Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 14, 2020

Remembering the Great African American Leaders Who Were Also Zionists

Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, and the “opiate of the Arabs.”

As much of the formal leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement seems eager to embrace the anti-Israel cause as its own, and, just last week, as two scandals erupted on social media involving black celebrities disseminating anti-Semitic canards and slogans, black-Jewish relations don’t seem to be at their best. Yet Saul Singer reminds us that these troubling incidents need not be taken as representative. He draws our attention to the sympathy for Jews and the Jewish state of two great leaders of the civil-rights movement: Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin—the latter of whom was also a regular contributor to Commentary magazine:

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