Will the Real Chosen People Please Stand Up?

Theology against power always finds the Jew

You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America?

— Jay-Z, “The Story of O.J.” (2017)

Why are there so many White billionaires? Colonialism and slavery, obviously. Why are there so many Jewish billionaires? If slavery built every fortune, as the liturgy says, then Jews must have owned Africans.¹ And as Whoopi Goldberg (née Johnson) reminded us on The View, the Holocaust was between “two white groups of people.” So what makes this one group of Whites special, anyway? Why single them out?

Black Americans are 60% more likely than White Americans to agree with antisemitic statements like “Jews have too much power,” according to polling from 2022. This gap isn’t explained by education, geographical proximity, or hostility toward Israel.² The special disdain from Blacks toward Jews replicates across decades of polling,³ showing up in data collected by groups like the ADL, though it rarely makes headlines.

Downplaying the antisemitic, xenophobic, and other hateful views of Black identity groups is deliberate. In 2020, the SPLC buried and sanitized their listings, claiming that black extremists didn’t “represent the same threat as white supremacy.” On the victim side, media underreport anti-Jewish and anti-Asian violence compared to its prevalence in FBI hate crime stats. If it’s Blacks on Jews, it won’t make the news.

Jamie Kirchick distinguishes two strains of Black antisemitism: the local, aimed at landlords and shopkeepers; and the conspiratorial, which blames Jews for slavery and floods. What makes a common community delusion antisemitic is a matter of degree, not kind. If the government did Katrina to drown Nawlins, why not a Jewish weather machine? If the CIA invented crack, why not kosher kush turning brothas gay?⁴

Merchants of masochism

Local antisemitism isn’t about Judaism, nor is it confined to “environmental racism zones.” Strangers offer credit or open shops when family won’t, and debtors take the deal. But the markup breeds resentment, especially when the lender looks richer. Ice Cube captured the mood in his infamous 1991 album with the lyric “Go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up.” The target here wasn’t Jewish American Princesses.⁵

Before Koreans and Arabs, the retailers were Jews. In mid-century Harlem, Newark, and Chicago’s South Side, Jews operated grocery stores, pawnshops, and rental units where chains wouldn’t. By the 1964 Philadelphia race riot, Jewish flight was already underway, but many remained behind the counter. Of the 54 storefronts left standing, 52 were Black-owned. Pogroms repeated in Minneapolis in ‘67 and Baltimore in ‘68.

After Columbia Avenue 1964, many local Jews saw civil rights differently.

Jewish history is well-archived, and the mensches embrace comparative genocide studies. By contrast, Black American identity depends on the idea of unmatched suffering, so others’ trauma is denied to protect their monopoly on moral authority. This explains why, even in 2023, Black Americans were nearly three times as likely as whites to say the Holocaust was a myth, and twice as likely to call it exaggerated.⁶

Although few “bloodsuckers” became rich from the hood before the white exodus, the mythos of Jews as orchestrators of Black suffering grew ever more fantastical. Racial conspiracy theories saturated high and low culture, from Public Enemy lyrics, to Dr. Leonard Jeffries’ lectures, to Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson’s campaign rhetoric. By 1992, Blacks even had their own Protocols: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.⁷

How they try to silence a black man!

The well-known relationship between Blacks and Jews was an unrequited love affair. Jews punched above their weight in donations and manpower during the early civil rights movement. But as Black Power rose in the mid-1960s, whites, including Jews, were expelled from groups like SNCC and CORE. Afrocentric Americans became a Third Worldist franchise, linking up with the Palestinian Lives Matter movement.

Black Power demanded self-sovereignty, including in academia, where Afrocentric scholars took prestigious pro-reparations arguments to their logical conclusion. If all white gentiles hold a collective, intergenerational blood stain from the Middle Passage, then why not white Jews too?⁸ Jews could challenge historical claims, but the Pandora’s box of institutionalized Black extremism had already been opened.

A common sight in cities: street preachers who racialize religion

When facts don’t fit the narrative, true believers rewrite the facts. The Bible privileges Jews, which is a problem for Black nationalists. Their folk theology creatively solves this by declaring Ashkenazim and Sephardim to be “Khazar” impostors and Black Americans the true Jews. In this end-times vision, a Black messiah returns, puts the Edomites (white people) in chains, destroys the fake Jews, and restores Black rule.⁹

For years, law enforcement treated Black Hebrew Israelite groups as fringe sideshows. That changed in 2019, when BHI followers threatened, stabbed, and gunned down Jews in South Florida, New York, and New Jersey. The attacks were covered as isolated incidents, unlike the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, which sparked weeks of reflection on a more comfortable target of blame—white supremacy.¹⁰

Impatient prophets with loaded guns

Cultist violence is often accelerationist: impatient acolytes want apocalypse NOW. The Nation of Islam speaks of the “Mother Plane,” a UFO that will destroy the white world and vindicate the righteous. White supremacist groups like The Order, active in the 1980s, believed a race war was inevitable and tried to spark it. Black nationalist militia groups like the NFAC, briefly activated in 2020, may soon wake up again.

Jews in “multiracial democracies” can learn from another besieged minority: South African farmers. Boers practice defensive architecture with artistry, nesting crash-rated bollards among flowerbeds, fencing their yards with electrified wire, and keeping alarm dogs indoors where poison can’t reach. When police look away, survival depends on layered barriers that stall attackers long enough for the house to hit back.

Fortress Synagogue stands. The Israelites are still outside, quoting Revelation 2:9

Another threat template comes from antisemitism-adjacent “Moorish sovereign citizens.” Like the BHI or NOI, they preach racial chosenness, but instead of yelling on the street, they focus on filing fake liens and running financial scams. In 2021, the “Rise of the Moors” shut down a Massachusetts highway during an armed standoff. When the triggerman isn’t white, media and police hesitate to connect the dots.¹¹

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that “The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron.” Antisemitism of color has incubated in America for over a century. Jews were canaries in the coal mine during the race riots of the 1960s, and the hate they face today has been gain-of-functioned into something antiwhite, Afrocentric, and apocalyptic. He who ignores the theology will meet the rifle. Prepare the flowerbeds.

1. Lehman, Charles Fain. “How Many Are the Black Hebrew Israelites?” Manhattan Institute, 6 Dec. 2023. A July 2023 survey of 1,075 Black and 555 non-Black Americans found that 49% of Black respondents (vs. 29% of non-Black) agreed that modern Blacks are descended from ancient Israelites. Agreement with the core Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) belief that “Relative to other white people, Jews were significantly more involved in and profited more from the transatlantic slave trade” predicted a 9.4-point colder rating toward Jews. Kyrie Irving and Kanye West parrot such claims without explicitly identifying as BHI.

2. Hersh, Eitan, and Laura Royden. “Antisemitic Attitudes Among Young Black and Hispanic Americans.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 17 Apr. 2023.

3. Pollack, Eunice G. “Black Antisemitism in America: Past and Present.” Special Publication, Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), 1 June 2022, pp. 1-25. Multiple polls cited here show antisemitism as disproportionately Black. These include: a 1970 study showing 73% of Blacks in their twenties ranked high on an antisemitism index compared to 35% of those fifty and older; a 1978 survey finding 81% of “Black leaders” agreed that “Jews chose money over people”; a 1981 poll indicating 42% of Blacks versus 20% of Whites believed “Jews have too much power in the United States”; a 2005 survey showing 36% of African Americans held “strong antisemitic beliefs” compared to approximately 9% of Whites; and 2020 data revealing 42% of Black liberals versus 15% of White liberals endorsed antisemitic stereotypes. These attitudes are most prevalent among younger and better-educated Blacks.

4. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” said Kanye West, referring to Hurricane Katrina conspiracy theories. In 2005, this made him seem like an ally to the Democrats. Kosher Kush: Kirchick’s “The Rise of Black Anti-Semitism.” Commentary Magazine, 16 June 2018. Reporting remarks that Louis Farrakhan made at the Nation of Islam’s “Saviours’ Day” rally, where Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory was proudly in audience:

Farrakhan also claimed that Jews control the FBI as well as Mexico, and he repeated a relatively new conspiracy theory, the “Pot Plot,” alleging that Jews promote homosexuality among black men through the distribution of a special form of marijuana.

5. For more on middleman minorities, see Zenner, Walter P. “Middleman Minorities and Genocide.” Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, edited by Israel W. Charny, Facts on File Publications, 1988, pp. 253-281.

6. Based on YouGov/The Economist polling (Dec 2–5, 2023): 18% of white vs. 45% of Black respondents did not reject the statement “The Holocaust is a myth.” Similarly, 21% of whites vs. 49% of Blacks did not reject the statement “The Holocaust has been exaggerated.” (Tables 45A, 45B). See also: Coleman Hughes, “Black Radicalism,” Sapir: Volume Twelve, Winter 2024.

7. Muravchik, Joshua. “Facing Up to Black Anti-Semitism.” Commentary, Dec. 1995. ‘Bloodsuckers’ is how Louis Farrakhan referred to Jewish shopkeepers and landlords. By 1984, 65% of Jesse Jackson’s Democratic delegates viewed Farrakhan favorably; in 1988, members of the Congressional Black Caucus gave him a standing ovation. The Nation of Islam’s 1992 publication of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews popularized the dubious claim that Jews played a dominant role in the transatlantic slave trade. Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it one of the most influential books in the Black community at the time. Farrakhan’s prestige was further cemented when NAACP president Benjamin Chavis co-hosted a leadership summit with him in 1994, just one year before the Million Man March.

8. Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1993). Martin, an Afrocentric professor at Wellesley College, assigned The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in his African American history course in the 1990s and subsequently faced national backlash led by Jewish organizations.

9. Malone, Vocab. “Why Do 1West ‘Hebrew Israelites’ Call Whites ‘Edomites’ And Chinese ‘Moabites’?” Christian Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 03-04, 1 Oct. 2019. The worldview of the Black Hebrew Israelites is not limited to glazing Blacks and denigrating Whites and Jews. They also teach that Chinese people are biblical “Moabites” who are conceived through incest between Lot and his daughters, and so are “retarded” (have Down Syndrome). See also the ADL’s 2020 backgrounder on BHI extremist sects.

10. In 2020, the FBI euphemistically acknowledged the threat from “individuals with an ideology that believes western hemisphere-based minorities are the true Jewish race and are empowered to eradicate those not in their belief system,” acknowledging not just the deli shooting but also the Hanukkah stabbing in Monsey by a BHI-curious gentleman. The linked Forward article for the shooting refers to this NBC Miami article on the knife threat.

11. See Daryl Johnson, “Return of the Violent Black Nationalist,” SPLC, Aug. 8 2017, which tracks both Micah X. Johnson’s July 2016 Dallas ambush (5 officers killed) and Gavin E. Long’s July 2016 Baton Rouge attack (3 officers killed). Johnson rolled with the New Black Panthers while Long filed Washitaw-Nation sovereignty papers and preached Moorish “natural law” on YouTube. See also this Hatewatch article on Long and Reuters on Johnson.