Dear John,
Growing up, I almost thought of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a Jewish holiday.
In my synagogue youth group, we celebrated by visiting Black churches for memorial services, marching against apartheid in South Africa, and participating in days of community service. Jews are rightly proud of our legacy of participation in the civil rights movement, symbolized in the picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Dr. King in Selma.
I continue to love observing MLK Day every year – reading King’s words, honoring his legacy, and recommitting to his dream.
In celebrations around the city today, I focused on the need to confront the enduring racial wealth gap in New York. A recent study from the Comptroller’s Office found that the median household net worth of white households in New York is nearly 15 times greater than Black households.
And even though Black New Yorkers make up nearly a quarter of the City’s population, just 1.57% of the City’s contracts go to Black-owned businesses. So I spoke about the work ahead to increase the diversity of the City’s contracting, including the companies who manage the assets of our pension system.
This year, I also shared more personal reflections on observing MLK Day as a Jewish New Yorker.
I’ve been really angry in recent weeks, as some Jewish leaders have led efforts against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including seeking the firing of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Let’s be clear: Diversity, equity, and inclusion were the very principles that Dr. King was fighting for.
Now, King believed those efforts must include the fight against anti-Semitism. He called anti-Semitism “immoral,” said that it “upholds the doctrine of racism,” and spoke against it many times.
So, would MLK support including teaching about anti-Semitism as part of DEI efforts? I feel quite sure he would. As he would condemn those who are praising Hitler, dining with white supremacists, or denigrating Jewish safety.
But Dr. King would criticize efforts to weaponize antisemitism against DEI and civil rights efforts — just as sharply as he criticized “white moderates” (largely Christian and Jewish leaders) in Letter from Birmingham Jail, who paternalistically believe that they can set the timetable for other people’s freedom.
That’s why I was proud to join Rev. Al Sharpton in a protest outside Bill Ackman’s office last week. The way to keep Jews safe, then and now, is not to dismantle the civil rights coalition. It is to build an even broader coalition against hatred and for inclusion and justice.
That seems to me to be one of the “mitzvot” – the commandments for observation – of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
And since MLK Day this year falls 100 days after October 7, I also felt compelled to explore what he might be saying about the war.
Dr. King supported Israel’s right to exist. “The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to exist,” he said in 1967. It’s something many supporters of Israel take pride in (including me).
But it’s also important to dig deeper. In June 1967, just a few weeks after the Six Day War in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai, King said: “For the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory.”
Dr. King was already calling for an end to the occupation of those conquered territories in 1967. Fifty years later, he would surely still be doing so. “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever,” he wrote from the Birmingham jail.
Now, he would also vehemently condemn Hamas’ brutal attacks of October 7. “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral,” Dr. King said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “It seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence ends up defeating itself.”
But I feel quite certain he would be speaking out against the war Israel is waging in Gaza, killing over 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, leaving 80% of people displaced, most of their homes destroyed, and a famine close at hand.
"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows,” he said.
We can’t know for sure what he’d be saying today, of course. But I believe that Dr. King’s words and actions suggest strongly that he would be calling for a ceasefire, for the return of all the hostages, and for an end to the war.
And he would be reminding us that ultimately, the only moral and sustainable path is one that leads to a genuine peace, grounded in justice and mutual recognition. In many ways, from that same Birmingham jail, he did just that:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Jews count religious mitzvot on a Jewish prayer shawl, called a tallit. We could count the mitzvot of MLK Day on that single garment of destiny.
In Dr. King’s memory, I hope we spend more time weaving it together in the year to come.
Brad
