This article first appeared in the Jewish Advocate
By Charles Jacobs and Sasha Giller
Jews around the world are in a hot wrangle over a conversion bill in Israel’s Knesset that raises the exquisitely contentious question of “who’s a Jew?” According to the most-worried, if passed, the bill could give Orthodox rabbis power to nullify conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis outside Israel. I read today that the bill is being put off until October. Whew!
But there may be no respite from another challenge to Jewish identity, coming eerily in these same moments. In a June 26 speech delivered to a large gathering of his flock, entitled “Who are the real children of Israel?” Minister Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam compared himself to Moses and then declared that the prophetic children of Israel are not the Jews living in Israel, but the Black men and women of America. “Allah,” said Farrakhan, revealed to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that the Black people of America are the real children of Israel.” “…somebody has taken the promise of God to the children of Israel and claimed it for themselves.”
Farrakhan’s “we’re the true Jews” speech came two days after he sent a letter – along with two books - to 16 Jewish American leaders. The publications, issued by NOI’s Historical Research Department – “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Volume Two” and “Jews Selling Blacks,” are said by Farrakhan to be “an undeniable record of Jewish anti-Black behavior, starting with the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery…”
Dear friends,
