Jack Ross had the following (breathtaking) response to my Selma/Gaza post, which touched on the Jewish role in the civil rights movement:
I've actually been thinking a lot about this lately as it relates to my
book [on anti-Zionist Rabbi Elmer Berger]. I've come to the very frank conclusion that Jewish passion for
the civil rights movement was analogous to the historian Rhys Isaac's theory about colonial Virginia, that the Virginia
slave-holding class rose to the vanguard of the revolution because as
slave-owners they knew better then anyone what political slavery was.
Likewise
the Liberal-Zionist establishment of the late 50s and early 60s were
the most outspoken supporters of the civil rights movement because in
their self-identification with the architects of an apartheid system
abroad they knew what such a system was at home. It bears emphasis
that I speak only of a class of Jewish supporters here, of course not
all Jews in the movement were motivated by Jewish parochialism, and not
a few would become the first Jews of the new left to turn against
Zionism. But consider, as one example, the one rabbi/Jewish
representative who spoke at the March on Washington, the most militant Zionist Joachim Prinz. This can be extended further to the CCAR as a whole, which was dominated in that period by veterans of Zionist agitation.
In 1952, the [anti-Zionist] American Council for Judaism Rabbi Irving Reichert gave a sermon at Washington Hebrew Congregation in which he could not have put it more bluntly: "Racism is no substitute for Judaism".
P.S. Here is the Jewish National Fund's plans for the Coretta Scott King Forest in Galilee. After the 2006 war, was the putative reason; but the JNF plants trees to cover up Arab villages…
