The Project on Allyship to Combat Antisemitism

Allyship has been fundamental to the fight against antisemitism in the United States since the founding of the Anti-Defamation League more than a century ago. Yet, this work has not always been smooth or easy, and as antisemitism increased in recent years, a refrain has been growing in the Jewish community: Our allies are not showing up. 

How can we change this paradigm? American Jewish University (AJU) recently convened a group of scholars to systematically examine the dynamics of the future of allyship, with a focus on African American, Asian-American, Christian, Indigenous, Jewish immigrant, Latino, LGBTQ+, and Muslim communities and their relations with Jews. This resulting project powerfully exposed the fraught politics around allyship – and to change the paradigm we have to change our perspective. Instead of the plaintive cry “Where are our allies?” we must embrace the unsentimental “What are we going to do to garner the allies who are available?”  

Allyship as a central theme of Jewish life was greatly reinforced during the civil rights struggle in the 1960s when Jews saw the crusade led by the Reverend Martin Luther King as not only just but also having deep resonance with their battles against hatred, especially coming only a few years after the Holocaust. The picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with King in Selma in March 1965 became emblematic of what many in the Jewish community saw as a durable and attractive alliance and a model for the Jewish population’s relationship with other groups.  

When antisemitism reemerged as a significant concern in the mid-2010s, due in some combination to protests, especially against Israel on college campuses, the rise of Donald Trump and Christian Nationalism, and the Charlottesville chants in 2017 that “Jews will not replace us,” the Jewish community began to look around for its allies. The search became that much more poignant after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in October 2018 when it seemed to be time to cash in the allyship chips earned over the previous decades.

As antisemitism increased, some Jewish commentators noticed that their allies were missing. After Oct. 7, the absence of some allies, especially on the left, was widely noted. Rabbi Sharon Bous talked about her feeling of “existential loneliness” given that “The clear message from many in the world, especially from our world — those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity — is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.”

Yet, the realities of political coalitions demand something different. Far from being a natural condition, allyship should be seen as a fraught and difficult relationship cultivated over time from deliberate strategies that account for the political terrain. First, we must recognize that many groups may not be particularly interested in developing allyship with the Jews – not because of inherent antisemitism, but because Jews, as a small population, do not bring obvious political muscle to many discussions.

Far from being a natural condition, allyship should be seen as a fraught and difficult relationship cultivated over time from deliberate strategies that account for the political terrain. 

Second, we must recognize that our allies come from communities diverse within themselves. We must carefully approach them, with an appreciation of this complexity. The Asian American community contains Koreans whose median incomes are high and Burmese whose are not, the Latin American community includes Cubans who have been in the United States for decades and arrived with significant human capital and Venezuelans who are recent, impoverished migrants. The African American community includes descendants of enslaved people forcibly brought to America centuries ago and recent migrants from the Caribbean and Africa. 

Two Allyship Strategies

The Jewish community will never adopt one allyship strategy. However, we must be intentional and understand the implications of our choices, which can be boiled down to two different but admittedly not completely distinct paths to pursue allyship.

One approach is what might be called transactional allyship:  We work for your cause with the expectation that you will help us or come to our aid in exchange. This bundle of actions has the potential to be durable because it is based on a type of realpolitik, but it has challenges, in particular recognizing that groups will have real reciprocal asks. As Dr. Bridget Kevane noted in her contribution to our project, “[Allyship means] What do you need? And it asks, “What do we need, both of us, together?” 

Jewish groups, led by ADL, have long had a reflex toward allyship, driven by the belief that all good causes could go together. However, other communities have distinct political agendas that may not align with the sentiments of the Jewish community. Thus, Dr. Kevane notes that the central question that the Latino population focuses on is no longer relevant to the Jewish community: “For most Jews, the immigration story is a distant memory. In turn, for Latinos, it has remained a constant reality.”

The other type of allyship might be called environmental allyship, which posits that the fight against bigotry helps everyone because there is some correlation between all hate even if there is no explicit quid pro quo between groups. This sentiment is central to the Biden Administration’s “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” released in May 2023, and includes building “cross-community solidarity and collective action to oppose hate” as one of its four pillars. 

Once the general path of allyship is understood, the implications become clear. The first regards the architecture of allyship. In transactional allyship, much of the heavy lifting will have to be done by organizations that can deliver votes and political positions. Many in the Jewish community tend to default to this model. However, other communities may not have a peak organization as well-established as the ADL and often lack that organization’s grounding in allyship work. For instance, since the glory moments of the civil rights movement, the African American community has split in several different directions based on varied understandings of social justice, among many other considerations.

In contrast, in environmental allyship, much of the work can and should happen at the individual level. With this perspective, people work to change the general climate, without making firm calculations about how political positions should be traded for explicit mutual gain. Allyship at the individual level, including friendships and grassroots organizations, is certainly possible and can be powerful. It is surprising that perhaps the most successful, but hardly discussed, development of allyship, at least until Oct. 7, was between Muslim and Jewish populations conducted at the individual level. Walter Ruby and Sabeeha Rehman note in their contribution to our project that, “Contrary to the perception that American Muslims and Jews have been and remain distant and hostile to each other, sustained efforts to build ties of communication and cooperation at the leadership and grassroots levels have been underway for two decades or more.” 

Yet allyship at the individual level is often difficult. For instance, Dr. Kevane notes that many members of the Latino population are far too consumed with daily struggles and the overarching political question of immigration to engage in much allyship work.

We hope that the guidelines in our research will enable leaders and groups to make better choices when constructing constituencies to fight antisemitism and other forms of hate. They may also be better able to calculate if the effort is worth the investment and expected outcome. That is far from the heroics of Selma but is what is needed to face the realities of hatred in twenty-first century America.

Jeffrey Herbst is the President of American Jewish University. The Project on Allyship to Combat Antisemitism is funded by The Schechter/Levine Program in Public Ethics and the Sid B. Levine Service Learning Program.

As originally posted in Jewish Journal: https://jewishjournal.com/community/374800/the-project-on-allyship-to-combat-antisemitism/