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Letters They Wouldn't Publish

October 21, 2005

Letters to the Editor
Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Editor:

The post-World War II civil rights alliance between American Jews and African-Americans, to which Eric J. Sundquist refers ("Blacks and Jews: From Afro-Zionism to Anti-Zionism," October 21), was preceded by a little known black-Jewish alliance during the 1940s on the issues of rescuing Jews from the Holocaust and creating a Jewish State.

During 1941-1942, a small Jewish political action committee known as the Bergson Group lobbied Allied officials to create a Jewish army to fight against the Nazis. Such prominent African-Americans as A. Philip Randolph and W.E.B. DuBois publicly endorsed this campaign, which played a key role in bringing about the British decision to establish the Jewish Brigade. It saw action against the Germans in 1945, and many of its veterans later took part in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

When news of Hitler's mass murder of European Jews reached the West in 1942-1943, Bergson sponsored a series of public rallies, more than two hundred newspaper advertisements, and lobbying in Washington to bring about U.S. action to rescue refugees. This campaign, too, was backed by African-American intellectuals and entertainers. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were among the sponsors of Bergson's Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and NAACP executive director Walter White was a featured speaker at the event. Paul Robeson took part in a benefit concert to raise money for the group.

After the war, as the Bergson Group turned its attention to the goal of bringing Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine and establishing a Jewish State there, its supporters included actor Canada Lee and U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this black-Jewish alliance involved the Zionist play "A Flag is Born," written for the Bergson group by the screenwriter and dramatist Ben Hecht. On the eve of "Flag"'s performance at the Maryland Theater in Baltimore, the Bergson Group and the NAACP joined hands to pressure the theater to abandon its policy of restricting blacks to less-desirable seats. This "tradition-shattering victory," as the NAACP called it, was used by civil rights activists as an important precedent in their battle to desegregate other Baltimore theaters.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA

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