The Century-Long Storyline: The Myth between the Jewish Community and So-Called “Liberalism”

Photo: c. Photograph by Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-nclc-04076). Public domain

In February 1908, photographer Lewis Hine raised his camera in a cramped loft workshop at 30 Suffolk Street in New York. In the frame: a handful of Jewish immigrant women hunched over sewing machines, stacks of half-finished garments threatening to topple behind them. Most had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, believing they’d escaped a fate that had already been written for them — only to find themselves boxed into another one: piece-rate wages, twelve-hour shifts, and the constant threat of dismissal.

Nobody in that loft was discussing “strategy.” They were discussing rent, and next month’s bread. But it was this same group of people who, over the following two decades, would build the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union into a force. This wasn’t a public-relations plan someone designed. It was people backed into a corner, using the only tool they had — organizing — to solve the problem directly in front of them. This is where the alliance begins: not dignified, not grand, barely even a “choice.”

Fifty-six years later, in June 1964, three young men drove into Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were Jewish; James Chaney was Black. Their task was to register Black voters. Within days, the Ku Klux Klan had murdered all three.

Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, March 21, 1965. Distributed by the Associated Press without copyright notice in 1965. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the U.S.

Ten months later, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel stood in the front row of the march from Selma to Montgomery, right beside King. Afterward, he wrote the line that would be quoted for the next sixty years: “I felt my legs were praying.” That photograph would end up printed on the covers of countless Jewish educational materials and synagogue bulletins — it became, more than any other single image, the condensed icon of the Black-Jewish alliance.

At this point, the relationship between American Jews and liberal politics had stopped being purely a survival strategy for people at the bottom. It had become a story about identity — Jews began narrating themselves as natural moral allies. That narrative had real action behind it, but it was also something actively told, and retold, and reinforced.

A coalition born of survival instinct, and a coalition actively built and retold through moral narrative, are already two not-quite-identical things. The first is adaptation. The second carries real agency with it — in some sense, this was already an act of designing an identity, and a political position.

By the 1970s and 80s, this design — if that’s the right word for it — had become deeply embedded in the institutional life of American Jews: academia, journalism, Hollywood, the inner workings of the Democratic Party. Jewish presence was so dense that “Jewish” and “liberal” had become, in practical political terms, nearly interchangeable. Several generations of Jewish leaders had, quite deliberately, cultivated, invested in, and amplified this coalition narrative, treating it as a long-term store of political and social capital — right up until that capital started being repriced.

Photo: Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine, April 22, 2024. Photograph by SWinxy via Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Less than six months after October 7, 2023, that ledger — half a century in the building — faced its first real run on the bank. In April 2024, tents went up on the Columbia University quad. NYU, Caltech, and the University of Michigan saw the same scenes follow within weeks. Signs read “whiteness” and “apartheid state.” Near Columbia, someone was heard shouting “go back to Poland”; someone else held a sign referencing Hamas’s military wing, aimed squarely at the Jewish students standing nearby. That same spring, Harvard president Claudine Gay and Penn president Liz Magill both resigned after congressional testimony in which neither could give a clear answer to whether calling for genocide against Jews violated campus policy.

The reaction inside Jewish student communities was far more complicated than the headlines suggested. Plenty of the students protesting were themselves Jewish, insisting that anti-Zionism and antisemitism were two different things. But for another portion of Jewish students, these chants and signs summoned a very specific family memory — the sense that their grandparents had already fled this once — except this time the fear wasn’t coming from the traditional right. It was coming from inside the coalition they had always assumed they belonged to.

The turbulence didn’t stop with spring 2024. Once in office, the Trump administration froze federal funding to Harvard, Columbia, and several other universities, citing their failure to adequately address campus antisemitism; Harvard sued the federal government in response. Multiple schools began banning pro-Palestinian student groups and expelling protesters. By 2025, as administrative crackdowns tightened and a Gaza ceasefire took hold that October, public protest activity on campuses visibly cooled — reported antisemitic incidents fell by more than half from their 2024 peak. But cooling isn’t the same as healing: heading into the 2025–2026 academic year, faculty-led “Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine” networks expanded to more than 130 chapters nationwide, and the University of Maryland’s student government scheduled a vote on an anti-Israel boycott resolution specifically on Yom Kippur. An Israeli-born senior at Northwestern later put it this way in an interview: the absence of tents doesn’t mean Jewish students feel safe — it just means everyone learned to only talk openly about their identity in specifically Jewish spaces.

The coalition narrative that had been so carefully cultivated, so patiently retold for half a century, looked, for the first time, genuinely fragile — and that fragility didn’t disappear once the tents came down. It simply found a quieter, more durable way to persist.

What This Actually Is

If this were a story about accident, then the seamstress in that 1908 loft, and the three young men on that Mississippi highway in 1964, should have no explanatory bearing on what happened sixty years later — history should read as discontinuous, and today’s backlash should feel like it came from nowhere. But that’s not what happened: today’s rupture is sliding along tracks that were laid, quite deliberately, by that carefully cultivated, repeatedly retold coalition narrative. Someone laid the track. Nobody foresaw where it would ultimately lead.

If this were a story about design failure, then responsibility should rest squarely with the designers — a generation of Jewish leaders who carefully engineered a political position, and are now paying the bill that came due. But that’s too simple as well: no single generation had the foresight to predict that, sixty years later, intersectional theory would reorganize the “oppressor/oppressed” axis away from religious and ethnic exclusion and onto race and structural power; nor could anyone have predicted the speed at which the Gaza war would collapse “criticism of a state” into “suspicion of a people.”

So the honest answer probably sits somewhere between the two — and not as a neat 50/50 split. The earlier chapters were adaptive; the later ones carried real, deliberate design; and in neither case did anyone have the power to control what historical currents that coalition narrative would eventually collide with decades on. That’s the part of this story that genuinely resists tidy categorization.

But This Isn’t the End of the Story

There’s one piece that has to be added here — the piece that any “inevitability” reading is most likely to leave out: if this path was once something people deliberately designed, it can be redesigned.

When Heschel and King met for the first time in 1963, no historical inevitability forced them into alliance — they chose each other, deliberately deciding to narrate Jewish and Black experience as two chapters of the same story. That was an act of active narrative construction, not gears clicking automatically into place. If a coalition could be actively built in 1963, it can just as easily be renegotiated, rebuilt, or even deliberately dismantled and replaced with a different political position in 2026 — that’s not what a fatalist would tell you, but it’s consistent with the logic this story has already demonstrated: people, even within the constraints of their historical conditions, retain the capacity to narrate their own story and choose their own allies. No one can guarantee what this particular choice will look like fifty years from now.

That’s probably what this whole history is really trying to tell today’s reader: you cannot escape the gravity of path dependency. But you have also never truly lost the pen that draws the next path.