in this country, there’s one mistake that the Jews make, they put themselves in a position where whenever anyone gives an objective analysis of the role that they play, they defend themselves by accusing you of being antisemitic. A Negro is not antisemitic when he says that the man who’s exploiting him in his community is white because it is a white man who owns all the stores. Now is it an accident that these whites who own these stores are Jewish?”

In this sound byte, we are treated to the trope of Jews owning everything and exploiting blacks, as well as the characterization of Jews as white. Is it characteristic of black Muslims to be haters of the Jews? It can’t be a coincidence that the pro-Hamas protest marches feature banners emblazoned with Malcolm X’s motto: “By Any Means Necessary.”

We’ve learned in recent months that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and programs, intent on ensuring protection against discrimination and insensitivity for marginalized groups, don’t consider Jews deserving of protection or inclusion. The recent controversies at Harvard University and other elite institutions demonstrate the consequences of these biases for Jewish students. But how does DEI show up as specifically black antisemitism?

Tabia Lee was forced out of her job as a DEI director at De Anza College in part due to her championing of Jewish students on campus who were experiencing harassment and open antisemitic hate. Lee, a black woman with purple hair, would seem the poster child for DEI, but she quickly found out that her idea of a truly inclusive educational environment was not in line with the rigid critical social justice activist views of her colleagues. In an October 2023 piece, she wrote:

“I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.’ I was astounded, but I shouldn’t have been.”

“At its worst, DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed. Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a ‘genocidal, settler, colonialist state.’ In this worldview, criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.”¹

It’s clear that critical social justice activists working in DEI foment antisemitism under the guise of “decentering whiteness,” and it’s clear that black DEI operatives are the most fanatical about it. Tabia Lee, by advocating for Jewish students, was accused of “white-splaining” and called a white supremacist by her black coworkers.

So, why does antisemitism persist in certain communities of color? Growing up, and learning about the civil rights movement, I had the impression that Jews were in strong solidarity with blacks in their fight for equality and freedom. I recently found a powerful insight from an essay by American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, who wrote a landmark essay in 1967 in the New York Times titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” in which he said in part:

“All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads.”

“One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.”²

Clearly, Baldwin recognizes that Jews and whites are not the same, and with his brilliance for parsing out troubling ambivalences, he hits upon the crux of the matter: To the extent that Jews have been able to become “white Americans” they’ve magnified the pain for black people that they can never do the same.

Envy begets resentment begets hate. How ugly it is that our culture and our institutions, after so much struggle and striving for coexistence in our unprecedented pluralistic American experiment, has turned to racial division, hierarchy, caste, and religious animus in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”?

It’s a travesty.

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1. “I was a DEI director — DEI drives campus antisemitism.” The New York Post.

2. Baldwin, James. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” The New York Times. 1967.