Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community

The release of this book, which is a well-documented look at the interesting relationship between Martin Luther King and American Jews, is quite timely and appropriate. In these early days of the millennium, Black-Jewish relationships seem to currently be on the mend from the low points of the 1990s, and books like this may help in the recovery process. Also quite well written with some little known information and rarely-read speechs by MLK on Black-Jewish realtions.

You mean blacks and Jews did not all walk hand-in-hand during the Fifties and Sixties, even though nearly 70% of white Freedom Riders were Jewish? You mean not everyone prayed with their feet like Rabbi Heschel in Selma? You're telling me that president of the UAHC, leaders in social action, was forced by his members to withdraw an invitation to King to speak at the group's 1959 convention in Miami? Did the Reverend James Bevel, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma, Ala., actually wear a kippah (freedom beanie) at his rallies and it protected him from the sheriffs? In this book, Rabbi Schneir tells us the story of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King's support for human and civil rights for Jews, his use of the Jewish experience in his speeches, and his call for the Baptists to stop trying to convert Jews. He also tells us the story of Jewish avid support of and reluctance to support King's movement. Rabbi Schneir, the son of Rabbi Arthur Schneir of Manhattan's Park East Synagogue, is a rabbi, founding rabbi of the West Hampton Synagogue, planner of the Palm Beach Synagogue, force behind a new cross-denominational rabbinical assembly, leader of the New York Board of Rabbis, President of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and member of the NAACP. Schneier is quite frank, and includes the wariness of some supporters of the far-left-wing Jews in King's entourage. He also discusses King's attitudes toward Israel, Zionism, militarism and the Six Day War. By the way, while King may have been dis-invited to a convention in 1959, by 1968, when King spoke at the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly's convention, he was greeted by over a thousand rabbis singing "We Shall Overcome" in Hebrew. King was planning to join Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's family for a Pesach seder in 1968, but was assassinated before he could.