by Edward S. Shapiro

About the author: Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and the author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry After World War II.

In her 1991 autobiography, Deborah, Golda, and Me, Letty Cottin Pogrebin argued that black-Jewish relationships rested on a common history of oppression. “Both blacks and Jews have known Egypt,” she wrote. “Jews have known it as certain death (the killing of the firstborn, then the ovens and gas chambers). Blacks have known it as death and terror by bondage.” Paul Berman agreed. “It was the past that made the blacks and the Jews almost the same,” he wrote in the February 28, 1994 issue of the New Yorker, “and the past has the singular inconvenience of never going away...