Mutual Empowerment in the "Power Era": US Jews and American Indians in the Post–Civil Rights Movement United States

Abstract

Mutual Empowerment in the "Power Era":US Jews and American Indians in the Post–Civil Rights Movement United States1 Avery Weinman (bio) On December 7, 1969, Joel Brooks and Rabbi Roger E. Herst—two US Jews representing the northern California division of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), a major institution of organized Jewish life in the United States—moored the newly rechristened boat Shalom I to the crags of Alcatraz Island in the heart of the San Francisco Bay.2 Brooks and Herst had sailed to the island to answer a public call for donations and support issued by Indians of All Tribes (IAT), the American Indian activist group who began their occupation of Alcatraz, the notorious former federal penitentiary ominously nicknamed "The Rock," a month earlier in order to call attention to the United States' violations of tribes' treaty rights.3 Over the course of nineteen months, from November 20, 1969 to June 11, 1971, IAT's Alcatraz occupation electrified a rapt public already thrumming with anti-establishment radicalism.4 For American Indians, Alcatraz came to symbolize core tenets of Red Power: full-throated rejection of assimilation, renewed interest in tribal sociocultural and linguistic traditions, and staunch advocacy for American Indian self-determination and legal autonomy on ancestral lands.5 [End Page 339] IAT designed the occupation primarily to speak to American Indians, but their activism also resonated with US Jews. The day that Brooks and Herst arrived on Alcatraz was the eighteenth day of the occupation, but it was also the fourth night of Hanukkah, the holiday in which Jews celebrate the reclamation of Jerusalem from Roman forces and the rededication of the Second Temple during the Maccabean Revolt in the second century BCE. For AJCongress members like Brooks and Herst who were sympathetic to IAT's cause, this was a meaningful confluence of liberation. In addition to ten cases packed with much-needed food and blankets for IAT activists living on Alcatraz, Brooks and Herst also brought a plastic hanukkiyah to use in a special Hanukkah service that symbolized Jewish and American Indian solidarity.6 On the windswept island, Brooks and Herst joined IAT activists for a feast of "Hebrew food" and recited the Hanukkah blessings to mark the "Jewish holiday of national liberation."7 Following services, Brooks and Herst explained their support for IAT to the San Francisco Examiner, making special mention of parallels in Jewish and American Indian history.8 For Brooks, the fact that "Jews know what it means to be dispossessed of their land" meant that they, like American Indians, understood the struggle for self-determination in their ancient ancestral territories. Similarly, Herst connected the Jewish past to the American Indian present in a comment to IAT activist Al Miller (Seminole), remarking that "Hanukkah is our festival of liberation from oppressive forces… We feel Alcatraz will become your symbol of that same struggle."9 The sentiments shared by Brooks and Herst echoed the press release that the Northern California division of the AJCongress had published days earlier, [End Page 340] which expressed the organization's hope that the traditional exchange of Hanukkah gifts, "Indian and Jewish folk-dancing," and occasion to "break bread" in celebration of "one of man's first attempts to gain national liberation" would make the joint IAT-AJCongress Hanukkah service powerful for both groups.10 Before departing the island, Brooks and Herst gathered with Miller and another American Indian IAT activist, Frank Robbins (tribe unknown), for a photograph to mark the event (see figure 1). In front of an old prison sign newly changed from "United States Property" to "United Indian Property," the four posed together, standing side by side in an interwoven pattern, as they the gripped the hanukkiyah in solidarity.11 This arresting photograph symbolizes an understudied trend: in the post–civil rights movement "Power Era" in the United States, amid a domestic surge of cultural pluralism and global waves of counterhegemonic radicalism, US Jews and American Indians looked to each other as sources of mutual empowerment. Here, the term "Power Era" refers to the discursive world of the late 1960s and 1970s, which was characterized by activists' enthusiastic embrace of third worldism, internationalism, antiracism, and...