Ä Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension": Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois
American Jewish History, 88 (1):
53-93 (Mar 1, 2000)DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2000.0004
Abstract
African-Americans have reacted to Jews not only as neighbors in the American communal polity but as a fellow diaspora people. This has been true at least since the late nineteenth century, when Caribbean-born Edward Wilmot Blyden embraced Herzl's Zionism as a template for Africa's redemption, and black newspapers in the United States expressed measured sympathy for Jewish victims of Russian pogroms. The focus here is on the career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the preeminent African-American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, as a prism through which to view the global impact on African-American attitudes toward Jews during the period marked by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.