American Zionism and African Liberation

Abstract

Relations between African Americans and American Jews in the 1950s were tightly bound up in the Civil Rights movement, the Holocaust, and the rise of South African apartheid, just as they were intricately connected to the Cold War and to liberation movements in African nations. Indeed, it is impossible to separate the evolution of African American and American Jewish identities—and too the evolution of a Black/Jewish alliance—from global events in this era.