Our road to the Green New Deal will not be easy. It will require creating deep coalitions between groups of people who have been set up to mistrust each other. Two of these important groups are Blacks and Jews. With Bernie Sanders as our last GND candidate standing, it’s worth looking at how these dynamics are playing out in the Democratic primary.

In 2016, I wans’t yet on board with Bernie. I grew up as a Gen X black girl in Berkeley, CA. The epicenter of white boomer nostalgia. So when Bernie addressed racism by saying he marched with Dr. King, he might as well have said, “my best friend is black.” It turned me off, along with countless millennials. However, this election cycle, Bernie has done a much better job of talking about racism, and building support among Black people, particularly Northern, Western, and urban folks. I voted for him, and was elated to see my state of California called for him. He has, however, been less successful in the South, and in less urban Black communities.

In numerous Michigan exit polls, people favored Bernie’s policy stances, but voted for Biden anyway. Many analysts have focused on how Biden feels “safe” or “known” or “familiar.” I would argue that Biden also feels “gentile.”

Bernie is Jewish. He’s not particularly observant, rather is a typical secular, leftist Jew. But he is, as we would say in the Bay Area, hella Jewish. Culturally, he’s unassimilated into white, middle class, gentile culture. He’s loud. He’s unabashedly in favor of social justice. He’s not always smiling and making nice with people. He knows—like the Jews of his generation knew—that the US is a brutal place for working people, and he’s not gonna shut up about it. For some of us, he’s a hero—saying the things we’ve known are true and are hungry for national leaders to say. For others, however, there’s a disconnect between the man and the message.

I would like to add the following into the mix: Southern and rural Black people are also more Christian, and less likely to encounter Jews, particularly unassimilated Jews. A loud, Brooklyn Jew like Sanders with a working class background is not going to be a familiar leader to many Southern and rural Black folks. I am not saying that Southern and rural Black people are more anti-Semitic than Northern or urban Black folks. Anti-Semitism, like racism, functions differently in different spaces. Just like the Democrats have a liberal form of racism and the GOP has a more violence-inciting form of racism. There can be more than one brand of anti-Semitism. But I have to wonder: if so many Southern and rural Black voters like Bernie’s message, but don’t like Bernie, what role could anti-Semitism be playing?

Every group targeted for destruction has a set of lies that the dominant group tells about them. For Black people, we are supposed to be violent. So much so that the police can explain shooting unarmed black children with a self-defense argument and get away with it. The lies told about Jews is that they are master manipulators and cannot be trusted. As Jane Coaston of vox put it so succinctly, “anti-Semitism, unlike many other forms of hate, is heavily reliant on conspiracy theories to replicate itself. Jewish people are believed to be secretly in charge — of the government, of culture, of the world in its entirety — forcing people to do their bidding without their knowledge.”

So when a Jewish man comes along, saying that he wants your family to have living wages and healthcare, that he wants a Green New Deal with a jobs guarantee to avert planetary destruction, what’s the catch? What is the hidden agenda? It sounds too good to be true. Through an anti-Semitic lens, it might sound like a hustle, a trap.

I’m also not saying that Black people are more anti-Semitic than non-Black people. According to Tema Smith of the Forward, “attitudinal studies have at times shown that anti-Semitic beliefs are more prevalent in the Black community [but] these anti-Semitic beliefs in conspiracy theories of Jewish control is not qualitatively different than white supremacist anti-Semitism.” African American Christianity is further complicated by the fact that it was a religion forced upon our community during slavery, filled with all the sexist, racist, classist, homophobic and anti-Semitic baggage of European Christianity. Cornel West is an African American scholar, philosopher and Bernie supporter. In a 1991 article in Tikkun, he describes Black anti-Semitism as a “particular form of xenophobia from below [that] doesn’t have the same institutional power of those racisms that afflict their victims from above [but] it certainly deserves the same moral condemnation.”

There have been significant studies of Black anti-Semitism in 1964, 1981, 1992, and 1998. I couldn’t find any studies that looked comparatively at anti-Semitism in different parts of the Black community, Southern vs. Northern, urban vs. rural, Eastern vs. Western, observant Christians vs. secular Blacks. I’d be curious.

One of the complexities in the relationship between Black and Jews is that when Bernie Sanders was born, Jews were not considered white. The very word “ghetto” comes from Europe where Jews were kept segregated and subjugated. In the US, Jews were one of the many groups of “ethnic” European immigrants, including the Irish, Italians, Portuguese, and others. Over time, these groups assimilated into white US culture, moved up economically, and moved out to the suburbs. Although many of them were boosted by the GI Bill, which offered benefits that were largely denied to Black folks.

Jews who have been committed to the project of assimilation into whiteness (and even some who have not) have often bought into anti-Black racism—both liberal and conservative versions. But Jews have also been at the forefront of fighting racism. If you look at leading white activists offering an analysis of whiteness, white privilege, and white racism, a disproportionate number of them are Jewish. I think this is because some Jews have a perspective on whiteness and racism that is lacking in most white people. Because whiteness is relatively new to their community and remains tenuous, they have enough contrast that they can actually see it. Also, the Jews have a strong tradition of social justice–tikkun olam–that many adhere to.

One of the biggest mistakes I see Black people making in our critique of Jewish racism, however, is in not understanding the role of middle agents in oppressive systems. The middle agent role—which is in no way exclusive to Jews—are gatekeepers like landlords and shop owners. Middle agents are rewarded economically, so that their kids can move up in the system, in exchange for enforcing harsh economic conditions on the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. In various economic systems, from US urban communities to colonies in the British empire, white elites use middle agents to have direct contact with the oppressed Black people, and to be targets of Black people’s resentment and occasional violence. In Africa and the Caribbean, the British used Asians folks from other parts of their empire. In the US, Jews played this role for a while, and more recently Asian and Arab folks have played this role, in addition to Jews. To be sure, these folks are playing along with anti-Black racism. But let’s be clear: the overseer on the plantation was not the slave master. The middle agents are not the oppressors at the top. Which is why so many Jews have taken strong stands against racism and economic exploitation. People who are squeezed into this precarious middle role sometimes collude with the oppressive behavior expected in their roles, but they also have the potential to see their common oppression by whites at the top and ally with folks on the bottom. As I would argue Bernie Sanders has done.

Although Bernie failed to appeal to me and others by saying he marched with Dr. King, he did march. “During the Civil Rights movement in 1963, Bernie Sanders got arrested to protest housing segregation and traveled to the March on Washington to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak.… Sanders has consistently championed racial equality and fought poverty and income disparity, two economic scourges that hurt blacks worse than anyone else.”

James Baldwin wrote powerfully about the relationship between Black and Jews in the 1960s, a time when Jewish identity and assimilation was shifting into whiteness. “[The Jew] is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn’t.”

Jews are not a monolith, and there are many Jews of color, including Black Jews. In the US, however, white Jews dominate, and they continue to retain a tenuous relationship to whiteness/non-whiteness, in part because white nationalism continues to single them out as scapegoats to be targeted with violence. Whatever perception we had about the effectiveness Jewish assimilation prior to 2016, the resurgence of white nationalism under the Tr*mp administration has called that into question.

Eric Ward is a Black man who has been studying White Nationalism for decades. I was rocked by an essay in which he describes going to militia conventions, and being able to find common ground with active White Nationalists by espousing a shared anti-Semitism: “despite its blood-curdling anti-Black racism, at least some factions of the White nationalist movement saw me as a potential ally against their true archenemy. [This faction made] a case for temporary alliances with ‘the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Orientals’ against the real enemy, the federal government controlled by an international conspiracy….” As Ward goes on to explain, “antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought,” rather, “Antisemitism forms the theoretical core of White nationalism.”

Ward puts this assertion into a historical context: “The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology…How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? For that matter, how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations…? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious.

“What is this arch-nemesis of the White race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews.”

According to author and activist Penny Rosenwasser, “White Nationalists want to create a white Christian ehtno-state–devoid of Jews, Blacks and Muslims. They blame Jews for funding migrant caravans of brown people coming to this country and for orchestrating the election of a Black President–essentially blaming Jews for the 2045 reality that white folks will be in the minority in the US — which is why neo-Nazis in Charlottesville carried tiki torches chanting ‘Jews will not replace us.'”

Ward explains, “Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today.”

Beyond simply looking at the role anti-Semitism might be playing with Black voters in the 2020 election, I believe it is crucial to look at the role that anti-Semitism is playing in the effectiveness of our movements overall. As Cornel West said, “If African Americans fall prey to anti-Semitism, principled attempts to combat racism forfeit much moral credibility.” The coalition that will be required to move the Green New Deal forward will have to broad and deep. Whether we face a Sanders or a Biden administration in January 2021 (God forbid we face a 2^ndterm), we will need to build power from the grassroots. I am 100% certain that racism has been a huge obstacle in our coalition building. I suspect that in many ways, anti-Semitism has, too.