BLACK AND JEWISH AMERICA: AN INTERWOVEN HISTORY is a four-part series from acclaimed scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr, exploring the rich, complex relationship between Black and Jewish Americans throughout our country’s history. It is a kinship defined by powerful moments of solidarity and painful episodes of division. Black and Jewish people started out in America on fundamentally different footing. By the early 20th century, however, they were drawn together by rising antisemitism and entrenched anti Black racism. These shared experiences led to productive civic partnerships and helped spark creative bonds in music and film that shaped American popular culture. The civil rights era is often described as the “golden age” of the alliance, when Jewish Americans worked closely with Black leaders and organizers to dismantle Jim Crow laws that fueled segregation. Yet while Blacks and Jews were united by shared ideals of justice, they were also divided by the realities of race and privilege in America. The alliance suffered as each group turned inward and prioritized its own struggles and agendas in an increasingly fragmented social and political landscape. But the hope and promise of cross-cultural solidarity endures today amid reminders of intractable bigotry. BLACK AND JEWISH AMERICA is a lesson in that promise and the challenges of sustaining unity against the forces that seek to divide us.