Given that it’s Black History Month, now is a worthwhile moment to recall the important alliance between Black and Jewish Americans during the Civil Rights movement, and consider how such a partnership could be revived.

Last month, I wrote two stories reporting on a 10-day trip to Israel and the United Arab Emirates sponsored by the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC). As part of the new Geller International Fellowship, 40 undergraduate students representing a diverse cohort across religions, cultures, ideologies, and ethnicities, bonded, and experienced the Abraham Accords firsthand.

I got to speak with a number of the students about the origins of their Zionism, the experiences of the trip, the divisions between the Black and Jewish communities, and lessons learned for their careers.

Three of the students I interviewed were young Black Zionists. Keron Campbell and Kameron Smith are both seniors who attend the historically Black Morehouse College, while Kamala Kenny is a junior at Brown University. Campbell said, “I get flack all the time because I’m an African-American man who is a pro-Israel activist … I get those arguments all the time from friends or family. … They know about Israel from what the media portrays, but they don’t know about Israel from coming to Israel … I love the Jewish community.”

Smith described his activist path: “[At] National Action Network, we focus on human rights in general. And that’s what really got me hooked on learning more about Israel and the conflict with Palestine, got me hooked on learning more about Zionism.”

Kenny said, “I had the privilege of traveling to Israel for the first time with Jewish National Fund on the Caravan for Democracy Trip. And that was just a great introduction to learn more about Israel and Jewish spaces. … I got more involved in Jewish spaces … and kind of just fell in love.”

Kenny also sees Zionism in a human rights context: “I share a lot of feelings and experiences of the Jewish community… What is going on, is not a Jewish issue, it’s a humans rights issue.” Kenny described how as a Black woman in America “it’s hard to sometimes feel safe,” however, “working at Hillel, that’s some of the times I feel the most comfortable. …  So I love being in the space because you know it’s sometimes, the only time I can feel safe.”

Smith also emphasized safety as a Black person in America. He discussed how a highlight of the trip, which many students told me about, was visiting the West Bank: “I will never forget we were walking through the refugee camp and of course I’m not Jewish, I’m a Christian, and I’m an African-American …  a lot of my peers, my Jewish peers, were in fear of their safety,” he said. “We had conversations about this when we got back … I told them, like, I fully understand what that’s like. They’re like ‘How?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s like what my life is like on this side of the world, like in America as a Black man the way that you guys were feeling is how I feel walking through certain neighborhoods every day back home.’”

Campbell said the West Bank visit brought home for him how, “You can be pro-Israel and also pro-Palestinian, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive … the sheer sense of poverty there is just humbling.”

Kenny, Smith and Campbell each mentioned their Christianity. Campbell talked about openly wearing his crucifix in the UAE: “For me, the highlight was Dubai. I’ve never been to a place where I’ve felt so much safety. So much respect for people, respect for others … I always have my cross out on my chest, my crucifix, and is it OK? And Emiratis were like, ‘it’s totally fine, we are a tolerant society.’… I never feared for my life being a Christian Black male in the UAE. … The UAE showed me that nothing is impossible.”

The diversity and overt tolerance in the UAE also touched Kenny, who said, “[To] be amongst people of another faith, so as well as being Christian, and then with a Jewish group, and then in a Muslim country, I think it was just really cool to witness all those things merging together.”

Kenny is a pre-med student and said, “I think how I want to integrate this experience and the Jewish community into my future, I think is just about diversity … I want to get more people culturally competent. I think that’s something that a lot of physicians and people in the medical field or science world lack.”

Smith described how “easily one of my favorite parts of Tel Aviv was we had an LGBTQ tour, and we got to walk and learn about the LGBTQ culture of Tel Aviv specifically, but also Israel as a whole. And it made me also realize how more accepting people are in other countries of LGBTQIA+ people in that community opposed to how they might be treated in some places in the United States.”

I asked Smith why there have been divisions between Blacks and Jews. He said, “Number one, as it relates to the conflict between Israel-Palestine, there is an association of skin color,” he said. “There are Jewish people that look like me … but I don’t think the Black community as a whole fully realizes that.” Kenny noted that on her campus there was a group of Black Jewish students and she wanted to collaborate with them.

Smith described the echoes of slavery some Black Americans perceive: “I think a lot of my people view it as Israel has really captured these people and put them behind walls … I partly blame our United States history system for this. … In school, the United States always portrayed Jewish people as white …. partly a result of the historical context of trying to teach about the Holocaust.”

Asking Kenny about her thoughts on Black-Jewish conflicts, she said, “These are communities that need to band together because they are a lot more alike than people realize.”

Campbell discussed how the trip “brought together Jews, Blacks, non-religious, religious, probably Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and we fell in love with each other. … I truly believe that these trips should have more and more people of color, people who don’t fit into the stereotypical way to be an America.” Also among the students I interviewed were Latinos and LGBTQ-identifying students who expressed many of the same sentiments about relating to the Jewish community.

Other Zionist organizations really need to take a page from the ICC’s playbook and bring together young people from across cultural groups to learn from each other to foster peace and tolerance.

David Swindle edits Algemeiner articles and social media presence. He contributes to Jewish News Syndicate and serves as Editor-in-Chief at God of the Desert Books, a new Zionist book publisher. Follow him @DaveSwindle and subscribe to godofthedesert.substack.com.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.