Old Friends, Unspoken Truths

By Jesse Jackson Jr.

AMWS October 18, 2026 -- When a Jewish American is accused of racism, the defense is often, "I have Black friends." When a Black American is accused of antisemitism, the defense is often, "I have Jewish friends." Both may be telling the truth. But neither defense admits what every honest friendship across that line already knows: that both sides bring unspoken truths and prejudgments into the room.

In the era of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Gaza, those unspoken truths are being spoken loudly, and often by the wrong people.

Let me start with what we share. We hold the same God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. We hold the same five books, and when our people were forbidden to read, the very book we were forbidden was theirs first. We hold the same four words, Let my people go. And there is a perfect intersection between Goshen and the ghetto. Somebody drew a line around a people and called the drawing of it a mercy.

But our stories part. The Jewish people possess a Promised Land, where they are the majority and rightly resist every effort to subjugate them. Ours, if it exists, exists here, in the very Egypt of our captivity, where we remain a minority. And the departure from Pharaonic slavery is different from the departure from constitutional slavery. Pharaoh never wrote a Hebrew into his constitution as three-fifths of a man. When the injury is written into the founding document itself, a people cannot simply leave the scene of it. A people must amend it. Their deliverance required a sea. Ours required a civil war, and it is not finished.

Consider what the Trump administration has done in the name of fighting antisemitism. It froze $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard and threatened billions more from universities. Five Jewish Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, wrote to the President that he was using "a real crisis as a pretext" and "hiding behind claims of tackling antisemitism as a guise." In the same season, on April 23, 2025, the President signed an order directing the government to "eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible." That legal tool has protected Black Americans from discrimination in housing, hiring and lending for half a century.

Think about what that means. One community's fear is held up as the reason for government action, while the other community's protections are quietly taken apart. That is not friendship toward Jewish Americans. It is a strategy that uses Jewish pain as a weapon and Black rights as a casualty. It sets the two communities against each other.

Most Jewish Americans see it. Roughly 78 percent of Jewish voters supported Kamala Harris in 2024, according to CNN's exit poll, and an AP-NORC survey this year found that about 7 in 10 Jewish adults view President Trump unfavorably. Black voters rejected him by even wider margins. On the question of Trump, the old allies still largely agree.

Gaza is harder. Black Americans watch the images from Gaza and many see a people under siege, displaced and without a state. That recognition is rooted in our own history, not in hatred of anyone. Jewish Americans watch October 7 and the rise of antisemitism here at home and see a people under threat once again. The AP-NORC survey found that about 6 in 10 Jewish adults call antisemitism an extremely or very serious problem, and about 3 in 10 say they or someone in their household experienced an antisemitic incident in the past year. Both of these realities are true at the same time.

Jewish Americans are also deeply divided about Gaza. About a quarter of religiously affiliated Jewish adults, and roughly 4 in 10 who are not religiously affiliated, told AP-NORC that Israel has committed genocide there. Jewish Americans do not speak with one voice on Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu does not speak for them.

That is the first unspoken truth both communities must say aloud. To blame Jewish Americans for the conduct of Netanyahu's government is antisemitism. To brand every Black critic of that government an antisemite is a way of silencing people who have earned the right to speak about oppression.

The second unspoken truth is harder. Some Black Americans wonder whether Jewish allies will stand with them when the issue is Black power, not just Black suffering. Some Jewish Americans wonder whether Black allies will stand with them when antisemitism comes from within the Black community. Those fears have been whispered for decades. Real friends should be able to say them out loud.

So let us change the defense. Not "I have Black friends." Not "I have Jewish friends." But this: "Because I have friends on the other side, I owe them the hard conversation."

Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel did not agree on everything. But they marched together, because each knew that the other's freedom was bound up with his own. That truth has not changed. Only our courage to live by it has.

Jesse Jackson Jr. is a political activist who served as U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 2nd congressional district from 1995 to 2012. The son of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson Sr., he was active in the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and the Democratic National Committee before Congress. Known for work on the Appropriations Committee, he pursued voting rights, health care, and infrastructure projects.