Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Jewish Community (review)

From the moment of his assassination at the Loraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., like Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, "belonged to the ages." A towering figure in the American moral imagination, King was subsequently honored with a national holiday and may soon be honored with a monument between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The Reverend King ranks with such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, and Winston Churchill named "Men of the Century" by Time magazine.

Enough time has passed since 1968 for historians to reveal that the national icon coexisted with a man whose human failings included a plagiarism episode and the sexual peccadilloes for which he was hounded by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. This new book by Rabbi Marc Schneier of The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding is a welcome reminder of why, despite such revelations and the controversy still surrounding his assassination, King's stature remains undiminished and his "Dream" continues to resonate powerfully for all Americans, including American Jews. "My people were brought to America in chains," King told the American Jewish Congress in 1958, five years before his "I Have A Dream" speech. "Your 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 oppression of any people by others an impossibility" (p. 34).

Utilizing biographies of King and his Jewish associates; King's autobiography, his writings and papers; histories of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights organizations; and some fresh interviews, Shared Dreams carefully recreates King's relationship with the Jewish community. The extensive literature on Black-Jewish relations, upon which Schneier also selectively relies, has been preoccupied, some would say almost to the point of obsession, with Jewish motives--selfless? self-interested? or both?-- for involvement in the African American struggle for equality. Schneier looks at the other side of the picture to demonstrate how King returned Jewish support by revealing his profound admiration and empathy for the Jewish people, his eloquent advocacy of Jewish causes including support for Soviet Jewry and Israel, and his condemnation of Black anti-Semitism.

In describing his theological education, King declared: "I draw not from Marxism or any other secular philosophy but from the prophets of Israel" (p. 32). And this worldview propelled him to back the embattled Jewish state because "there is something in the very nature of the universe that is on the side of Israel in every struggle with Egypt" (pp. 160-61). In 1967, after gathering war clouds forced him to abandon plans for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to promote peace between Israelis and Arabs, King signed a statement, published in the New York Times just before the outbreak of the Six Day War, urging United States support of Israel. Criticized for speaking out even by his confidante Stanley Levinson, a Jew but no Zionist, the pacifist and Vietnam War opponent King agonized over the justification of Israel's preemptive strike against Egypt. Yet his commitment to Zionism as "nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land" (p. 165) persisted, and he reaffirmed it in a major speech before Conservative Judaism's Rabbinical Assembly but a month before his assassination: "I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world and a marvelous example of...how desert land can almost be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy" (p. 169).

King's Gandhian faith that even the Holocaust might have been prevented if German "Protestants and Catholics had engaged in nonviolent direct action and made the oppression of the Jews their very...