Free Republic

The piece, by Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, asked why a Minnesota convenience store called the police on George Floyd. Midway through, Bayoumi casually invoked the historical tensions between blacks and Jews. "In Harlem in the 1960s, most such stores were Jewish-owned," Bayoumi writes, offering as evidence James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, also published in the Times, titled "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." In that essay, Baldwin writes, "It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home." "Today, many of these stores in major cities around the country are run by...

I've never felt more loved and respected than during my recent trip to Israel, where I was struck by the sense of empathy that most Israelis feel for American Blacks, whom they consider to have endured similar trials of bondage and exclusion. On the shared history of exclusion between Blacks and Jews, Rev. Martin Luther King observed: "My people were brought to America in chains. Your [Jewish] people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make...