Black Zionists

African Americans send prayers to Israel, and checks, too

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One may as well begin with the dream. Labor Day, 2001. At the Gideon Christian Fellowship, a predominantly African American church located in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, Pastor Willie F. Wooten stood to address the parishioners who gathered that holiday weekend for the 6 a.m. prayer service he leads every day of the year.

He told them about the dream. As he slept the previous night, Wooten explained, he was visited by God. And God came to deliver an explicit message: “Get on the right side of My people. Start praying for the Jewish state and the Jewish people and bless Israel by donating money directly to the Israeli government.”   

Wooten is in his early sixties: fleshy light brown cheeks, black hair succumbing to gray, neat and gracefully combed back. He speaks in a raspy voice rendered coarse from years of delivering the Gospel at high volume.  

“And so I told the church that we need to set a budget and give to Israel,” Wooten says. The Gideon Christian Fellowship is a 600-member ministry united by a belief in the Bible as the inspired and infallible word of God. The congregation began holding all night prayer sessions in which attendees cried out to the Lord on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people. 

And then there was the money: $25,000 to be exact. But Wooten was stymied. How exactly does one go about giving money directly to the government of Israel? His solution was to pick up the phone and call Ariel Sharon. “The call went straight into his office. It was just amazing,” says Wooten.   
Daniel Seaman, the very surprised press secretary who answered the phone that day in the prime minister’s office, gently explained that such a transfer of funds directly to the prime minister was impermissible under Israeli law. In order to support Israel financially, Seaman told Wooten, the church would have to purchase Israeli bonds; Gideon promptly became the unlikely owner of $25,000 worth.

“We tried to give the Jewish people money,” Wooten says, “and here they were telling us how to make money. Isn’t that just like the children of Abraham?” 
But the urgency of God’s command lingered and Pastor Wooten and members of his congregation set about lobbying the state legislature of Louisiana to invest in the State of Israel. Three years later, on October 14, 2004, the Louisiana Department of the Treasury purchased $5 million in Israeli bonds. Wooten proudly shows me photographs of himself posing with a giant novelty check made out to the “State of Israel.”

Until the 20th century, Jewish Americans were no different in their relations with black people than any other Americans. “They were no worse than anybody else, but certainly no better,” says Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and author of the forthcoming book, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century.

“There was no prominent Jewish abolitionist,” says Greenberg bluntly. There was, however, a prominent Jewish member of the Confederacy. During the Civil War, Judah P. Benjamin served in the cabinet of the Confederacy as attorney general, secretary of war and secretary of state.

“It is not that there were no Jews who were abolitionists,” Greenberg continues. “My point is that Jews acted like white people in the sense that their interest was just the same as other white people. Jews in the South tried as hard as they could to assimilate, to be as much like their neighbors as possible so as not to encourage anti-Semitism. And it worked, but the consequence was that they were just as embedded in the system as others.” 

The modern relationship between blacks and Jews stretches back to the opening years of the century when African Americans began to migrate to northern cities in droves. They settled into neighborhoods where Jews, most of them recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, lived. Struggling side by side, the two minorities found common cause in a shared demand for equal opportunity in an era when racism and anti-Semitism were overtly prevalent.

This budding alliance was institutionalized when Jews and blacks jointly founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and collaborated on the launch of the Urban League one year later. It is a telling sign of Jewish opinion at the time that in 1917, when pogroms in Russia perpetrated by Cossacks against Jews coincided with lynch mob violence against blacks by the Ku Klux Klan, The Forward equated the atrocities in an editorial: “the same soil, the same people.” 

But even at this nascent stage of cooperation, tensions simmered beneath the surface. In 1902, Henry M. Turner, Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, was dismayed that the United States government had sent diplomatic cables to Romania and Russia protesting the treatment of Jews in these foreign countries. Turner condemned the pogroms but added that, “Surely the United States Government cannot be more sensitive over the wrongs inflicted on the Semitic people in Romania than over the ignominious disgraces heaped upon the Afro-Americans, its citizens, by its white citizens. And the same as it can issue a note to the powers on behalf of the Hebrews, it can issue an order, a comment to the various states for a better treatment of its colored citizens.” This complaint would be voiced again and again by African Americans throughout the 20th century.   

It was not until the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s that mainstream Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League—which until that time had consciously distanced itself from the African American struggle—sought allies in the struggle against fascism. The African American community was eager to cooperate, not only because it empathized with the plight of the Jews as another oppressed minority, but also because fascism—at home and abroad—threatened it as well. In a fiery address at Madison Square Garden in 1942, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, told the largely African American audience: “no Negro is secure from intolerance and race prejudice so long as one Jew is a victim of anti-Semitism or a Catholic is victimized.” The refrain, echoed by prominent civil rights leaders like Adam Clayton Powell and Ralph Bunche, was that injustice anywhere threatened justice everywhere. As such, neutrality and apathy in the face of hate were not an option.

The success of the war alliance set the stage for joint political activism. Furthermore, for the first time the political demands of blacks and Jews fell upon the receptive ears in the general public. “Coming out of the war, and the Holocaust in particular, the American people have now seen the physical consequences of racism in the form of gas ovens,” says Greenberg. Speaking in 1952 on “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” W.E.B. DuBois argued that the race problem “cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.”

The strength of the black-Jewish bond was particularly evident in how African Americans responded to the founding of Israel. In 1948, the NAACP adopted a resolution at its annual conference proclaiming that “the valiant struggle of the people of Israel for independence serves as an inspiration to all persecuted people throughout the world.” Walter White—the head of the NAACP at the time—personally lobbied the Liberian andHaitian delegations to the United Nations to support the resolution.

DuBois held up Israel as an example of progressive liberation from colonial rule, celebrating what the Jews had already accomplished in “bringing a new civilization into an old land.” In search of their own Jerusalem, many blacks were strengthened by the moral example of an anti-colonial movement that not only brought a long exiled people back home, but successfully defended its turf. 

The groundwork for what was to become the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was set. After all, it was thought, equal opportunity for one means equal opportunity for all. In those days, as the writer Paul Berman recalled in a volume of essays he edited titled Blacks and Jews, “It was almost as if to be Jewish and liberal were, by definition, to fly a flag for black America.” “It became a mitzvah to give to civil rights groups,” says Greenberg.

In 1963, at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago, Rabbi Abraham Heschel delivered a speech in which he argued that the modern Exodus was not yet complete, for “it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a negro to cross certain university campuses.” Slavery was a cultural touchstone for Jews and recent history for blacks, and Heschel seized upon this as a powerful unifying theme. In the crowd that day was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who would later recall that Heschel’s speech “inspired clergymen of all faiths to do something they had not done before.” Heschel went so far as to embrace the crisis in black America as God’s gift to the nation: “the test of our integrity, a magnificent spiritual opportunity.”

In 1964, King and Heschel published companion essays, both titled “What Happens to Them Happens to Me.” In his contribution, Heschel traced the origins of his steely conviction to the moral passion of the Torah: “You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16). Heschel walked alongside his friend King in the historic 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. 

Writing on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day in 2002, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a close disciple of King’s in the civil rights movement, reflected on his mentor’s appreciation of the unique symmetry of the black and Jewish experiences:  

“He knew that both peoples were uprooted involuntarily from their homelands. He knew that both peoples were shaped by the tragic experience of slavery. He knew that both peoples were forced to live in ghettos, victims of segregation. He knew that both peoples were subject to laws passed with the particular intent of oppressing them simply because they were Jewish or black. He knew that both peoples have been subjected to oppression and genocide on a level unprecedented in history.” 

On April 3, 1968, King offered his most famous—and haunting—invocation of the Exodus in a speech on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.” The next day, King was assassinated. He was planning to spend the upcoming Passover holiday with Heschel and his family.

Pastor Glenn Plummer visited Israel for the first time in 1996, traveling by bus from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Jerusalem. With his wife, Karen, sitting next to him, Plummer pressed his face against the window, drinking in the landscape. The road to Jerusalem evoked rich biblical associations for Plummer, a prominent religious and business leader from Detroit who owns three television networks that broadcast religious programming. Plummer is also the former head of the influential National Religious Broadcasters. “There is a passage that David wrote that says, ‘I lift my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help, my help comes from the Lord,’” says Plummer, a virtuoso conversationalist who gives the impression that he could talk a hole into a cement wall. 

He had long known that verse of scripture, but until that moment on the bus it had never occurred to him that David’s eyes gazed upon this same land.

“And here I am riding on this bus, looking out, and some of these hills, somewhere down the line, David had to have seen. It just brought tears to my eyes and it had an overwhelming impact on me… The experience was exhilarating.” 

But it was during a 2004 trip to Israel that Plummer experienced what he calls “a real explosion in my heart for the Jewish people.” For the first time, Plummer learned about the existence of the Ethiopian Jews. “I just couldn’t believe it. Suddenly I saw these Ethiopian Jews all over the place. These are black Jews. I was just stunned. Why did I not know this? I did not know about Operation Solomon. I did not know about Operation Moses. I was just floored. 

“For the next seven months or so, something really began to stir in me about Israel and black America. I began to notice many parallels. I knew some of this stuff, but it only began to focus in my mind after that trip. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that black America is and should be a very strong international ally of Israel.”

Plummer’s face is narrow and youthful with a meticulously groomed goatee flecked with wisps of white. Vibrantly dark eyes, undiminished behind the wire frames of his glasses, suggest a restless vitality. 

“It is absolutely fundamental,” he says. “Black preachers identify with the journey of Israel, and black people in general relate because there are so many parallels.”  
Plummer sounds a bit like Ralph Ellison, who once quipped, “All of us old-fashioned Negroes are Jews.” And Ellison had a point. Even today it is very common to find black churches named for biblically significant Jewish sites. For Plummer, this fact is of critical significance. “If you ask a normal black, ‘Where is Sierra Leone?’ They would probably not even know it is a country, forget that it is in Africa. Most black Americans have no idea about that. But when you ask us, ‘Have you ever heard of Mt. Zion? Have you ever heard of Mt. Carmel? Mt. Hermon?’ These are normal black church names. Those are names that are common in the black community because they are the names of black churches. And when I say common, I mean you can go to any black community and you will find these Jewish names on the churches.”

Exodus remains a touchstone of black identity that spans the religious, political, and social, even secular, spectrum. “Just as the epic story of the journey from Egypt to Canaan became deeply ingrained in Jewish life through the celebration of Passover,” says Eric Sundquist, professor of literature at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, “so the black Exodus, through continual elaboration and reinvention, became an enduring symbol of African Americans’ consciousness of being a nation, but one in exile from its homeland and longing for freedom.” 

Plummer agrees with Sundquist’s analysis: “There is no other people other than black Americans and Jews that have hundreds of years of slavery in their history,” he tells me. “And that has drawn us to have some kind of sensitivity to Israel.” 

It is a vision that Plummer has been preaching with unrivaled devotion for the past two years. “There are a lot of black leaders who are pro-Israel and known for that,” explains Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, “but none who I would say are as committed to really rallying the African American community as Glenn Plummer.” Because of his standing as one of the most senior institutional figures in Christian broadcasting, Plummer is likely stands to have an influence on the way African Americans perceive and understand Israel and the Jewish people. His clout, and the potential of his message, has not been lost on the Israeli government.  

In May, Plummer was invited to meet with Ariel Sharon when the Israeli leader was in Washington on a state visit. It was an intimate gathering with about 10 to 15 of the most prominent evangelical leaders in America, including Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson and John Hagee. Plummer was the only African American in the room. 

By the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the civil rights era alliance between blacks and Jews was rapidly disintegrating.

“The center of attention had moved from King to the Black Power movement. King was on the defensive at the time of his death,” argues Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University and the director of The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project. King had already been eclipsed as the unchallenged leader of the black struggle.

If something as amorphous as the emergence of the “Black Power” movement can be traced to a specific date, June 16th, 1966 seems the most viable candidate. Delivering the culminating speech at a Greenwood, Mississippi rally, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) asked the audience what it was they wanted. The response was an undeniable clarion call that the zeitgeist of the civil rights movement was heading in new directions: “Black Power!”  

In August, SNCC published a “Position Paper on Black Power” in which the revolutionary tenor of the Greenwood rally was explicitly codified as official policy. Rejecting the biracial struggle for equality that had characterized the civil rights movement since the founding of the NAACP in 1909, the paper’s authors asserted that “if we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people.” SNCC’s youthful activists were impatient with the nonviolent tactics championed by mainstream leaders like King.

“The liberal civil rights movement can’t ultimately deliver what these guys want,” says Cheryl Greenberg. “There is a Civil Rights Act, but people are still getting killed. There is Brown vs. Board of Education, but the schools are still segregated. Young people, both white and black, start to say: ‘This is bullshit, we have to turn radical.’” The politics of identity were sweeping the ranks of the movement. “No one wanted to be identified as an assimilationist in the late sixties,” Clayborne Carson says with a slight, reminiscent chuckle. 

In 1965, Elijah Muhammad, (who had shed his given surname of Poole), published Message to the Blackman in America. The message promulgated by Muhammad and his disciples—most notably Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan—is that blacks are the original chosen people. Whites are the product of a series of genetic experiments geared toward the destruction of blacks. To Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad was a modern Moses, sent to “restore unto his people their own lost culture, their lost identity, their lost racial dignity.” 

At a fractious moment in the civil rights movement, and with the counterculture raging on the fringes, the Nation of Islam’s quasi-martial code of personal discipline and self-reliance earned the respect of many in the black community. In addition, the theology of the Nation was very adaptable to the tenets of Black Power. As Malcolm X was fond of saying, “coffee integrated with white milk” is weak, black is strong. The word “Negro” rapidly disappeared from the American lexicon in favor of “black.”

The Six Day War of 1967 also had a powerful impact on the alliance, changing the way Israel was perceived in the activist black community. To the arbiters of Black Power, the war was an example—according to Greenberg—of “Israel as a white, European country oppressing its non-white Palestinian native majority.” As such, in the name of solidarity with other “colonized” people of color around the world, Black Power rhetoric took on a baldly anti-Zionist (and at times anti-Semitic) tone. The discourse was soon dominated by ideologues like Eldridge Cleaver, who made an international pilgrimage to stand beside Yassar Arafat at a 1968 Fatah rally in Algeria and proclaimed that, like America was doing to its black residents, the Israelis were “trying to solve their problems at the expense of another people.” Carmichael upped the ante when he proclaimed that black militants were ready “to take up arms and die if necessary to help the Arabs free Palestine.”  

By the end of the sixties the prominent role played by Jews in the leading civil rights organizations was deemed an affront to black autonomy, at least in the more vocal precincts of black opinion. The considerable influx of Jewish money to the movement was now seen as paternalistic, demeaning and oppressive. James Baldwin denigrated Jewish financial support as mere “conscience money.” The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC became racially exclusive, decreeing that they would no longer accept white volunteers. One Jewish civil rights professional explained this pivotal development in the following way: “Among professionals in inter-group relations, the Jews are the longest in the field, the most skilled and most experienced. Negro professionals resent this. Negroes have developed their own leadership and they don’t want whites—Jews or anybody else—to be in the forefront of the civil rights fight.” The traditionally liberal leadership of the movement, epitomized by Martin Luther King, Jr., was supplanted by new organizations like the Black Panthers and a new group of intellectual rabblerousers—figures like Cleaver, Carmichael, H. “Rap” Brown, Malcolm X and Harold Cruse.    

Still, to chronicle the excesses of an excessive era is to lose sight of a fundamental reality: The conflict between blacks and Jews was never as ideologically hardened as the enticing and simplistically dramatic headlines would lead you to believe. There was nuance. It was buried beneath waves of rhetoric, but it was there. “This rhetoric,” according to Cheryl Greenberg, “was not indicative of a widespread view in the black community. It was a widespread view only amongst radicals.” 

In many respects, much of the black-Jewish tension was a direct result of progress. As greater racial equality was achieved, it was no longer a sufficient principle around which a mass movement could congeal. The coalition had achieved passage of the Civil Rights Act, bringing about the legal end of segregation and an endorsement of voting rights the following year. “The black-Jewish coalition didn’t end because it failed,” argued the black-Jewish activist Julius Lester. “It ended because it succeeded.” Political success, as it so often does, birthed political complexity. 

The fundamental divide that tore at the fabric of the traditional civil rights coalition was not between blacks and Jews so much as it was between liberals and radicals, between those that clung to the goal of assimilation and those who thought the system itself was rotten at the core and needed to be overthrown. “SNCC repudiated the NAACP as much as it repudiated Jewish groups,” says Greenberg.  

This was a black-Jewish spat in large part because a disproportionate number of the leading white activists in the civil rights movement were Jews. Any turn against white participants in the movement was inevitably directed at Jews. Naturally, they did not appreciate being cast out of the movement and pigeon-holed as a reactionary social element simply because they happened to be white. Reactionary! How dare they! There was perhaps no greater insult in the milieu of sixties radicalism.  

A few memorable snapshots in this saga are:  

• 1979. Andrew Young, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, resigned his post after it was revealed that he had unauthorized contact with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The issue quickly devolved into a black-Jewish stand-off when it was perceived that Jewish organizations lobbied for Young’s dismissal. As Jesse Jackson said at the time: “There’s tremendous tension in the air around the nation over the forced resignation.”  
• 1984. In conversation with a Washington Post reporter, Jesse Jackson refers to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” At first Jackson denies the remarks, but things escalate when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan goes on the radio in Jackson’s presence warning Jews: “If you harm this brother [Jackson], it will be the last one you harm.” A month later Jackson appears before national Jewish leaders to admit his guilt and ask for forgiveness, though he refuses to denounce Farrakhan.  
• 1991. The Nation of Islam publishes a notorious piece of pseudo scholarship titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews that, amongst other incendiary charges, blamed Jews for the slave trade. 
• 1991. After a car that was part of the motorcade escorting Rebbe Menachem Schneerson hits and kills a black child, a mob of African Americans shouting “Kill the Jews” repeatedly stabs a young rabbinical student and leaves him to die on the street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 
• 1993. Farrakhan aide Khalid Abdul Muhammed mounts the stage at Kean College in New Jersey and accuses Jews of “sucking our blood in the black community.” Three months later, in the face of escalating pressure, Farrakhan calls a press conference and announces that Muhammed has been removed from his post for the time being. “While I stand by the truths that he spoke,” Farrakhan says, “I must condemn in the strongest terms the manner in which those truths were represented.”    

An accounting of the Jewish response to these incidents cannot be limited to the narrow confines of Commentary, where editor Norman Podhoretz and others wrote about the demise of the black and Jewish relationship. To be sure, many American Jews did indeed feel increasingly vulnerable, under attack, and unappreciated in the face of Black Power hyperbole. In this sense, Podhoretz’s sweeping broadsides, beginning with his landmark 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” did speak to a very real constituency with very real fears. Yet, unlike Podhoretz, a vast majority of American Jews maintained liberal views on a range of social justice issues. 

Greenberg insists that the past few decades have “not really changed regular old Jews feelings about tikkun olam or equality or civil rights. But these Jews and blacks do not have the megaphone, in part, because their message does not make the news. ‘Black People Like Jews’—that is not a headline,” she says, laughing.  

Most black Zionists uniformly dismiss the turn towards radicalism in the late sixties as a regrettable deviation, attributable in large part to the egregious failings of leadership in the black community. “Jesse [Jackson] had the microphone, not the black church leaders,” Pastor Glenn Plummer says in a bitter tone. “And there was an impression that he, and Farrakhan, and Al [Sharpton] spoke for black America when in fact they weren’t. I have been around a lot of black Christian leaders, and I am a firm believer that there is a deeply felt love for Israel but the Jewish people do not know it because black people have not articulated it as clearly as needed.” 

Plummer spares some of his harshest criticism for Jesse Jackson, arguing that unlike Farrakhan, he “has no excuse because he was birthed out of the civil rights movement.” He claimed to “speak for most African Americans, and was virtually unchallenged in that regard by most of black leadership, that is what really began to cause a deterioration. It came not from black people by in large, but from Jewish people because they felt betrayed.” 

One brisk Sunday I visit the predominantly African American Corinth Baptist Church in Capitol Heights, Maryland. The church sits tucked away at the end of a quiet street in a residential neighborhood, a modest-sized, well-maintained and painted light pink building. The parking lot showcases a decidedly middle to upper middle class array of vehicles, several of which pull into the lot blasting gospel music.   

The windows are covered in a red plastic that bathes the interior of the chapel in a gauzy rose-tinged incandescence. The chairs too are red. Above the altar hang two giant banners adorned with gilded lettering. One reads: “Hallelujah to the Lamb of God.” The other: “King of Kings.”

As the all-male choir warms up, I am greeted by Reverend Almond Dickens, immaculate in his well-tailored suit, a high shine on his black shoes. Dickens is the chief administrator of the church. His brother, the Reverend Roosevelt Dickens, is the head pastor.

“Jewish people and black people have always had an interwoven link and remarkable ties,” Roosevelt Dickens tells me as he picks away at a plate of spaghetti and a hot dog. We are sitting in his cramped office located just off the main sanctuary. At one point he excitedly presents me with his 2005 membership card to the World Jewish Congress. 

When I ask the brothers Dickens about their passion for Israel, Pastor Al points to the Bible on the desk. “The words in there will never change,” he explains. And in its pages, he continues, it clearly says that those who bless God’s chosen people will be blessed. “God has always taken care of his people. The Jewish people have always been blessed. When I stand with them I am hoping that some of that blessing is reflected onto me.” As Pastor Al talks, his brother spontaneously interjects with creative variations on the theme of “praise the Lord” and “Amen.”  

For the Dickens brothers—and biblical literalists in general—the ancient past exists on a parallel track with the present. Decades, centuries, epochs are effortlessly condensed into months, weeks, days, even sentences. Casual conversations are peppered with the grandest historical, mythological and religious allusions. In this respect they differ not at all from the primarily white evangelicals who are a famously pro-Israel constituency. 

“We are concerned about how Israel is giving up more and more land and what this means for the coming of the Last Days,” Pastor Roosevelt tells me. The Last Days, according to Pastor Roosevelt, will occur when the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt on its historic plot. He supports his contention with various passages of scripture and an abstract argument involving numerology. Every point he makes is prefaced with “I have done a lot of research.” The bottom line seems to be that the “Millennial Period” will soon be upon us.  

Based on his in-depth research, I ask, what will happen to the Jewish people when Christ returns? Pastor Roosevelt grins uncomfortably. Pastor Al begins to fidget with a picture frame.  
Nevertheless, Pastor Roosevelt is admirably explicit: “His return will afford those Jews who are still alive the chance to correct their mistake and embrace Jesus and take their rightful place as sons and daughters of God.” Evidence of this happening is already underway, he assures me, citing as proof the good work of groups like Jews for Jesus. I ask them if the Corinth Baptist Church has forged a relationship with Jews for Jesus. Pastor Roosevelt says no, and then looks at his brother and suggests that this is an idea worth exploring.  

Although neither pastor has been to Israel, Pastor Al is planning a trip shortly. “We have a zest and a zeal to get more involved with Israel and the Jewish people,” Roosevelt says. But he is most concerned about when the Temple will be rebuilt. He tells me—“as proof that he knows what he is talking about”—that there is already money put away by “people” for the construction of the Temple. “So tell me,” he asks as I rise to leave, “when will the Jews rebuild the Temple?”

Pastor Willie Wooten is distracted, and this time his mind is not preoccupied by a dream.  
When Hurricane Katrina breached the levee system, and the toxic stew of lake water poured into New Orleans, the Gideon Christian Fellowship, which consists of five modern looking buildings situated prominently on a hill overlooking Interstate 610, was severely damaged. Much of the church’s property was either swept away or left ensconced in fetid mold. Several of the large stained-glass windows that had graced the front of the sanctuary, a source of great pride, were reduced to pastel-tinged shards. “You can look right through the front of the building,” Wooten tells me, the pain of the loss still fresh in his voice. 

It was Glenn Plummer who delivered the good news to him. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews was offering to help reconstruct his devastated ministry. “It was $50,000 you know, it was kind of shocking,” says Wooten.  

To Wooten and his beleaguered flock, it was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, God’s way of saying thank you for their sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people—His chosen people. (“The apple of His eye,” was how one parishioner described Jews to me.) “We were all excited that a divine thing was taking place,” Wooten tells me. “God was really honoring his word that he would bless those who bless Israel. We found it to be an exciting time, especially in light of all the difficulties. Here was an oasis in the midst of a desert.

“I see a gathering now,” Wooten told me the last time we spoke. “There are more African Americans coming to the forefront on this issue. When I started getting involved I thought I was the only one. But now they are all around and they are bubbling up.