Guest Column

And it was Jews, Branch explained, who
helped found and fund the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, of which King
was president.
Branch honored the many Jews who marched
in Mississippi in 1966 and in Washington, D.C., in
1963, and reminded everyone that "hatred, ghet-
tos and oppression" are just as much a part of
Jewish history as the African American experi-
ence. He closed with King's simple admonition:
"Either we will live together as brothers, or we
will perish together as fools."
But it was left to the exuberant Bishop
Kenneth Ulmer, a Los Angeles preacher, author
and teacher to other pastors, to really amp
things up. With an old-time preacher's cadence
of shouting, stomping and singing, he made the
lectern his personal pulpit.
"Black folks have got to recognize," he
preached, "that Jewish folks are our older broth-
ers! Some folks pray on Saturday and some folks
pray on Sunday, but we all pray to the same God."
He talked of the parallels of Jewish and black
slavery, and stated that "nobody more reveres
the Exodus from Egypt than black folks." "Go
Down, Moses," after all, he said, is a Negro spiri-
tual. He then led the crowd in a chorus of "Let
my people go!"
By this point, the crowd was on their feet,
swaying their arms and yelling "Tell it, Bishop!"
I was completely dumbfounded and had two
prevailing thoughts in my head at that moment:
I wish more Jews could see this, and shouldn't I
also be standing and screaming?
But I also knew that most Jews have no knowl-
edge that there's a passionate and growing seg-
ment of the African American community that
loves Israel and the Jewish people.
AIPAC's outreach division has been seeing
this firsthand. The Progressive National Baptist
Convention (PNBC), 2.5 million members strong
and with vast influence among pastors and com-
munity leaders, has officially declared its support
for Israel, adopting a resolution that states: "Israel
is God's chosen nation, and that the Lord will bless
those who bless Israel" — taken from Genesis 12:3.
The resolution calls for sanctions against Iran
and supports Israel's rights to use force when
justified. The passage of this pronouncement is
no small gesture, but rather a seismic shift in
how thousands of black churches will be teach-
ing their congregations.
The seminar was just a recent example of
what's happening more and more within the
African American community. Recognizing our
common religious and historical roots together,
many African Americans are taking the time to
learn about Jews and Israel, to respect Jewish
history, its teachings, its customs and traditions.
Many call for love and kindness and understand-
ing toward their Jewish brothers and sisters.
That's a beautiful thing. We Jews should know
that. We should care. And more importantly, we
should reciprocate.

❑

Mark Jacobs is AIPAC's Michigan outreach chair.

E.U.'s Denial Of Anti-Semitism

T

he European Commission's former president,
Jose Manuel Barroso, has maintained both
that European values are incompatible with
anti-Semitism and that Europe's integration is the
best antidote against it. Indeed, the commission's
position is that it takes every opportunity to condemn
anti-Jewish bigotry.
President Barroso's well-intentioned faith
in the European values and the European
Union's (E.U.) ability to condemn anti-Semi-
tism seems misplaced. For example, shortly
after the slaughters at Charlie Hebdo and
the kosher supermarket in Paris, the E.U.'s
culture ministers met and issued a unani-
mous condemnation of the "intolerance
and ignorance" that led to the "senseless
barbarity" of the Charlie Hebdo murders
and omitted mention of those Jews who
were murdered for simply being Jews.
Even the current president of the com-
mission, Jean Claude Juncker, expressed
his "highest solidarity" with France and
his outrage following the Charlie Hebdo massacres,
but he failed to issue any statement concerning the
attack at the kosher market. He provided a brief
denunciation of anti-Semitism only after Denmark's
double homicide. It read: "We stand against anti-Semi-
tism and all forms of discrimination."
Impossible to oppose on its own, anti-Semitism is
condemned only within contexts that acknowledge
discrimination against others — a point to which we
will return.
In responding to the murders in France, the
European Parliament called for a moment of silence
for all victims. Its president, Martin Schultz, then stat-
ed, "These 17 cartoonists, journalists, police officers,
employees and ordinary Jewish citizens were killed
because they represented things that fanatics cannot
stand: criticism, humor, satire and free speech."
Whether Schultz regarded the murdered Jews as
critics, comics or exemplars of the E.U.'s citizenship
is beside the point. His failure to specifically men-
tion anti-Semitism signals a dangerous reluctance to
forcefully confront the reasons why "fanatics" single
out Jews.
The E.U.'s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), the
E.U. agency tasked with countering discrimination
(including anti-Semitism), similarly expressed its "hor-
ror at the crime and its sympathy with all those close
to the victims."
Its website spoke of the "attacks on the editorial
offices of the French magazine ... and the subse-
quent hostage crisis" without once mentioning that
the crime was murderous terrorism. Moreover, this
pattern of conflating all the victims of the attacks
obscures the specific threats faced by European Jews.
As Professor Robert Zaretsky notes, the Jews at
the Hyper Cacher market were "no more hostages
than the victims at Charlie Hebdo were insurance
adjustors.
The latter were killed," he explains, "because they
were cartoonists, while the former were executed
because they were Jews."
The FRA's failure to grasp these facts persisted

in the brief reports it soon after issued. Focused on
the intersection between "nondiscrimination and
internal security" in the aftermath of the massacres,
the agency underscored the fears of the Jewish and
Muslim communities without recognizing the signifi-
cant differences between them.
Ignoring the profound anti-Semitism that perme-
ated the Islamist terrorism, the FRA turned
to those Muslims whose alienation they
insisted was conducive to their "radicaliza-
tion."
Notably, the agency extended no similar
concern to Europe's Jews, whose result-
ing despair and isolation increases the
chances of their departure from Europe.
If one knew nothing about "the events of
January 2015" in reading the reports, one
would have supposed that the terrorists
were Islamophobes whose largest group of
victims were Muslims.
In responding to the terror in Denmark,
FRA Director Morten Kjaerum said he
"hoped that leaders of all religious communities again
come together to condemn these latest attacks, in
order to avoid polarization in our societies."
He continued, "Political leaders need to use the
momentum to formulate farsighted policy that tackles
the root causes of radicalization."
Such comments proved no less perplexing than the
agency's earlier response to the attacks in France. The
director's failure to establish the obvious about which
religious communities have become "radicalized" is
as frustrating as his refusal to consider whether anti-
Semitism might be one of its "root" causes.
By contrast, Federica Mogherini, the European
Commission's vice president and the E.U. high rep-
resentative for foreign affairs, was one of the few
E.U. officials to bring an element of clarity to the
horror when she explicitly noted its anti-Semitic
dimensions. Following her meeting with a delegation
of the European Jewish Congress after the terror
in Paris, she expressed her condolences to all the
victims and observed that the subsequent attack
on the kosher market exacerbated the horrors that
had already transpired. Then, when it came time for
the E.U. to issue its annual statement to commemo-
rate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, she
observed that while 2015 marked the 70th anniver-
sary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the murders at the
kosher market served as a sobering and grim remind-
er of anti-Semitism's persistence.
Far from taking every opportunity to condemn
anti-Semitism, the often-tepid response of the
European Union's leaders suggests that European
integration is no antidote to the virus. Indeed, the
polity's credibility and values hang in the balance if
these leaders cannot recognize anti-Semitism and
unequivocally oppose it.

❑

R. Amy Elman is Weber Professor of Social Science, professor of

political science and a member of the Jewish Studies Program

at Kalamazoo College. Her latest book is titled "The European

Union, Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Denial" (Nebraska

University Press, 2014).

March 5 • 2015

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