With today being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, here are ten random facts about the history of relations between Jews and blacks.
1. Black and Jewish relations go all the way back to at least the 1500s.
2. Famed Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama in 1965.
3. According to one study, almost 30% of blacks are anti-Semitic (including, so it seems, former Twin Delmon Young).
4. Over three-fourths of Jews in many southern cities owned slaves.
5. There definitely are black Jews. Estimates range from 20,000 to 200,000 in America alone.
6. That YouTube video, Black And Jewish (which doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anymore) wasn’t that good anyway. To be fair, they didn’t have much to work with.
7. There was a huge riot between the two groups in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991.
8. After Prohibition, Jewish gangsters, looking for a new source of revenue, invaded Harlem. Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz and black leader Stephanie St. Clair went to war over the Harlem numbers racket.
9. From 1966 until his death in 1975, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was headed by a Jew, Kivie Kaplan.
10. Obama got 69% of the Jewish vote in 2012, down from 74% in 2008.
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