I saw a video on Facebook this week that I cannot get out of my head.

A big, powerful Black man is attacking a middle-aged man on a street somewhere. The middle-aged man is wearing a Star of David. The bigger man kicks him again and again, shouting the word “Gaza” over and over, as if this stranger in the street whose views he does not know, whose politics he could not possibly have asked about, was personally responsible for everything happening in Gaza. .

He was not. He is a Jew. Apparently, that was enough to beat and kick him.

The first thing I felt watching this video was rage, but that soon transitioned into something closer to grief,  a feeling of mourning as I remembered when things were different, when Black and Jewish Americans worked together to help make Dr. King’s dream come true. For me, this is personal.

In the early 1960s, I was part of the civil rights movement. I was arrested and beaten by police. I experienced this alongside Black Americans who were fighting for the most basic rights: the right to vote, the right to sit at a lunch counter, the right not to be murdered because of the color of their skin. I remember the picket lines where we stood side by side singing “We Shall Overcome.”

I was not alone. There were many young Jews who identified deeply with the plight of African Americans. After all, just eighteen years earlier, the Nazis had been busy exterminating what remained of the Jews they had imprisoned throughout Europe.

In the most dangerous years of the civil rights movement, Jews were dramatically overrepresented among the white Americans who showed up. Roughly half of the white volunteers who traveled to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964 were Jewish. Two of the three young men murdered there that summer, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were Jews from New York. The third, James Chaney, was a young Black man from Meridian. They were killed together and buried in the same earthen dam.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm in arm with Dr. King at Selma and later said that his “legs were praying.” Jewish lawyers defended civil rights workers. Jewish students rode the buses. Jewish institutions put their money, their reputations, and sometimes their bodies on the line.

Today, many Black Americans identify passionately with the Palestinian cause and now view Jews not as allies, but as oppressors. Some activists appear willing to excuse or rationalize even the actions of Hamas. Yet Hamas is not a movement that shares the democratic or pluralistic values many Western activists claim to defend.

After October 7th, I watched from Europe as some of the loudest voices excusing or rationalizing what Hamas had done emerged from activist spaces that once saw Jews as allies. Hamas did not just attack soldiers that day. Hamas raped young women at a music festival. They murdered children in their beds. They burned families alive. They dragged grandmothers across the border into tunnels. There are videos of this too, recorded by the killers themselves, who appeared proud of what they had done.

To watch any part of this be cheered, laundered into slogans, or waved away because of the politics it implicates and then to see a Jew on the street kicked while a stranger screams “Gaza” is to watch something tear open in the fabric of a relationship I once believed deeply in. A belief that continued through out much of my life.  For instance, I was the found chair of PluggedIn, a non profit set up in the 90s to support the largely black and hispanic population of East Palo Alto. 

 I do not want to do to Black America what that man in the video did to that stranger. The Black community is not one thing. Most Black Americans are horrified by hatred and violence. The most vocal antisemitism in America is not primarily coming from Black communities. And the historic Black-Jewish alliance was never seamless: there were tensions in the late 1960s, there was Crown Heights, there was Farrakhan. Real things. I know this.

Still, it feels to me that the bond between many Jews and many Black Americans has weakened significantly to the point it is broken.

I suspect many young people marching in the streets today do not know that Schwerner and Goodman were murdered fighting for civil rights. Many do not know that early NAACP budgets were supported in significant part by Jewish donors. Do they know that Heschel and King deeply admired one another? Do they know that synagogues in the South were firebombed because rabbis refused to stop preaching against segregation?

The Jews of my generation did not march because we expected anything in return. We marched because the Black struggle in America was so obviously, so painfully, the struggle of a people in exile — and we knew that story in our bones. We thought, in those years, that we were building something that would last beyond us. Perhaps we were wrong.

I do not want videos like this to erase my memory of the fight for equality that I participated in and believed in.

I write this from Italy, a country whose own Jewish community was nearly destroyed within living memory by people who had forgotten or had been taught to forget that the family next door was also a family. The part of Lecce where I live used to be the Jewish quarter.  Now that only thing that is Jewish is a few street signs.  

I am horrified by the hatred I increasingly see directed toward Jews around the world. And I am scared  not so much for myself, but for the younger generation of Jews who may grow up never knowing there was once a time when Black Americans and Jews stood shoulder to shoulder.

While I understand the anger some have against the actions of the Israeli government, and anger I share, holding every Jew responsible for the actions of that government means that every American should be held responsible for the actions of the government of the USA this includes the man who beat the jew.