NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, CODE SWITCH -- Dollinger lays all this out in his new book, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s.
Dollinger, a professor at San Francisco State University, argues that much of our accepted knowledge about the interaction between black and Jewish communities is based more on myth than fact. He says uncovering the real story can teach all Americans a lot about privilege, historical memory and the way we construct our own stories.
“I tell this story in the hopes that, even in the contemporary period, folks can take a deep breath and pause, whatever their initial reaction will be, to, you know, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Farrakhan, Nation of Islam, all the topical issues now, and they’ll be better informed to understand the dynamics if they understand and see what actually happened over the last 50 or 60 years,” Dollinger says. “Clearly in Trump’s America, we have a variety of different constructed narratives, and everyone’s got a bunch of facts to prove that they’re right. And everyone is internally consistent, and nothing that anyone else says on the outside matters, you know, because they’ve got it right.”