The Jewish Case for Indigenous Solidarity

Jay Saper
4 min readOct 14, 2019

I can’t go back

Where I came from was

Burned off the map

I’m a Jew

Anywhere is someone else’s land

— Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Unlike the European Christian settlers who sought to ban us from these shores when we first arrived as refugees, the indigenous community, having been all too familiar with the violence that forced us to flee, understood our effort to seek sanctuary here with compassion.

While Pittsburgh and Poway remind us this is no goldene medine, or golden land, it is not our hosts who are the ones reaching for rifles to shoot us in our shuls on shabes, but the same European Christian settlers whose colonial project has been built upon the ravage of genocide.

As a people routinely expelled from and nearly exterminated in all too many places, we long to build safety upon this soil where we find ourselves today. If we want to get serious about getting free, we must show steadfast support for those who have been most targeted by and in the forefront of resisting the violence waged by European Christian settlers here on Turtle Island.

Our stories, those of the indigenous and Jewish communities, have been overlapping and interconnecting over the years. Our liberation is bound up together as well.

Interconnected Stories, Bound Liberation

The Catholic Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella funded Columbus’s 1492 voyage that pillaged the land, advanced genocide, and spread colonialism, laying the groundwork for what became the United States. It was no coincidence that same year the very same monarchy expelled the Jews from Spain and Portugal. European Christian colonialism derived from the antisemitism that had fueled centuries of bloody crusades.

The administration of President Ulysses Grant established the boarding schools that kidnapped indigenous children from their homes and stripped their culture away from them in the quest to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” Earlier in his career, Grant issued General Order №11, expelling Jews from his command during the Civil War.

In 1958, in the face of escalating violence from the Ku Klux Klan, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina put up a heroic armed struggle that squashed the white supremacists. Jewish folk artist Malvina Reynolds commemorated the revolt in her song “The Ballad of Maxton Field.” Reynolds had a personal run in with the Klan two decades prior when they raided her family’s California home because of their efforts to organize the Jewish and Black community to support the Scottsboro Boys.

The FBI violently suppressed the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 that sought to confront the history of treaty violations on the land where over 200 of their ancestors had been massacred in 1890. The FBI also put the political prisoner and American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier behind bars, where he remains to this day.

Preeminent radical lawyer, the Jewish Bill Kunstler, defended the American Indian Movement activists. J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the FBI for half a century and pioneered notable projects to sabotage these vital social movements, had launched his career by deporting the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman in 1919, initiating the curtailing of Jewish immigration that resulted in the banning of Jewish refugees from seeking sanctuary here during the Holocaust.

As the water protectors at Standing Rock mounted their historic defense of their land and water from the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, major media outlets maintained silence on the topic for months. The first prominent journalist to travel to the scene was the Jewish Amy Goodman, whose footage of guards releasing dogs on water protectors led the state prosecutor to issue a warrant for her arrest and charge her with trespassing and participating in a riot.

Building a Just Future Together

These centuries of violence and suppression have always been accompanied by fierce resistance. Indigenous communities are still here, fighting for a future while remaining grounded in the traditions of the past.

In New York City, the American Indian Community House has been at the forefront of providing comprehensive support to meet the health, housing, education, and ceremonial needs of their community. Yet, as the organization celebrates it 50th anniversary this year, they face continued cuts to their funding that puts their vital work in peril.

The recently launched Manna-hatta Fund is an opportunity for those settled on this land to provide crucial financial support for the organization’s ongoing work, as part of a broader commitment of working towards decolonization. I have been part of a team that has been working in collaboration with the American Indian Community House over the past two years to build this project.

Making a gift to the Manna-hatta Fund is one opportunity for us to continue in the legacy of our brave ancestors who have struggled for liberation in the diaspora through an unrelenting commitment to solidarity. Making a gift to the Manna-hatta Fund is a commitment to our unrelenting disloyalty to the principles and practice of white supremacy.

While people of European Christian descent should absolutely be the primary contributors to the Manna-hatta Fund, there is no need to for us to hold our breath until the fathers of antisemitism and colonialism swing into action to repent for and right their wrongs.

Nearly a century ago, amidst the decade European Christian settlers experienced as the Roaring Twenties, one of the most popular tunes in the Jewish community was di grine kuzine, a searing critique of the faux promises of America. The Yiddish song concludes with the crescendo:

אַז ברענען זאָל קאָלאָמבוסעס מדינה

az brenen zol kolombuses medine

To hell with your land of Columbus

--

--

Jay Saper

Educator, organizer, writer, and artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York.