FEATURE
SELMA and
the Jews
Martin Luther King
In our time of increasing
anti-Semitism, understanding between blacks and Jews
needs to be strengthened
I BY RABBI BENJAMIN BLECH
SELMA IS BACK IN THE NEWS – AND DESERVEDLY
so. Saturday 7 March marked the 50th anniversary of the seminal Selma march
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 1965,
peaceful civil rights protesters tried to
cross the bridge. They were brutally beaten
by police officers with billy clubs, in a
scene that shocked America and became
widely known as “Bloody Sunday”.
John Lewis, then 25 years old, suffered a
fracture of the skull. Today, he is a congressman from the state of Georgia. Together
with Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, as well
as a host of other supporters, they re-enacted that long ago march for freedom recently. And, as Lewis correctly pointed out, “Our
country will never ever be the same because
of what happened on this bridge.” America’s
history of racism and bigotry was decisively
altered. The heroes of Selma and the civil
rights movement brought the United States
a long way towards fulfilling its self-defined
biblical ideal that “all men are created
equal”. Sadly, though, one part of the story
seems to have been forgotten.
There was an iconic moment in the original march from Selma to Montgomery. It
was a scene reproduced around the world.
Walking arm in arm, in the very front row,
along side the Reverend Martin Luther King
was Nobel Prize winner Ralph Bunche together with white-bearded, head-covered
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Rabbi Heschel represented a living symbol of the powerful role Jews had come to play in the
movement for the rights of blacks to equali-
18 JEWISH LIFE
ISSUE 82
ty, dignity and respect before the law. Many
Jews, martyrs to the cause, like Schwerner
and Goodman, who received posthumous
Presidential Medals of Freedom in 2014,
were in the forefront of those willing to give
their lives for what Jews saw as a contemporary parallel to the biblical story of the Exodus.
How to explain then the incredible excision of not only Rabbi Heschel, but just
about any recognisable Jew from the movie
portrayal of that event meant to lionise the
heroes of Selma? It is strikingly and symbolically significant that the historic moment that brought about cataclysmic
change occurred on a bridge. That, after all,
is the most profound meaning of the story
– creating a bridge between peoples separated by prejudice and unwarranted enmity.
Selma the movie doesn’t want to suggest
that blacks had no help from white people.
Its agenda isn’t portraying all others as devils. It admits the positive contributions
from readily recognisable different groups.
Shown are many white clergy, wearing clerical collars and other religious garb, who
participated in the Selma events.
In one scene, Martin Luther King hugs a
Greek Orthodox prelate, obviously meant to
be Archbishop Iakovos, who participated.
Another shows a group of white segregationist thugs beating and killing James Reeb, a
Unitarian minister from Boston who came
to Selma to join the march. The one group,
however, strikingly missing, the one religious denomination from which no single
representative can be found, is the Jews.
We ought to remember what first
brought Martin Luther King and Rabbi Heschel together. It was in January 1963 that
the National Conference of Christians and
Jews sponsored a conference in Chicago,
entitled “Religion and Race”. The Rabbi
opened the conference by comparing the
civil rights struggle with a decidedly Jewish
parallel. He told the gathering, “At the first
conference on religion and race, the main
participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were, ‘Thus says the Lord, the
G-d of Israel, let My people go that they
may celebrate a feast to me.’ While Pharaoh
retorted: ‘Who is the Lord, that I should
heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not
know the Lord, and moreover I will not let
Israel go.’ The outcome of that summit
meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is
not ready to capitulate. The exodus began,
but is far from having been completed.”
King was profoundly taken by Heschel’s
biblical allusion. That was the beginning of
their friendship. The shared pain of two
people with a common history of slavery
and mistreatment pointed to mutual cooperation in the struggles still facing them
in the future.
Realistically, blacks and Jews both know
that their struggle against bigotry is far from
over. Racism and anti-Semitism are moral
cancers for which we have yet to find an effective cure. At the commemorative march,
President Obama articulated his recognition
that “the work of Selma is not yet over”. Similarly, from the murders of Jews in Europe to
the threats of total annihilation from Iran,
we can’t escape the truth that the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust is not a historic anomaly impossible of repetition.
Reconciliation is a two-way street.
Blacks and Jews ought to feel confident
about each other’s full support – the kind
of support, unacknowledged by Selma the
movie, which Jews gave to the civil rights
movement and the kind of support blacks,
by virtue of their hard-earned sensitivity
to injustice and prejudice, should surely
now extend to Jews as well.
After all, what we both so desperately
seek after our shared histories of oppression is the original meaning of the name
Selma – a word that comes from the ancient Arabic for shalom, or peace. JL
Printed with permission from aish.com, the
leading Judaism website.