King fought for justice for all races

During the month of January, we mark the birthday of one of our nation's great modern heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Almost everyone in America knows how King struggled for human equality and dignity.

All too many people have come to believe that this day is an "African-American holiday." Nothing could, however, be further from the truth. King not only fought for the rights of African-Americans but for every disenfranchised group of Americans. King not only fought for racial justice, but also for the right of the Jewish people to live without the twin social cancers of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

For example, in August of 1967 King published his famous "letter to an anti-Zionist friend" in which he wrote: "Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.

"Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them."

King was a well-known figure in the Jewish community. In 1965, one of American Jewry's most famous figures, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marched arm-in-arm with King through the streets of Selma, Ala. It was during this march that Heschel's "I felt my feet were praying" became an iconic statement of the Civil Rights movement.

American Jews well understood King's message. Today we know that between half and two-thirds of all white Americans who actively participated in the struggle for racial equality were Jewish.

But the Jewish and African-American alliance runs much deeper than the battles for freedom fought in the latter half of the 20th century. In a sense this alliance has Biblical roots. Black churches understood the powerful message of liberation from slavery as expressed in the Book of Exodus, and many of the black spirituals are grounded in Hebrew scripture.

Some four decades later both Jews and African-Americans need to relearn our common history. For example, too few American historians know that King was planning on attending a Passover seder at the home of Heschel just one week prior to his assassination in April of 1968. While that event never occurred, King's birthday reminds us that we dare not forget the ideals of human dignity King taught and which are symbolized in the Passover meal.

King wanted to help us all get to that "promised land" where we judge each other not merely by the color of our skin or the way we worship God but by how we live our lives and treat each other.

On Martin Luther King Day, we in the African-American and Jewish communities need to relearn our history and find ways to build on King's legacy so that together we will surely make this land a land of promise and of hope.

* Rabbi Peter Tarlow is the executive director at Texas A&M Hillel Foundation in College Station.