What Does a Black Theater Group and a Jewish Furniture Salesman Tell Us about Race and the Radical Left?

• In Event: Race and the Jewish Radical Left

Abstract

On Oct. 11, 1919 an all-Black theater group performed a play entitled “Queen Esther” in Los Angeles before an audience of more than 300 people, mostly Black. Little is known about the author besides her name nor about the details of the play apart from the high praise it received in the Black press. Still, “Queen Esther” provides an intriguing gateway into the subject of Jews, Blacks, and the political left.

This paper begins with a straightforward yet difficult question: why was “Queen Esther” written and staged in the fall of 1919? In the absence of explicit statements by those involved in the production, any answer to the question can only be speculative. This paper attempts to offer a plausible explanation based on historical context and the role of key individuals. The latter includes Black journalists and readers, their Jewish counterparts, and a particularly outspoken furniture salesman known for his advocacy of socialism, Zionism, and pan-Africanism. This paper frames these figures within a national and international context. It stresses the importance of “race riots” that swept across several dozen cities during the summer of 1919, anti-Jewish violence that consumed Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe around the same time, and, finally, a marked increase in antisemitism in the United States. The paper also identifies the surge in support for Zionism and pan-Africanism in the United States as important factors. These concurrent developments, the paper argues, fostered a mutual perception between some Blacks and Jews as “brothers in suffering,” that is, two groups sharing a similar, although not identical, plight. This perception predated World War I but was intensified by events in and around 1919. Over the next several decades, the notion of a Black-Jewish alliance gained credibility in leftist circles, most notably in the Communist Party, a leading promoter of “Negro-Jewish unity” during the 1930s and 1940s. This paper attempts to situate historically the genesis of that notion.

Author

• Tony E. Michels, University of Wisconsin - Madison