Public opening lecture to the conference Race and Revolution: Lessons from the 1960s and 1970s
This presentation follows the complex transnational dynamics that, at the turn of the 1970s, brought the American racial struggle to Israel. The rise of Black Power in the United States had a ripple effect on Israeli politics and public life, including the radicalization of both Left and Right. In 1971, the Israeli Black Panthers arrived on the scene with a series of raucous demonstrations and other public stunts. The group appropriated from the American Panthers icons such as the clenched fist and the image of the panther and employed the color line to politicize the oppression of Mizrahi Jews, immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, at the hands of the Ashkenazi elite. In the same year, the ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane moved his operations from Brooklyn to Jerusalem. In the United States he had been the founder of the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), which he conceived of as the Jewish response to–and a Jewish version of–the American Black Panther Party. American racial discourse also migrated through theater, film, music, news reports, and, importantly, the social sciences. American liberalism had an impact on welfare policy and helped shape a massive education initiative that sought to integrate Mizrahi and Ashkenazi students. The US/Israeli encounter is revealing of the global reach of the American racial discourse in the long Sixties. It is also paramount to our understanding of the fundamentalist/progressive split that characterized Israeli society ever since.
Oz Frankel is a Professor of History at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He recently published Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 (Stanford UP, 2024).
Comments:
Gertrud Koch (Freie Universität Berlin)
Bruno Chaouat (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis)
Chair: Jay Rowell, Director of the Centre Marc Bloch
The event will be followed by a reception.
Organized by: Frank Müller and Nicolas Schneider (Centre Marc Bloch)
Contact: mueller@cmb.hu-berlin.de or nicolas.schneider@cmb.hu-berlin.de
In collaboration with:
Funded by the DAAD using funds from the Federal Foreign Office (AA)