Jesse Jackson’s eulogies rightfully celebrated his pathbreaking presidential runs in the 1980s – despite being clouded by his 1984 slur calling New York City “Hymietown.”
Back when integrity still mattered, Jew-bashing undermined this civil rights leader’s moral standing. Pressured, he apologized – a month later. In retrospect, the “Hymietown” controversy helped pave the way to today’s multi-front Jew-hating epidemic, uniting right and left extremists, and transcending class, festering from downtown ghettos to uptown campuses.
The Holocaust delegitimized Western antisemitism for decades. By the 1980s, American Jew-haters seemed marginalized: mostly lower-class losers, often KKK bigots or Neo-Nazis. Recognizing how Jew-hatred powered Nazi ideology, most Americans repudiated antisemitism as illiberal and undemocratic.
In 1950, the German-born social psychologist Theodor Adorno claimed that “neither ethnocentrism nor antisemitism ever showed a tendency to go with leftist liberal views.” Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality validated most American Jews’ conserva-phobia and American liberals’ faith that “it”– the Holocaust – could never happen “here.”
Polls showed that higher education levels generally yielded less antisemitism. Under Ronald Reagan, Republicans emerged as pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. By 1986, it seemed like Fievel Mousekewitz in Steven Spielberg’s An American Tail was right: there are “no cats” – meaning Jew-haters – “in America.”
The turning point for American antisemitism
Alas, one exception emerged. Starting in the 1960s, higher education levels often (not always) produced more Black antisemites. Growing prosperity calmed traditional frictions between working-class Blacks and Jewish shopkeepers. But Black nationalists, Black Muslim demagogues, and anti-colonialist academics, equating Palestinians with Blacks, peddled an uptown anti-Zionist antisemitism that seduced some New Left whites, too.
Israel's 1967 victory was the turning point. A pamphlet put out by the SNCC – Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee – which echoed a 1966 PLO diatribe, soon circulated, deeming Israel an imperial intrusion “planted at the crossroads of Asia and Africa.”
One cartoon depicted a hand with a Jewish star and a dollar sign tightening a rope hanging Egypt’s Gamel Nasser and the African-American boxer Muhammad Ali. Blurring anti-Zionism with antisemitism, this caricature had greedy Jews replacing southern rednecks lynching Blacks and Arabs. (Two years ago, Harvard student groups resurrected this cartoon).
Cultivating Third World solidarity – later justified as “intersectionality” – Black antisemites used “Zionist” to mean “American Jews we hate.” During the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, Black radicals peddled Jew-hatred to their broader community, claiming “the Middle East murderers of colored people” couldn’t teach Blacks effectively. The Black Panthers called Jewish landlords “racist Zionists.”
Jackson's role
Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” bigotry also popularized a new antisemitism steeped in anti-Zionism. The older generation of civil rights leaders, especially Dr. Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, befriended Jews and loved Israel.
In 1979, Jackson visited the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat in Beirut – enjoying a hero’s welcome. When asked whether he equated Israelis and Arafat’s PLO as terrorists, Jackson lost his moral compass. “In war, both sides see their own military as soldiers. The US should side with neither,” he said.
Similarly, this champion talker went silent regarding the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Jewish threats, which escalated the Hymietown tensions. Initially, Jackson felt “no obligation” to respond, saying: “Ask Farrakhan.” Eventually, Jackson condemned certain “statements,” not Farrakhan himself.
Jackson blasted Israel’s alliance with South Africa and many liberal Jews’ discomfort with affirmative action. A growing Black antisemitism, highbrow and lowbrow, sparked 1991’s Jew-hating Crown Heights riots. Meanwhile, Jackson’s anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist antisemitism infected many academics, Black and white.
While masking bigotry with human rights talk, Jesse Jackson also harmed Jews – and America – by undermining Martin Luther King’s vision of America becoming a colorblind democracy. The most influential Black leader bridging King and Barack Obama, Jackson reoriented the civil rights movement.
King’s roll-up-your-sleeves can-doism tapped Americans’ highest egalitarian ideals; Jackson’s chip-on-your-shoulder grievance culture demanded race spoils. King’s logic of fairness for all spurred individual achievement and opposed prejudice, because bigotry hurts us all. Jackson’s logic of essentialism cultivated group entitlements and a victimization Olympics, compensating certain oppressed groups while dismissing others considered unworthy or branded “oppressors” – including the Jews.
At their worst, Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and other such organizations became Operation Shakedown. Their network demanded jobs based on color, not “content of character,” while often extracting corporate payoffs by threatening bad publicity or boycotts.
A tarnished legacy
Jesse Jackson was captivating, charismatic, and delightfully eloquent. “When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed, it’s called a depression,” he snapped. He taught students that “it’s not your aptitude but your attitude that will determine your altitude.”
He told parents, “Your children need your presence more than your presents,” while preaching, “Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.” He wanted Americans “to turn to each other, not on each other,” and insisted: “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.”
When mocked as America’s rhyme-master general, Jackson correctly noted that “You cannot very well be a mass educator and a mass communicator with a technique that in fact induces people to sleep.” He preferred roaring “Down with dope, up with hope” instead of “Off with narcotics, up with sobriety.”
Tragically, Jesse Jackson’s shining example of rising from ghetto outsider to history-changing mythmaker, along with his inspiring empowerment messages, will coexist with two ruinous legacies. His dog-eat-dog essentialism reduced people to particular biological characteristics, pitting one group against another, while undermining individualism and liberalism.
Second, in legitimizing high-brow and low-brow antisemitism, by both Blacks and whites, he strengthened the ideological foundation triggering today’s multi-dimensional Jew-hating storm, uniting anti-Zionism with antisemitism, uptown with downtown, and far Left with far Right, in common un-American illiberal bigotry.
The writer is an American presidential historian and Zionist activist born in Queens, living in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and Its Aftermath. His latest e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-hatred was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.