osewalrus

This article from the Atlantic is particularly thorough in placing this in the context of the last century of Jewish/African American relations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/womens-march/555122/?utm_source=atlfb

Whether or not one agrees with its conclusion, it outlines the nature of a number of issues. I particularly draw attention to this set of paragraphs:

"The persistent tension existed alongside remarkable cooperation. Cornel West wrote that the alliances between blacks and Jews that culminated in their cooperation during the civil-rights movement were “a major pillar of American progressive politics” in the 20th century. This period spanned nearly 70 years, fueled by Jewish philanthropy, solidarity, and mobilization. Jewish activists fought to desegregate the South during the 1960s. Two Jewish volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered along with James Chaney by local white supremacists.

"Yet even this often-romanticized era was fraught. The phrase “Mississippi Summer” has an odor of dilettantism that underscores the divide between blacks and Jews, whatever fraternity in oppression was thought to bind them together. The political scientist Andrew Hacker observed that local black organizers sometimes felt patronized by their well-meaning, drop-in Jewish allies. But resentment ran deeper than this. Hacker reported that Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—a work of early importance to black nationalism that urged the decoupling of black-Jewish alliances—once remarked that he found Jewish activists cloying because they seemed to presume: “I know how you feel because I, too, am discriminated against.”

"And this is the fundamental, unbridgeable difference: Jews found asylum and assimilation in the United States, a path denied to African Americans. Eastern European Jews, who from 1880 to 1924 made up the largest wave of Jewish immigration to America, fled poverty, oppression, and even mass violence in the form of pogroms. While they initially inhabited an underclass, their refuge was real and permanent, and a road to assimilation was open to them. A not-precisely-altruistic United States then vanquished Hitler and liberated the death camps. In the two decades after the Holocaust, Jews achieved a great degree of upward mobility in their wealthy and bustling adopted home while actualizing the dream of Zionism in the Jewish state of Israel.

"James Baldwin expressed how differently America functioned for African Americans: “The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.” African Americans are, by and large, not voluntary immigrants. They are a stolen people, cut off from their history. They have been denied the opportunity to assimilate and gain upward mobility, persecuted from slavery through Redemption and Jim Crow, and without recourse to the glittering dream of a Zion past or present, they remain captive in mind and body to a country whose institutions despise or ignore them."

(Emphasis added)